I’ve run across a fair amount of new webmasters who have some pretty interesting views on website promotion. Some things that they think are pretty outlandish and just not true. Here are the five most common myths that I have come across: 1. All Link Exchanges Are Good - sorry, but no. Offtopic reciprocal link exchanges have pretty much no benefit for SEO and in most cases should not be done. However, if the two sites are on the same topic you may wish to perform a reciprocal link exchange for the benefit of drawing targeted visitors, but don't expect any big impact on your search rankings. Link farms should especially be steered clear from. One-way links are the holy grail of website promotion - they carry a lot more weight with them in terms of SEO, and are almost always targeted. How do you attract these one-way links? Write solid content with great headlines. 2. A Big Promotion Budget Means Big Results - having money to throw around is not going to make your website successful. You can’t just stop at getting the visitor to your website - you have to sell to them, also. Make them want to buy your product or subscribe to your feed and become repeat visitors or whatever your objective is. Before you spend even a dime on website promotion you need to carefully design your site with your visitors in mind. Just because you would buy from your site does not mean that other visitors will want to. Know your audience and how to sell to them before wasting your money. Work on getting your conversion rates high first before you aim for larger amounts of traffic. Remember, you don’t need to have a big budget (or any budget at all) to become successful. 3. Design Is Everything - one cannot underestimate the importance of a good design, but without great content, the design will mean nothing. Your website design should work to compliment your content, which is the main focus of your website. Use your design to draw the reader in and spotlight your articles, focusing their attention. There is no excuse nowadays to have a crappy template with the proliferation of good, free templates all around the internet, but you also don’t need to be spending all of your resources and time trying to create the perfect design - text is what sells. You don’t buy a book based on the cover, you buy it based on the content. The cover may be what draws you in, but the text is what sells you. Your priorities should be: good design, great content. 4. Anybody Can Create A Successful Website - false. It’s a lot harder than it looks. It takes a huge amount of time and dedication. That is why 90% of new blogs don’t make it past two months. Only if you are willing to put hours into research, learning, building, and promoting, and realize that you will fail multiple times before you succeed, will you be able to become successful. There is a huge change in what it takes to build and run websites as a hobby and as a business. 5. If You Build It, They Will Come - just creating a website does not guarantee that visitors will come to it. Google has over one billion websites in its database, and you can bet that a thousand of them are very similar to yours. If you just do what everyone else is doing you will get the same mediocre results. To truly get attention and attract visitors, however, you need to be unique. Do something that no one else is doing, put a new spin on an old idea, or just do it better. You need to have a good answer as to why a user would rather go to your site instead of one of the other thousand that offer the same thing. 6. Yours - what do you think is the biggest website promotion myth? As you can see, building a successful website is not easy. It is, however, an exciting and rewarding journey if you are dedicated to it.
You sure found a bunch of truisms. Most people would be better off in their website efforts if they had this blown up about 100 times and hung above their computers, least wise I know I would. Thanks for the reminders. donrock
All ideas CAN be good - I'm sick of everyone I know greeting me with "Hey I have an idea for a website!" It's sweat, and time, and work, and dedication, not the damn idea.
the idea is the most important, time/work/dedication = money.. like hiring someone if you can't do it... but without a good idea there is no point in starting a website
In my short time on this forum this has been the best post I have read. These points are strong - I learned most the hard way.
6. Content is King, but it also can be the executioner. Putting any kind of ridiculous, poorly written, or pilfered content on a site will lead to its death. While "content is king" is short and catchy; it really should be original and unique content is king.
So true - very good point. I've seen too many "content" websites where the webmaster just plastered it with free poorly written articles and then goes on to complain that they are not getting good rankings or results. webcosmo: thanks for the +rep!
It is easier to make money online than work at regular job. False it is harder to make money online because you have to motivate yourself.
#7 Duplicate Content is the Dragon . . . . And PS, As for the ideas.. I recommend sitting down, and deciding what the absolute most interesting thing to you is... something you really want to delve into. Then mastering it, and making it successful. Again, it doesn't matter the subject, any idea can work if you put the effort into it to bring it to the top.
this is a great post well done I have to agree with the myth about links early last year I built 1000 of recipricol links and it resulted in no PR. Worst thing I payed for the service
Sacrificing a gray squirrel on the odd day of the month at midnight with a spoon will not help you get visitors.
"You have to have a complete solution to get the first visitor" More important is to start with something you can make money with immediately. Get paying traffic and you will have the resources to perfect it later. wiz
"Metatags are worthless" Titles are important. Keywords can be significant Metatags are still used, if you have just a few carefully chosen key phrases that are focused on the page content they can help. 500 key words will be ignored. Key words unrelated to content will be ignored. wiz