It should be easy. Write them a quick note, package up your manuscript and send it away – or simply email it. Unfortunately, most publishers (and most agents) don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. They want you to query first.

Fine, you think. You can do it that way. So you read enough query guidelines that you can summarize the similarities between them without pausing for breath, and fire off a few queries.

All you get in response is one rejection letter after another.

What’s going wrong? It can’t be anything to do with your book, because none of the publishers – or agents – you’ve approached has even seen it. Have you misunderstood the query guidelines? Is there something you missed? Is the tone not quite right? Or what?

There have been entire books written on the art of approaching a publisher, but in essence, it boils down to one simple reality: publishers (and agents) are in business to make money.

The purpose of your query letter is therefore to convince them that they can make money from your manuscript.

It’s about persuasion, or sales. You have to give the publisher confidence in you and your book. You have to give the publisher no reason to doubt.

This means yes, do pay attention to the query guidelines. Don’t waste either the publisher’s time or your own by submitting a genre they don’t deal with. (You’d be surprised how many poetry and short story submissions we get at Nimblewords Books – even though the website quite clearly states we’re a specialist non-fiction publisher only. Even if it’s the best poetry the world has ever seen, from a business perspective we just don’t care. All it’ll get from us is a quick, impersonal rejection letter.)

Do make sure you spell the Editor’s name correctly, if they’ve mentioned this as a criterion. Do check your query for spelling and grammatical errors – because if you get it wrong in the query, the implication is that you’ll get it wrong in your manuscript as well.

Most importantly, though, focus on what the publisher is interested in: the market for your book.

That market isn’t “everyone”. That’ll get you nowhere. Do some research, and be specific. For example, if you’ve written a novel, what is the market for that type of novel? Is it a growing or shrinking market? What differentiates your book from others in the genre? In other words, how would your publisher market you?

If you’ve written a non-fiction book, is there an existing organization with a special interest in the topic? How big is that organization? Are you a member? What specific need prompted you to write the book? What are you competing against? If you can provide actual statistics that show a specific market for your book, and what the competition for your book might be, that would get any publisher’s attention; it would certainly get mine.

The other side of the equation is nearly as important. Who are you? What writing experience do you have? In other words, let the publisher know that asking for the manuscript is going to be worth their while. Ok, so there are books out there that look as if they’ve been written by a dyslexic chimpanzee, but the reality is that they are the exception. In general, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. List whatever writing credentials you have. And make sure whatever you submit is in the best shape it can possibly be.

And that’s about it.

That’s what happened to me the first time I got a book published. I must have sold almost a hundred copies during those five years. I made hardly enough in royalties for a decent meal, let alone a living.

At the time, I figured that’s just what happened with e-books, but that’s only one business model. It can work for the publishers if they keep their costs down, because they can publish hundreds of books and live on the accumulated profits. Authors trying to establish themselves this way just end up slowly starving.

The Better eBook Strategy

If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you’ve probably stumbled across it already without even knowing. Done well, with the right product and marketing, a single e-book can generate tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Let’s say that again. Tens of thousands of dollars per year. Sometimes even more.

The problem is that it can only reliably be done with a certain type of book. Not with fiction, or poetry, or anything that you’ve written with the intention of changing the world. It can only be done with non-fiction written to solve a problem.

It doesn’t matter what that problem is, as long as your book offers a solution, and there is a sufficient number of individuals in the world looking for that solution. If your book fits this criterion, you’ve got a known market. From there, all you need to do is tap into that market.

Tapping Into The Market

To tap into that market, you need to:

• build a simple website
• write compelling sales copy for that website
• integrate that simple website with a payment system
• integrate that simple website with a way to both protect and deliver your e-book, and
• drive relevant traffic to your site.

Basically, it’s all about the web. The information on how to do all of this is freely availably, if you look hard enough.

