Website Promotion

In my last post, I talked about actively reacting to what other people are saying about our businesses and websites. Actively Reacting As A Marketing Strategy can be a time consuming task but there is one great way to make the task much easier.

In order to actively react to blog entries, forum posts and other conversations that relate to your website or business you first have to find those conversations. For small websites and businesses, it might be as easy as conducting a few Google searches for their company name. But, there’s an even better way to find out who’s talking about your site(s) and go directly to the page where the conversation is taking place.

Many of us spend a great deal of time seeking ways to advertise our websites and businesses to stand out from the crowd.

How much time is spent actively reacting to what others are saying about us?

Some time ago I was subcontracted to do some marketing research for a company. Their products sold in the $100k+ range and they wanted to know what their primary competitor was doing online. The results surprised me and are something we could all learn from…

Among the search engine industry is the relatively new concept of negative SEO. I don’t see the techniques associated with negative SEO as anything new; now they just have a name. Most of the conversations about negative SEO discuss a third party interfering with your SEO efforts but is not damaging your own SEO efforts also a form of negative SEO?

Negative SEO Through Frames

I had been taught that using frames to create webpages would hurt search engine optimization before I even learned how to program a site using frames. Why learn how to do something that was bad?

I was introduced to programming with frames as part of the one HTML class I have taken and I quickly saw why so many people were/are using them - they make managing a site quick and easy. But, are the benefits of using frames worth the negative SEO results?

Now let’s look at the SEO questions you should ask before using frames.

There’s a somewhat new craft related website called Ravelry. According to their homepage, it looks to be a great resource to:

organize - “organize your projects, stash, needles, and more”

share - “Show off you work. Share your ideas and techniques.”

discover - “Find new designs & yarns. Make friends. Try new things.”

All of these things are near and dear to those of us in the yarn and thread Crafting Community. This site appears to be taking the great success of Wist and the numerous craft forums and blending everything into one giant resource of a website.

What makes this site so interesting, beyond what it offers to crafters, is how they are creating a huge buzz by limiting access.

It’s so very tempting. Drop that link, stuff a signature, or spam people’s blogs. But, when does something migrate from promotion to shameless plug and should we even worry about if it does?

First let me define how I see the terms promotion and shameless plug as variations on a theme.

To me, promotion is when you tell someone about your product, service, or website. Promotion in most cases is synonymous with advertising.

A shameless plug on the other hand is a form of promotion that somehow takes advantage of a situation to push your product, service or website.

The question is, “Is there really such a thing as a shameless plug anymore or has society just come to accept them more than they did in the past?”