Monthly Myth Buster:
Popular methods that help market your website, or do they?
There are many misconceptions about marketing a website online, but the most prevalent myth is that whatever you do to market your website will help. You could not only be wasting your time using methods that are outdated or ineffective, but you could actually get your website penalized or banned from the major search engines by using improper online procedures. In this month’s RezNEWS Myth Buster, we’ll outline some of the most popular techniques that are being (incorrectly) touted as a savior for your web business.
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Webrings – This is a technique that was popular several years ago, nonetheless, we still hear people recommending this practice today! In simple terms, a webring is a collection of websites joined together in a circular structure. As a participant of the webring, each website has a common navigational bar which contains links to the previous and next site. When a user clicks next (or previous) again and again, the surfer will eventually end back at the initial site; thus the origin of the term webring.
The problem with a webring is that they generally don’t work and are used on lower quality websites. When webrings were popular, they really weren’t effective at driving much traffic to websites. When search engines caught on to this type of linking, they made webrings virtually worthless from an search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.
Reciprocal Linking/Partner Sites – This technique is still being used today. Reciprocal linking is when you link your website with another website and list these links on a “links” page on your website.
While this technique does work, its effect is marginal and losing power each year. This used to be THE way to get additional links to your website to improve search engine ranking. Search engines have since given this technique less clout because it was easy for Webmasters to artificially manipulate rankings at the search engines. This fact, coupled with the huge amount of time it takes to implement a link-trading program, makes this method marginally effective at best. Your time is better spent seeking other ways of website promotion, or at least, choose sites to trade links with carefully and make sure your website will receive benefit out of the trade as well.
Web 2.0 – We’ve talked about this practice in detail in our October 2006 RezNEWS feature article. Web 2.0 is the “new” emerging trend online, where you promote your website with a blog and on social networking sites to increase traffic and brand awareness.
While blogs and social networking may be effective for some industries, we have yet to see any tangible results when using this type of marketing for the lodging industry. Web 2.0 also takes quite a bit of time and manual labor to implement and even more time to keep current, as an appreciable amount of time is spent writing articles and blog posts.
PPC Search Engines – Not all pay per click search engines are created equal. While there are literally hundreds of PPC search engines, only three are really worth the effort to execute and maintain.
Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the PPC search channels that send the most traffic, usually, which is highly qualified. Other PPC search engines, such as MIVA, GoClick, or PageSeeker, may send traffic, but that traffic is not qualified targeted traffic. Using marketing dollars on these channels will end up wasting your money. Without a website tracker that can track revenue from each resource, it makes it even harder to ensure that the money you’re spending is producing a positive return on investment.
As you can see, not all website marketing methods are created equal. In fact, you can end up spending lots of time and money for little to no return by using (or paying somebody else to use) ineffective marketing methods. By applying the MOST proven methods and techniques, you’ll leverage marketing efforts into a sustainable online presence that will positively impact your bottom line year after year.
This month’s myth: that all website marketing formats are effective or worth the time and money spent is……BUSTED!
About the author
Dennis Miller is the Internet promotion manager for RezStream. Dennis has over four years Internet marketing experience in the hospitality industry. He is a leading expert in search engine optimization, pay per click services, and using the Internet to increase revenue for hospitality clients.
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