Greetings: It has fallen to me to advertise our websites www.icdus.com and www.beepers.com. Suffice it to say that I have no clue where to begin. I started by re-designing both of them since they looked dated, the beepers site is not live yet but a preview is up at www.beepers.com/new. We tried pay-per-click but the minute you stop it we fall off the face of the search engines. Within the next few months we plan on providing two new services which I won’t go into but I would really appreciate some suggestions on how to generate traffic and search engine ranking. We do the bulk of our advertisements by other means other than the internet, this has never been truly used by us. I am open to any suggestion at all, should we provide our customers with blogs or forums? Adsense will not work because it lists our competitors, which is bad for business. I would appreciate your suggestions... Regards, Mike I.
Well, this question is so general that you would need to write several books to fully cover it. And you could find all the answers yourself by using the search function anyway (with terms like "how to promote" or "get traffic" for example).
Get links http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=safari&rls=en&q=link:6batQuexBRMJ:www.icdus.com/ better, but get links http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=safari&rls=en&q=link:zev0ba9nw1IJ:www.beepers.com/ WIth 2500 indexed pages http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.icdus.com This site would generate a reasonable weight in the coop ad network (see the referral link in my sig)
Hijinx, You need a little patience to get moving up in the rankings in the natural listings. Like maybe 4-6 months, in Google even longer somtimes, for a set of key terms you are optimizing for. Optimize your pages, and do off-page optimization: reciprocal linking campaign, and your standard free and paid directory submissions. If you are in a very competitive market you may need some professional help. If you need more details you can private messge me.
For new sites it can take up to 12 months to rank, but even then it depends on how well you have optimised your website pages. Yahoo and MSN you can pretty much get traffic to then within 48 hours, but from my own experience, traffic is much lower from these SE' together than been on Google. The best way is to get Adwords until your site is ranking well in Google, but as Design Agent mentioned, you need to spend a quality amount of time per week working on gaining more links. Work at getting one way links than sending emails for reciprocal link exchanges. I've done away with reciprocal link exchanges on one of my sites, and just concentrated on articles, press releases etc.
You need to decide if you want your marketing to have a lasting effect of not. If you are fed up with your site traffic dropping dramatically after stopping your google advertising than you really need to work on SEO optimization ( i assume you have this in mind as one of your top choices since you are posting to this forum). Build quality links that have your keywords in the link text. Your traffic will steadily increase. The great thing is that when you decide stop building the links, your traffic won't drop.
Why is this the case? The opposite is true in the real world: Take car dealerships for example. You often find them clustered together in the same area or along the same major road. Why? Because people comparison shop and check out many options before they byu, and if you have your dealership in the middle of knowwhere, you will miss out on a lot of these people. The only time this kind of exclsuvity works is when you are selling a very high-end car (Ferrari etc.) where you have little competition and your customers will seek you out as they have already decided it is the Ferrari they want (not the Lamborghini) and they are not intending doing any comparisons. So I think that being listed next to your competitors in a block of Adsense ads is a positive thing. There are other issues with Adsense (the quality of clickthroughs is lower than for the Adwords ads on the main Google search page), but being listed next to your competition should not be a reason to discard this method.
You shouldn't use pay per click for general advertising. I would only use pay per click if I had a specific product or service to sell and I had set down to figure hour much I would spend. For general advertising you should try text or animated banner advertising. Find a webmaster who will allow you to put an animated banner or text link on their homepage who gets tens of thousands of visits per month. That will bring you in nice streams of traffic. A press release is another good way to get the word out about your site. If you have a product or service you can use P2P for free advertising.
Wow links comp for internet dial service shows top listing has over 700 links. search for pagers isn't so bad to get on in top 10. Get the links started. Great start is submitting with directories that will allow you to target keywords in anchor text.
I took the liberty of looking at your source code and I have a couple of suggestions. (No guarrantees, of course). You've optimized for keyword "pagers". Logical, but not specific enough. While there are a substantial amount of searches for this term, there is too much competition from other sites to be able to rank well straight out of the box. I used the Wordtracker suggestion tool to come up with these keyword ideas in order of KEI: 1 "motorola flex pagers codes" 2 "alert tones for motorola 2way pagers" 3 "skytel motorola timeport pagers" 4 "old motorola pagers" 5 "motorola voice pagers" 6 "all motorola two way pagers" 7 "motorola pagers two way" 8 "motorola monitor pagers" 9 "motorola fire pagers" 10 "motorola 2way pagers" If any of them apply, consider using one or more. Or better yet, go to www.wordtracker.com and find your own. There are many places here where you can learn more about on-page optimization. Take the time to do so. I know, the learning curve is steep, but that's why you get the big money, right?
You can consider ad words for the new services you are starting . Have a nice ad done and a good targetted sales page .You sure do have your competition listed next to you but then that's the "nice" ads for . Keep building links or use some professional service . There are many on this forum who would be glad to help you in seo . And as you are already in the process of redoing your websites then consultant a seo right now so they can help you optimise it without wasting time later .Most of them will also be able to guide you with ad words. Don't push all similar products on one page but make seperate pages .This will add more pages to your website and will increase the weight of the internal links. Plus you can then focus on targetting one product in detail "UNLIKE" your competition . Use a drop down box so people can choose the product they want to buy and take them to the respective page of this product making it easier for them to navigate . Or use a search feature. List all in the side navigation in text links divided in categories. If you think that changing the navigation later may become a problem then either contact a software developer for a little software utility that will update the navigation and you can upload the new pages using FTP.I maintain my main site with this utility I made for myself. Last link in my signature.Takes 2 minutes to change the side navigation of all pages of that website.The navigation is actually written in those pages and not generated with php or cgi. ( the html editor is not the utility I am talking about.) By all means this is the right time for you to consult a SEO to take care of search engine marketting for you. There are many good ones on this forum. Don't discard ad words because your competition is using it . They are using it because it might have proved profitable . If you still don't want to invest their then start a affiliate program and let the affiliates advertise .Plus they will also be a source of some back links for you! Best wishes , jeet