Promoting A Web Site: Promoting Your Business Online

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

Bob: When promoting a new site, you need to go through a three phase process. The first phase is to get initial attention on your new content. That includes social book marking, submission of the RSS feed of your blog to various RSS directories and aggregators, directory submission and search engine submission. You can do this by getting a SEO services company.

Once you’ve completed that stage, your main site will have anywhere from ten to fifteen or so links. You can get that information from your SEO guide. Hopefully, depending on the competitiveness of the keyword that you’re targeting, you should be on page two or page one of Google for your respective keywords. Now that’s not going to be enough to get you any significant ranking over the longer term. It’s not going to be enough to sustain that ranking either.

At this point I would suggest moving into what I call phase 2, link building activities. I learned this through the Traffic Evolution Review. We are still using leverage. Because you’re applying leverage you’re only getting low to moderate authority links. The sort of leverage I suggest in phase 2 is submitting keyword optimized content to either blog networks or article directory networks. There are services now that you can use to automate this process.

I myself use Article Marketing Automation from the PLR Pro guys for submitting to blog networks. I use Unique Article Wizard to submit to the article directories.

By doing this, you’re giving yourself the potential to acquire a hundred, two hundred, three hundred links, it’s that sort of order, to whatever it is you want to build links to.

David: When you do that, do you also build links both to your Web 2.0 properties as well as your initial main WordPress site?

Bob: Yes. Some of these automated services do allow you to spin the links. For those that do, yes, I do. I’ll always build a primary link to my main site but I’ll spin the link to a range of my secondary sites. So I’m actually using the process to build links to both sets of sites. In the end, you’re always going to get 50% of your links pointing to your main site.

David: There are plenty of services out there, like you mentioned, that do achieve those goals. I think for each one of these stages that Bob’s going through, as long as you have something in place for each one of these, I think you should pretty much be on the right track, no matter what service you use. We talked about a few. The key really is just finding a plan that makes sense for you and your budget and where you’re at. Then make sure you follow through these steps. Where do we go from here?

Bob: That’s phase 2. At this point, we’ve still applied leverage. Making a traffic submission is a five-minute exercise. Having an article written and submitting that to these various blog networks and article networks, with an hour’s work you can achieve that. Over a period of four to six weeks that might net you several hundred links, to whatever page or domain you’re trying to build links to.

Now at this point you’ll be monitoring of course your SERT positioning and ranking relative to your keyword. Market Samurai has a fantastic module now called Rank Tracker, which I was party to the development of, so that makes it very easy now to track your relative ranking in the SERTS for your keywords.

At the completion of this point, you may have two or three hundred back links but they’re all going to be probably relatively low PR links. They’re going to be 0s, 1s and 2s at best. So you’ve got a fair volume of low quality links but you probably haven’t got any decent PR links, 3s, 4s and 5s and so forth.

I don’t really know of a highly automated leverage way of getting high authority links. So at a certain point, if the link building activity that you’ve undertaken to this point hasn’t given you the ranking you desire, then you need to go into phase 3. Phase 3 is to cherry pick authority sites where you can engineer a link, simply for the purpose of getting a high authority back link.

Market Samurai has a module called the Promotion Module which allows you to find high page rank Web 2.0 sites, high page rank blogs, high page rank forums within your niche, that are keyword relevant. You can then engineer a back link from a high page rank page on that site.

Go through this three page process and you will be well on your way to promoting your new site.

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.