3 Responses

1. WebMetrics
   Damian,

   You are correct, you can buy keyword listings from Google and a whole host of other search engines. However, what keywords do you use? What do you competitors do? When people search for services such as yours, what do they type in? And this isn’t a good long term strategy as what you really want is to build a strong presence not just have a paid for listing.

   My organisation does this for a number of companies, under the service title of WebMetrics – I can let you have further information if you require.

   Good Luck.

2. Build a web
   Damian

   Buying keywords is only one of many ways of promoting a web site, I personally have not parted with money for this. I have however had an e-Markeing consultant look over my site http://www.trainerbase.co.uk to advise on how to be search engine friendly (meta tags etc). As a result I have good rankings with many training related keywords (not enough though) and the majority of members come via search engines.

   That said, other ways of promoting your site are: links with other sites, put the url on anything you can think of, mention it whenever possible, join other directories, contribute to forums (TZ for a start), register your site with search engines (free), become a robot magnet (update the site regularly) and then anything else you can think of. Once you have done that, do it again though be careful not to spam the search engines.

   Hope this helps.

   Peter
   AKA Ed. Editor of TrainerBase

3. Target people
   Your website will compete for search engine success against hundreds of others. There’s no substitute for targetting the people you want as clients and getting them to take a look. Perhaps offer free downloads, or a competition. Once your site is live, send the URL to everyone you know, ask them to take a look and pass it on. Don’t imagine that having it all pasted up in cyberspace excuses you from the need to cold call!
   Good luck – Dick Barton
   http://www.dickbarton.co.uk