Don’t misunderstand me, though. You’ve really got to know what you’re doing. If your site doesn’t look professional or work the way it should, it won’t generate the results you’re after. Nor are these skills the type of thing you can perfect overnight. My advice is that if you don’t have the skills yourself, pay someone to do it for you.

eBook Marketing Difficulties

That’s where the business model starts to fall down. If you can’t do it yourself, it can cost. Even if you can, it can soak up a lot of time. Because it isn’t just the initial building of the site and making it functional that we’re talking about. It’s that last point as well: driving relevant traffic to your site.

This type of site is almost never going to rank highly enough for people to stumble across it by themselves. Instead, most of these sites rely on pay-per-click advertising.

Pay-per-click advertising can be a huge trap for the unwary. You’ve got to get the balance right. How much is a sale worth to you?

To work that out, you have to know what your conversion rate is once qualified buyers reach your page. You’ve also got to know what the return rate of your product is. And yes, you do have to offer a proper no-questions-asked return policy, or people simply won’t buy.

Once you know these things, you have to know what sort of margin you will accept, and adjust your advertising to suit.

It isn’t a set-and-forget process. To get the type of results we’ve discussed, you need to tweak everything. Advertising placement. Advertising copy. Website copy. Colors, book cover design. Price.

It’s about optimization, and it never stops. It can take hours of your time.

Nimblewords Books

Or you could try a publisher like Nimblewords Books. There may be other publishers with a similar business model, but Nimblewords Books would be my choice. But then, I’m biased. After all, I do work for them.

At its most basic, let’s assume you’re a widget maker. It makes sense to give your widget making business a trading name that reflects what you do – and make sure the domain name is available for it.

Calling your business Alpaca Ltd is not going to help. It might have done when your customers found you by referring to the phone book, but the web doesn’t order things alphabetically – and Alpaca Ltd isn’t something your customers would search for if they don’t know who you are.

Call your business Widgets, if widgets.com is available. Call it Bestwidgets if Widgets.com is taken. Or SpringfieldWidgets if you happen to be in Springfield.

Remember, there is a certain amount of leeway, as long as you make sure that your decisions reflect the type of business you have.

For example, if your marketing budget is strong, you might come up with a less intuitive domain name that reflects your widget brand. Let’s assume your widgets are little heaters designed to keep people warm under their clothes. You could get the domain name Cozy.com, but only if you can do sufficient brand awareness advertising that people will associate Cozy with you.

If your company has weight, you can invent a word and make it into a brand. iPod is an obvious example. Before the iPod existed, no-one would have searched for it, and so it never would have been found. Apple, though, has a strong brand presence. They’re big enough – and cool enough – that they can create a buzz about a product, and have everyone talking about it by the time it goes live.

It’s all about branding – and I’m talking about more than just logo design. The stronger your brand, the greater the liberties you can take on the web.

Note: yes, I know I should have followed my own advice when choosing the domain name for this blog. However, this site is mostly for me to jot down my thoughts. Recently, those thoughts have been about the web, and this is only natural because it’s what I do for a job. But there are many other topics clamoring for attention, and pretty soon it won’t be so clear what the primary topic of this blog actually is. So I’m happy with what I’ve called it.

Brand awareness has been the big-ticket item among marketing professionals for a number of years. The logic behind it is unarguable: people won’t buy your product if they don’t know you exist.

Because of this, huge corporations, startups and even government departments have together spent billions on advertising, splashing their logo on billboards, in newspapers, on your TV screen. They even spend an unguessable amount every year sponsoring big-name sports stars just so to get their logo on that sports star’s baseball cap.

These days, brand awareness has found its way into websites. Marketers are slowly becoming aware of the impact the web is having (not to mention the reach!), so they’re trying to make use of it in the best way possible.

Unfortunately, many of these marketers seem stuck in the mind-set of twenty years ago. Even now, many of them are still trying to treat the web as just another advertising medium. They’re implementing brand awareness campaigns in much the same way they do in the real world. They’re:

• outsourcing their web marketing to advertising agencies
• buying banner advertisements
• paying whatever they need to pay to get their Google ads to the top of the first page of results
• creating advertisements and hosting them on You-Tube, and paying online newspapers to display them.

