Archive for August, 2008
WE SPIN THE WHEEL AND IF YOU WIN ALL OF US HELP TO PROMOTE YOUR SITE
What is the Publicity Wheel?
The Publicity Wheel is a fun and unique way to achieve an increase in traffic and exposure for your website at absolutely no cost. Everyone promotes one site at the same time, so be prepared for a big boost!
How does it work?
Each spin of the wheel, one featured site from each category is collaboratively promoted by the Publicity Wheel community.
By adding a small snippet of HTML code to your site, the featured site’s ad will be displayed to your users, earning you a number of publicity points each click.
At the next spin, a new site is selected based on publicity points and promoted once again. The more points you have, the higher your chances, but you don’t need to have the most to win.Example: If you register within the Business category you’ll receive over 1500 ad views when you win
THE ART OF SEARCH ENGINE PROMOTION
What are search engines looking for in a website?
The philosophy of a search engine is to deliver relevant web pages in response to a search query which will contain one or many keywords. This is not an easy task as there are literally millions of web pages in existence. The early search engines suffered from the problem of returning too much dross – the classic example was a search for ‘Bill Clinton’ returning a web site with one page saying ‘Bill Clinton joke of the day’. This happened because of KEYWORD DENSITY – this particular web page had the relevant keywords accounting for 40% of all the keywords on the webpage, which the search engines relied upon to decide which webpages to display first.
The founders of GOOGLE managed to go a long way to solve this problem (and become incredibly successful) by using the idea of page rank. They designed their search engine to ascribe a page rank to every webpage, based on web links from other web pages. This offered a ‘democratic’ and easily automated way of establishing the relative importance of websites, and hence prioritise which websites would be shown first in a google search. They also take note of the text used in the web links (hyperlinks), so for example, if a website had a link ‘food and drink’ pointing to www.harvest-fayre.co.uk then a google search for ‘food and drink’ would be more likely to return this website.
The internet has now developed into a major commercial sales channel for business and we find there is a constant battle between search engine optimisers (the web masters who try to improve their search engines ranking) and the programmers within the search engine companies. Webmasters have tried new tricks such as embedding hidden keywords in websites (e.g. white text on white background) and artificial ‘link farms’ where thousands of websites are made to link to each other. Search engine ‘alogorithms’ (the programming of the search engines) had been modified to detect these tricks and ‘black list’ such sites. However, some webmasters are trying new tricks to fool the search engines, but risk losing all by being blacklisted.
What factors are important to search engines?
Factors influencing your position in search engines returns can be broken down as follows
Internal factors (which you can control by updating your website)
Number and placement of keywords within the website including the title
Number of web pages
How your web pages link to each other
Frequency of updates
Alt tags (text descriptions of images)
Not using any ‘tricks’ to fool search engines such as white text on a white background etc.
Does the web site offer a coherent ‘theme’, i.e. does not have ‘artificial’ and irrelevant text added.
External factors
Which web sites link to you?
What text is on their links to you?
The ‘theme’ of the website linking to you.
It is the external factors that will get to the top of the search engines!
