It is really that hard to promote your website with the search engines?

Some time ago I convinced my friend and boss to create a company and start a new business that would aid in our existing endeavors.  It wasn’t like we waived a magic wand and the company was born.  First, I created a business plan.  Then, I revised it again and again.  I did my research and found our niche market.  We contacted an attorney, found a few programmers and created a website.  The website is up and visitors should be pouring in right.  The first day we had 4 whole visitors.  That included myself, business partner and two friends.  The next day we had 4 more and we were moving up in the internet world, then the weekend hit.    Several days of nothing, what went wrong?

Next I did some research and looked into help.  Every one of the Search Engine Optimization companies had a great plan, but no guarantee.   I was given rates from $100 a month to $50,000 for the year.  At around $100 a month you get what you paid for, I did.  I could not see paying $50,000 and get a return on my investment this year.  So I dug deeper and did more research and after reading everything I could about the big three, Google, Bing and Yahoo, I learned some great information from their articles.  I found articles that detailed 95 points on how to improve your Google ranking and an article that made 8 basic points.   They threw around words like long tail search, backlinks, relevant content and meta tags.  This would take either hard work or a great deal of money.  Then it seemed to me that Google’s algorithm was as complex as Pepsi trying to figuring out Coca Cola’s formula.  Then Google soon announced they would penalize those that paid for links to achieve higher rankings.   
The two most common pieces of advice I did pull from the articles backlinks and content.  Then it began, I was asking people for backlinks and the more I asked the more I was simply ignored.  I “thought” this was a win win situation.  I would post your link and you post mine, this theory didn’t work out very well.   The next day I opened up my email and found that my uncle had died in a terrible plane crash in Africa on business trip.  The fortunate thing was he left his $16,000,000 to me.  This was a complete shock to me seeing that my only uncle was visiting my parents that weekend in Houston.  Why did he leave his 3 children out of the will?  Oh wait another Nigerian scam, this made me think a little.  I know everyone has had this email sent to them hundreds of times, but it must work.  Next I started to email people in my industry gave them a brief description of how this would help the two of us and I pressed send.  I know they received the email, I checked that box, still no response.  I was confused maybe I was approaching this the wrong way.

Finally I spoke with my Real Estate friend about his website.  He has owned the domain for several years and his best friend does a great job with the graphics and design, but they were lost on the ranking too.  Like most it was a $14 per month business card.  They were once approached by these search engine companies and figure that the price tag was too high to get the proper return on their investment in that industry.  As an experiment I convinced him to allow me to help, what I had recently learned and we have seen clear improvement in our site rankings.   However, he did graduate from “that school” in Oklahoma so I had to speak slowly enough for him to understand.  Most working people don’t have the time to put the effort in to researching this optimization thingy.  The only true way to move your site up the ranks is from consistent hard work that results in consistently updated relevant content.  

With our company http://www.yagernorthmarketing.com we have been focusing on helping local companies improve and maximize their advertising dollars.  Then it finally occurred to me, why not create a network of businesses looking to increase their position with the search engines.  We created a free article exchange; this would allow those in the same industry that do not compete geographically to build content to their site with backlinks.  Now I know there is a great deal more to optimizing your site and I will leave that to you and your webmaster.   Good luck promoting your business and contact us if you would like to join our network.

About the Author

Yager North Marketing: For your marketing needs contact kanenorth@yagernorthmarketing.com

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