For them, the cost of Brand Awareness has gone up. They always had to pay for the billboards, the newspaper ads, the direct mailouts, the radio and TV ads. Now they have to pay for the equivalent of all that to do the same in the online world. They’re doing this out of a sense of having to, just to keep up. For them, brand awareness is still essential to get that sale.

At the same time, there are new companies exploding onto the marketplace with little or no marketing budget at all.

How are they doing it?

They might be doing it with a brand awareness strategy that makes proper use of the web. They might not even have a brand awareness strategy. They might just have a site promotion plan.

The fundamental difference is that they understand how Web is different from other media. The difference is this:

In all other media, whether it’s radio, TV, print or whatever, your audience is a passive observer. They look at what other people have created (the advertisement), and either take it in or don’t.

With web, your audience has the ability to engage. They can choose to pay attention or not. They can choose to take part. They can choose to show your promotion attempt to a thousand of their friends – or write a post on how incredibly bad it is on their blog.

It’s the difference between looking at a picture of a lake – and going for a swim in it.

In real-world terms, that means it’s possible to promote a billion-dollar company without spending a dime (anyone ever heard of Google?), if you know what you’re doing.

In New Zealand (which is where I’m from), one of the most popular websites is an online auction site called Trademe.co.nz. The Chief Executive recently gave a talk, in which he was quite open about their marketing policy. They intentionally keep their spend budget as low as possible, relying on web promotion techniques to get the word out.

Obviously, they’re doing quite well. But here’s the rub: one of their revenue streams includes selling banner ads on their site – targeting the marketing people who just haven’t quite figured out that banner advertising is like placing a billboard where no-one cares to look.

What am I saying? By all means, have a brand awareness campaign going if you can afford it. If you can’t, or choose not to, stick with site promotion. But don’t pay a big advertising agency to manage it for you. Instead, hire someone who knows what they’re doing, and let them go for it.

1. Inception
2. Growth
3. Stabilisation, and
4. Decline

Wherever your site is within these stages dictates where you should spend your effort.

For example, if your site is in the Inception stage (like my blog), there is little point in going all out marketing it. If you do manage to drive traffic towards your site, that traffic isn’t going to get the experience you’re planning – and may well leave disappointed.

(Note: most commercial sites are finished with this stage before the public ever sees the site. It’s generally only those managed by individuals, in their spare time, that are ever visible before getting to the Growth stage.)

For my blog, this means I’m spending only a small handful of hours actively promoting it (as yet). Those hours are spent not madly trying to generate immediate traffic, but instead aiming for the long-term strategy.

I’ve joined a couple of communities (social networking – see my Site Promotions Methods Defined Post), and I’m engaging in low level link building. In particular, I’m:

• slowly building a following on Twitter by posting regular, useful tweets
• establishing myself in a blogging community called Blogcatalog by being reasonably active in discussions, and
• writing comments on related blogs (the comments link back to my site).

My focus in this stage has to be getting my content to a level that I’ll be happy with. I figure this will mean about thirty posts: enough to keep it interesting, and show the range and depth of knowledge I’m sharing.

When I get to the Growth phase (maybe in a month or two), I’ll switch focus. That isn’t to say I’ll stop posting, because I certainly won’t. But I will spend considerably more time promoting. As well as I’ll write Squiddoo lenses and look for guest posting opportunities, and maybe start a few discussions on Blogcatalog. But the real difference will be my approach to Twitter.

There are a few Twitter strategies that I’ll detail later that show significant potential. It’ll be really interesting to see how they go.

If your site is already in the Growth phase, you should be doing all you can to keep it there. I’ve listed what I’ll be doing, but there are many possibilities. Go nuts.

If your site is in the Stabilisation phase, it’s time to sit back and reassess. What has changed? Is it something you’re doing? Or a factor outside your control?

