The Definitive Guide to Promoting A Web Site

Listen to the Robert Somerville Interview with the tons of other podcast interviews that you can find on this site.

Bob: When we begin to promote a new site, first we get a lot of links back to our primary money site using a service like Traffic Bug. Now we have to talk about the site relative to individual content on that site. This SEO course teaches you how to do that. Let’s say you’ve published a post on that site and that post has been targeted to a very specific keyword, it’s got a very specific competition profile. Depending what that competition profile is, that Traffic Bug submission might be all that you need. But that’s probably definitely only the case if you’re looking at keywords that have got sub 5000 competing pages phrase match.

If we’re talking about the blog itself,like this SEO services site, your main site, your main ranking vehicle, what we suggest to people is they start to build a network of related sites on other domains, preferably on other authority domains which link back to that site to that blog. By this I mean creating a series of Web 2.0 sites where you can generate an authority link from that site back to your blog but you also have the potential for that Web 2.0 page to rank for the keyword in its own right. So you’ve got multiple ranking opportunities for the keywords that you are targeting.

David: Just to give a little distinction as well, you’re talking about building your own network of these authority type Web 2.0 properties because effectively you are controlling that network. It’s a similar effect but you’re leveraging off the power of these Web 2.0 properties. It’s just to have that distinction as opposed to building your own network, this might involve building more WordPress blogs through WordPress Direct or whatever and then linking those back.

Bob: Correct. Now in essence it is the same thing. The difference is the reason why you want to build pages on Web 2.0 domains is because they already have authority. The root domain of many of those Web 2.0 sites is PR6s, PR7s, some are PR8s. So even though your particular page on that domain is going to have low authority in true sense, in terms of page rank, just by virtue of the fact that your page is sitting on an authority domain means that the link you get from that page to your site, your blog, will have a higher value than a link that might come from another WordPress blog on a domain that has zero authority.

So we’re effectively borrowing the authority of these Web 2.0 domains to give us some links that have authority. This improves the potential for our blog to rank for the keyword that we’re targeting. We’re also attempting to have additional ranking vehicles in the search engines for the keywords that we’re targeting. Those Web 2.0 pages will have the potential to rank in their own right.

David: Are you looking to rank for the same keyword that is the primary keyword on your domain so ideally you want to own the top five positions for a particular keyword? Or are they going for secondary keywords or how do you do that?

Rob: Again, coming back to your keyword marketing research, you identify a theme keyword, your most important keyword within your micro niche and then a handful of what we call category keywords. Category keywords are simply keywords that meet the competition criteria that you’re using to filter out your activity. They have sufficient traffic potential to justify the work that’s going to be required to rank for those keywords. There’s no point spending hours and hours targeting a keyword that has no traffic.

So eventually you’ll have a range of pages that are optimized both for your theme keyword, your main keyword but also your category keywords as well. Ultimately you want your main ranking vehicle, your blog, to rank for all those keywords and you need to get links coming in to that blog for both the theme and the category keywords.

Now every time you create a Web 2.0 property, you’re going to be submitting that to Traffic Bug as well. Every new piece of content gets submitted to Traffic Bug. Or if you are doing it manually, you book mark it. If you’ve got an RSS feed for that Web 2.0 property, you’d submit that to the RSS aggregates and directories and so on.