Manual Promotion The human touch makes the difference!
A Web site can be promoted online in two ways
- automatically or by hand. There are many products on the market (many
of which we've trialled in the past) which promise great things. Advertising
slogans such as 'Submit your Web site to over 500,000 sites in just
5 minutes!' sound too good to be true. And they are!
So what's the catch? The answer
is that there are a number of catches. Firstly, the vast majority of
these 500,000 sites are what are known as FFA pages. FFA stands for
'free for all' - that is to say, they consists of pages of links where
anybody can submit anything they wish. To give you a fuller picture,
the following is a genuine extract from such a page (the links have
been disabled so that you stay with us on this!):
Hopefully,
this requires no further explanation. If you think that having
a listing within the above will do anything for your business,
then think again!
Particularly when you consider
that:
FFA sites are very rarely visited (they receive
a lot of automated submissions, but not visitors!)
FFA sites will do little for your link
popularity (in fact, they could even hinder it!)
your link could, for all you know, end up
sitting alongside a link for a porn site - is this really what you
want for your business!?
There are many other reasons why
we tend not to favour automated promotion which we could detail here.
We feel this example alone, though, should highlight the critical shortcomings
of automated submission software.
As with many things in life, there are some things that are better done
with the human touch, and we believe online promotion is one of them.
At The Dedicated
Partnership, we maintain a database of some 500+ sites which we
manually submit our clients' details to. These can be anything
from general search engines to niche-specific directories.
The database is categorised and
regularly updated, and the effectiveness of the links that we establish
is monitored very carefully. By performing these manual submissions,
we secure links that not only bring traffic in their own right, but
that also improve the link popularity of the site being promoted, thus
having a knock-on effect upon search engine rankings and search engine
traffic.
And our online promotion service doesn't just stop there - we also spend
a lot of time on newsgroups, e-mail discussion groups and Web-based
forums, advertising our clients whenever the opportunity arises.