Take a look at your market, your competition, in fact anything in your website environment. Take a look at what you’re currently doing, and measure that against what you were doing six months ago. Assess as actively and realistically as you can what the impact of these environmental conditions – and any changes to your actions – might be on your site.

It’s now time to revisit your Content Strategy. Are you still acting in accordance with it? If so, is it going to be effective in the current environment?

If not, then you need to update it to reflect what’s currently happening.

If you don’t, your site will start to Decline – and the whole idea is to stop it before it gets to that point, and start another cycle.

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Essentially, a Website Life Cycle follows the same general pattern as any other life cycle. At its simplest, it looks like this:

The Website Life Cycle

Inception

Inception is the start. In my definition, it includes everything that a site needs for it to perform it’s main function. This means that some websites that have been around for a while still fall into this category – but most get there pretty quickly. Let’s use Amazon as an example. At its start, it’s primary function was to sell books. Therefore, it needed to be able to display inventory to an audience and enable them to buy. If it existed as a website but only displayed the books, then with this definition, it would still be in its inception phase.

At this stage, the website might be quite small. It might also attract very few visitors.

Growth

Growth starts only once the site is capable of performing that main function. Growth might be defined as including additional functionality, doing more of its core functionality, or attracting more visitors. With Amazon, it included all three.

This stage can last as long as there is a driving force pushing the site to better and bigger things, until a competitor starts taking significant chunks of the market, or until the market is saturated.

Given that the world is still new to e-Commerce, that saturation point is likely to be a long way off with Amazon.

Stabilisation

Stabilisation happens when there is no more drive for growth and change, and the saturation point is reached. The size of the site becomes static, as does the number of visitors and the number of conversions. Be aware that stabilisation isn’t a good thing, because it’s a precursor to decline.

Decline

If nothing is done at the stabilisation stage, decline is inevitable – because whatever caused the change from growth to stabilisation is still acting. In this case, decline could refer to the number of visitors, the number of conversions, and sometimes even the size of the site.

How does the size of the site decline? Websites aren’t static. Sections might be disestablished (Amazon, for example, might come up against a competitor specialising just in Music, and decide that it’s no longer profitable to compete). If the site is large and the maintenance budget is cut, links may break.

Cycle Regeneration

The good news is that a site doesn’t have to decline. It’s a cycle, but it doesn’t have to be singular. You can build one cycle on top of another, starting the next just as things start to stabilise in the current one.

To start that next cycle will need some careful planning. Where is the market heading? What changes do you need to make?

It’s like Madonna reinventing herself for each album, to keep her existing fans and gain new ones at the same time.

Done well, a site can re-start the cycle as often as there is a drive to do so.

My Blog

My blog is still in the Inception phase. It’s live, doesn’t yet what I want it to do. I envisioned it as a useful, comprehensive resource for those starting out building a website. I figure there are some useful aspects to it already, but it’s got some way to go before it becomes comprehensive. Maybe in a couple of months, if I have the time I need.

For those who are interested, it’s on it’s third cycle – although I have to admit I didn’t start each of the new ones early enough. Both times, I let it decline quite badly before doing anything with it.

This time I’m planning it properly. I’ve got my strategy in place. So I should be able to manage it much better in the long term.

(Note: for those who are interested, this life cycle is very similar to a Product Life cycle from the world of economics. There’s a good reason for this: a website belongs to that world, too. It is a product, even if it doesn’t sell anything.)

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Now, there’s a little confusion about the terms I’ve been using, so I figure I’ll clear that up now.

Site promotion has two different definitions. It has a holistic definition that refers to everything about getting your website known, including both SEO and non-SEO methods. (I used it in this way in my Site Promotion Plan Part Two: SEO).

Site promotion also refers just to these non-SEO methods of getting the word out about your site. It’s obviously not completely cut and dried, because “Link building” can appear in both categories (see below). In any event, for the purposes of this post I’m using Site promotion in the smaller sense.

