Free Viral advertising
This is the fourth post in the popular ‘recession’
series, following on from:
The Recession-A
Great Opportunity?, The
Recession-What an Opportunity. The
Recession-Act Now
Up until the recession RFT Express was doing
OK, the recession and the chance of acquiring struggling companies,
was the spring board to bring forward our intention to expand
our customer base. With companies closing down, many courier companies
couldn’t survive if they lost one or more customers. Multinational
courier and transport firms were closing non profitable sections
of their businesses down, this left a big whole to fill in the
UK and Europe markets . This phenomenon is typical of virtually
of all sectors in the market. The only way we could capitalise
quickly on this was through our websites.
Why Use Google?
Google is the place to be noticed whether you have a website or
not [on this page on our website you can find out how to get a
web presence, without paying for it, and with no experience] We
have several of these, and every month we get statistics from
directories we who have replicated what they think is important
on our site, and reproduce a mini site which gets us extra business,
all for free. It’s a snowball effect which is generated
by links on Google.
Before the internet was available to everyone, the only ways to
generate business were through personal contacts, knocking on
doors or paid advertising. There used to be a true saying :-‘without
advertising a remarkable thing happens.....NOTHING!’ This
is still true today, the only difference is the way you advertise.
How Can Google Work For You
Lets go back to Google again, open Google.com
and type in the phrase you think relevant to your type of business.
The first page is the only page you need to look at. At the top
of the page you will see 3 or 4 paid adverts for websites, usually
the market leaders who are paying a fortune for these adverts.
Below these are the listings in the order Google rate them. To
the right you will see other paid listings.[Google have a bidding
system, where by the more you are prepared to pay for each time
someone clicks on your advert the higher you will be on the page.]
In most languages people read from left to right, and most people
understand that if a company is prepared to pay a lot of money
to Google and every other search engine just to get you to click
on their advert, the prices that company is charging for its services
has to be higher than those who don’t, i.e. the organic
listings below who are there on merit, not paid adverts. Before
we leave Google, try one more thing. Open Google UK and use the
same phrase as before, you will come up with different listings.
Now try the same phrase and narrow your search down by clarifying
a local search area, i.e. the phrase followed by your county,
or your city. You can get more local by clicking on Google maps
and use the same phrase again.
More people click on the organic listings, than on paid adverts.
So with more websites on the net, than people in the world, how
do you get noticed?. The things that get you on to page one of
Google are links, content, and visitors. Visitors come with the
more links you have, and depending on your website content. Most
websites, even those in top spot of Google, don’t always
get there with content, but with links. There are two links that
virtually guarantee you top spot on any search engine the first
is register with DMOZ. This was the most important and influential
human edited directory. Started 11 years ago, if you were listed
on it, it would guarantee top billing on all search engines. Unfortunately
all submissions are scrutinised by volunteers, who are reputedly
experts in your particular business. These experts are some of
the original people who were admitted to DMOS, the only problem
with DMOZ is they don’t talk to you. You can submit to them,
but they wont tell you if you have been accepted, they won’t
tell you if you have been rejected, if you submit twice you are
automatically rejected, you can apply to be an editor in your
field of expertise, but you won’t be accepted. If your site
is accepted, you have no control over how they list it, and it
can cost you rankings. A post on http://www.webpronews.com/search/node/dmoz
shows some of the good and bad feelings DMOZ promotes.
After reading what people say, you might decide against this course
of action.
The second line is to get a ranking from
Alexa, they work on the number of visitors to your site, and ignore
all sites they consider to have less than 100,000. According to
WEB CEO a leading search engine optimiser Alexa is an organization
that analyses the world's web traffic. There is a community of
people that use Alexa Toolbar, a small utility that gathers information
about what websites they visit, how many pages they view. The
information is then transmitted to Alexa and analysed. The quantity
of Alexa toolbar users and the number of pages viewed by them
are adjusted to approximate number of internet users. Then the
popularity of different sites is approximately measured. In terms
of the Alexa Traffic Rank, the closer a site gets to the number
1 position, the more traffic a site receives. For example, if
you consider Google, its main page has Alexa TR 3. That means
that www.google.com is the third most visited page in the web.
If your website is not one that interests the Alexa community
you have no chance.
Again you may decide not to register with
Alexa.
You may be thinking that
the internet is a closed shop, although some avenues appear to
be closed, there are other ways to get to the top. These will
be discussed in the final post in this series.
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Article
by Vic Farron : staff writer for RFT Express