As the diagram shows, there are several different aspects to the smaller definition of site promotion – which means there are several different ways to go about it.

I’ve already mentioned some of these in a previous post, but for the sake of completion I’ll go over each one in more detail here.

Social Networking

Social networking sites have been defined as sites focusing on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.

Twitter, MySpace and Facebook fall into this category, but there are a long list of others. Some of these focus on niches, while others are more general. If you’re looking for a fairly comprehensive list, Wikipedia has one.

How do you use these to promote your websites? This depends on the site. In general, the idea is to build a following and let the people who are following you know about the website. Link to it. Tell people about it. You can often create a specific page about your website on the social networking site and point your friends or followers directly to it.

On many of these sites, it’s often useful to have a strategy detailing how exactly you’re going to use it – and I’ll talk more about that later on.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m including smaller community-based sites (for example, Blogcatalog, which is a community of bloggers) in this category as well.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking might sound similar, but they’re quite different. The idea with these is that if people like the content on your site, they’ll bookmark it for future reference. The difference between this and just using the favourites button on your browser is that the bookmarking sites make it easy to share with others.

For a comprehensive list of the sites that fall into this category, click on the button at the bottom of this post.

The promotion opportunities in these sites are obvious. Every time someone bookmarks a webpage from your site, that’s another place where people could chance upon it.

To make use of it, it can be useful to include a call-to-action (like the one at the end of this post).

Real World Promotion

This one is straight-forward. If you have a website, tell people about it. If it’s a business website, include details on your business cards, all your promotional material, and everywhere else. Even if it’s a blog, you can still include its address on your emails, post flyers in mailboxes, or anything else you can think of.

Ensure any advertising that you do points to your website.

In this way, you can drive traffic to your site that might otherwise never have come across it.

Profile Building

Profile Building has overlaps with both Social Bookmarking and using Social networking sites, but is broader than both. Essentially, if you have one webpage, you have one chance for people to find it. If you have many webpages that all advertise you, you have many chances for people to find it.

It’s about establishing yourself as an authority. Write guest blog posts for related bloggers. Write articles for article directories, but don’t submit the same article to more than one. (This site lists the best article directory, of which there are hundreds.) Create a Squidoo lens. Write a Wikipedia post if your website or organisation is official. Write an article for LifeHacker. Essentially, litter the internet with pages that refer to what you’re up to.

Link Building

This is similar to profile building, but focuses on getting links to your site on other people’s sites. Obviously, the more links that are out there pointing to your site, the greater the chance people have of randomly finding your site. (As an added bonus, inbound links are also good for your PageRank, as mentioned in a previous post.)

There are several ways to do this, including:

• ask for a link
• link swapping (this isn’t so good for increasing PageRank, because Google doesn’t like it as much – but people can still follow the links)
• write comments in forums or on blog posts, with a link in the signature
• use Tynt Tracer
  
• write articles as above (most article directories allow links in the author’s bio).

Again, given the number of options, it’s generally a good idea to have a strategy in place.

Pay Per Click

This is the simplest of the lot. Create advertisements using one of the pay per click programmes (Google’s one is called Adwords). This can be very effective, if done correctly – but it also costs.

I’ll include banner advertising in this section just for completion. Some of these are pay per click, but many others are pay per impression. In general, pay per impression is a bad idea, because most people only look at advertisements on the web if it directly relates to what they’re looking for. Pay per impression is like paying for a billboard few people look at (refer to Jakob Neilson’s article on Banner Blindness for confirmation), whereas pay per click is paying for results. I’ll doubtless talk more about these in later posts, but that will do for now.

Summary

Given the huge variety of options available for site promotion, there’s an obvious question: which should you use?

It’s up to you. Work it out as part of your Content Strategy. All of them will work, if you do it correctly, and apply a certain amount of effort.

Over the next few posts, I’ll detail the strategy I’m using. I’ll describe what I’m doing, and why (but don’t take this to mean it’s the only way; for your website, a different approach might be better).  I’ll go into details about what I intend to do in the future – and what I specifically choose not to do. Some of these choices are because I don’t think it’s right for what I’m trying to do, but some of them are because they could backfire rather badly.

I’ll keep you posted.

Oh, and one more thing. If you liked this post, bookmark it on your favourite site using the icon below. Send a tweet about it. Write me a comment, or otherwise share your thoughts about it with those you know. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.

(This is that call to action I mentioned above.)

1. content aspects, and
2. promotion aspects.

This post is all about the content – and what I’m doing to try to ensure my blog earns its place in Google search results. That means I’m focusing on Keywords. (Check out Site Promotion Plan Part Two: SEO to learn how Keywords impact search results) .

First, I’m trying to choose good keywords. I can’t stress enough how important this is (and I’ll admit it’s something that I could do lots better myself). If you’re starting out in a crowded market, keyword selection is vital to your site appearing high in a Google search. When should you do it? Before you’ve written anything. Have your Keywords all planned out in advance, and write accordingly. Otherwise, you may well be wasting your time.

You have to choose keywords that are actively searched, and that don’t have a lot of competition. How?

There are two tools that are of immeasurable help:

1. Google’s Keyword tool
2. Google’s PageRank tool:

   

Google’s Keyword tool is a keyword generator. What I did was type in the general terms I was interested in writing on. These included Web Content, Search Engine Optimisation, Web marketing and the like.  I hit “Get Keyword Ideas” and noted the keywords taht returned the highest number of monthly searches.

If it was as simple as that, everyone would be first in the rankings. Unfortunately, that’s only the start. For the most popular keywords that came up, I did a Google search and looked at the top four or five sites. I’ve got the PageRank tool in my toolbar (you can get it by downloading either the Google Toolbar or the SEOBOOK toolbar; I use the latter, because it gives me a bunch of other useful things as well).

What this means is that I can see the PageRank of any page on my screen. If the top four or five sites from my Google search showed a relatively low PageRank (zero or one), then I figured I could compete fairly well. If they showed a higher PageRank (two or three), then I figured I might have to work a bit harder.  Anything higher than three, for my blog site, went straight in the Too Hard basket.

Once I had my keywords, I started writing posts that included those keywords in important places.  These places inlcude:

• the page heading
• alt text behind images (even though I have very few of these so far)
• link text (see how often I link back to previous posts?), and
• high in the page text.

You can probably tell by looking at my posts some of the keywords I’m targeting.

Each placement is important, but it’s the combination of placements that can really gain Google’s attention. Hopefully, in time to come, whenever anyone types my keywords into Google’s Search field, my posts will end up fairly close to the top – and passing strangers will click on them to get a better look.

Not Just Search Engines

There’s one more thing that I consider to be vitally important. I’m not just writing for search engines. I’m also writing for real people. For me, this has a number of implications. I’m trying to keep my posts as useful as possible. For example, this entire section was conceived as a detailed “how-to” for those just getting started.

The idea isn’t to just offer general comments, but to provide detailed information about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it that way. I’m doing all I can to ensure that it’s both readable and interesting. Why? Because I want people to come back. I want them to bookmark my site and check regularly, just to see what else I might have written.

I also want them to start sharing my posts on social bookmarking sites. They’re only going to do that if what I’ve written is useful.

My next post will be on another non-technical aspect of Search Engine Positioning: Site promotion. For me, that’s one of the most interesting parts of the whole game.

Search engine positioning includes both technical and non-technical aspects. The non-technical aspects fit squarely in the Content Strategy I’ve been talking about, and I’ll discuss them in detail in a later post. This post is about the technical things.

You can do the same with most websites, except for the free sites built on the back end of another organisation’s URL. I’ve set up a few websites using Drupal in the past, and you can certainly do it there. WordPress (yes, this is a WordPress site) makes many of them easy.

Most of the things I did were set and forget things that needed to be done only once. Such as:

1. I chose a blog theme that specifically mentioned it was optimised for SEO. Now, I don’t have the detailed technical knowledge to be able to see if they’re right, so I had to take their word for it. It’s also clean and, to my eyes, looks very good – so that’s an added bonus.
2. The default for WordPress is to give each new post a number, which it appends to the end of the URL. Google likes to see meaningful words in URLs, so I went into Settings and updated the Permalinks field. Now, each URL reflects the title of my blog (that’s the important bit) and the date it was published. I can also manually edit blog URLs if I feel it will help.
3. Next, I installed a plugin that automatically creates an XML sitemap (Google XML Sitemaps) that pings the major search engines every time I update a post. This makes it easier for them to index all my pages, so at least they know my posts exist. If the search engines don’t know my posts exists, they aren’t going to display them even if someone searches for my keywords and keyword phrases.
4. I then tried (and, I have to admit, failed) to install another plugin that automatically generates tags for each post. Because I couldn’t get it to work, I’m going to have to find another that does the same job – if I don’t want to have to add the tags manually (any suggestions as to what to use would be welcome.)
5. I also added the Add-to-Any plugin, which generates a button at the bottom of every post that gives anyone reading the opportunity to share my post on any social networking site they like. I’ll admit that this might not make my page any more important to Google, because most of these sites will be using the no-follow attribute – but the exposure sure can’t hurt.
6. I did two more things. One is fairly common. I set up a Google Analytics account, and made sure the appropriate code is appended to the bottom of each post. Not exactly an immediate optimisation technique, but it should give me good insight into where any traffic is coming from.
7. The other is less common. I set up a Tynt Tracer account, which not only traces any content that others might copy from my site, but also appends a link back to my site wherever that text is pasted. Instant PageRank points.

As the title of this post says, anyone can do these. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an old pro or a relative newcomer. None of them is difficult, and they can all add serious value to your site.

The next couple of posts will be about the other things I’m doing, including Keyword searches and site promotion. They should be up within the next few days.

But before I go into detail about what I’m doing exactly, a bit of background might help.

First, there isn’t much point of having a web page if no-one can find it – and there is an enormous number of web pages in the world. For example, if you do a search under “SEO”, Google will return around 186,000,000 results. How is it possible to get your site to make it into the first three pages of results?

Because the first three pages are where 99% of your audience will stop looking.

Basically, the factors that come into play are:

1. how high your page’s PageRank is, and
2. how closely the user’s search terms match the Keywords on your page.

It’s the interaction between the two that determine where your page appears on any list of search results.  (Oh, there is one thing I should mention, and that’s the percentage of searches controlled by Google. According to Hitwise.com, Google is currently the search engine of choice for around 73% of US searches, and significantly higher in other markets (over 80% in Canada, for example). Effectively, search engine optimisation therefore means optimising for Google.)

Here’s the important bit: if the keywords on your page match the keywords on your competitor’s page, your respective positions in any search results will be determined by the relative worth (PageRank), according to Google, of your page as a whole.

The opposite is true as well. If Google perceives both your webpage and your competitor’s website as being equally valuable (same PageRank), then it’s how closely the keywords on your page match the search terms that determine your respective positions in any search results.

The factors that will improve your page’s PageRank include:

• lots of links from other sites connecting to yours
• lots of links from related sites (sites discussing similar topics) connecting to yours
• links from sites with a high PageRank connecting with yours
• lots of unique, good-quality content
• frequently updated content
• the age of your site, and
• a good navigational structure which lets the majority of pages be indexed.

Knowing this is the first step to doing something about it. There are positive ways (often called the “white hat” approach) and there are devious ways (the “black hat” approach). I’ll no-doubt talk about this a bit later, but for now it’s enough to say that Google doesn’t like sites that use black hat techniques, and is very likely to respond negatively.

My content strategy includes using white hat techniques, and I’ll detail exactly the steps I’m taking over the next few posts. If you’re new to SEO, stay tuned. Some of the things I’m going to say may well change how you’re doing things.