Promotion Tip:
Make Your Site Informative

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

People search the Web looking for information and often report that they can't find the information they really want - particularly product information. Unfortunately, many Web sites concentrate more on making the sale than providing information. But consider this: the more you give visitors what they want, the more likely they are to hang around long enough to shop.

Build and promote some good informational pages for your Web site. It's a relatively small effort that can pay off big in search engine promotion and increased visitor traffic.

Not A Sales Pitch, Please!

An informational page is just what the title implies. It's a Web page that contains straightforward information about a particular topic. You aren't trying the hard sell approach (yet), but rather you're giving visitors basic information about pet care, car stereos, African cooking, or whatever topic your site covers.

Informational pages give you the chance to be the expert and give visitors information they can't get anywhere else. Once they're comfortable with your knowledge and expertise, they're far more likely to buy your products or services.

Use these three tips to create a good informational Web page:

See? That's not so hard. You'll spend some time creating pages that help your visitors, but you'll get search engine benefits!

You Become More Popular

Webmasters often gripe that it's hard to find good sites that are willing to trade links. That strategy is called "reciprocal linking" and it works like the barter system. You offer to link to Web site A and Web site A returns the favor by linking to your site. That's a great, cost-effective promotional strategy, but it takes a long time to implement.

While you can make linking easy, it still takes time to identify related sites and contact the webmasters. Those people are busy and popular sites are often swamped with reciprocal link requests - many of which come from automated software programs. They're apt to ignore requests unless you can prove that you really have something of value to offer.

Your sales pages just aren't that valuable to other webmasters. The last thing they want to do is have their visitors spend money at someone else's Web site! But they're often much more willing to consider a link to related, but non-commercial pages at other Web sites.

For instance, a site that specializes in cookbooks probably wouldn't link directly to the order page for your own Ethiopian cookbook. However, the cookbook site owner might be quite interested in linking to a good article about the history of Ethiopian cooking.

Review our article Improve Link Popularity In 10 Easy Steps for more ideas about how to increase your site's link popularity score.

Be A Cheapskate

Search engines and directories are constantly looking for ways to increase their profits and they view your Web site as just another cash cow. You could spend thousands each year just submitting and getting all your pages indexed.

Commercial sites have to pay Yahoo just to get an editor to look at the site and also pay a recurring annual charge to stay in the directory. LookSmart also charges all commercial sites. Search engines aren't far behind. Inktomi, AltaVista, Teoma, and others all have programs that charge to spider your site - and you pay by the page.

But most of these charges apply to commercial sites only. You have a better chance of using the free submit option if you submit your informational pages. Remember, you've already carefully written them to avoid obvious promotion of your products or services.

Use the free submit options offered for non-commercial pages at Zeal.com and Yahoo.com. The web of search engine and directory alliances means that getting into one search engine and directory may also get your site into many others.

Don't ignore Google and the Open Directory Project: all submissions there are still free!

Open The Doors

Imagine a huge department store that covers an entire city block. You'd expect it to have more than one entrance wouldn't you? Surely, it would have at least one door on each side - and probably a lot more.

Now consider your Web site and consider that each page in a potential doorway into the rest of the site. Too many webmasters think only about designing a good home page and never take advantage of the promotional opportunities the other pages offer. If you optimize every page in your site for slightly different keywords and keyword phrases, you greatly increase your chances of being found.

Your informational pages are a great way to do that! The theoretical Web site that sells Ethiopian cookbooks could target several related keyword phrases and build informational pages around those phrases.

For instance:

People searching on those phrases may not think they're in the market for a cookbook, but a visit to your site may convince them to buy one.

But of course, this means extra work for you trying to select keywords, write copy, then optimize and submit these extra pages. That's why Search Engine Power Pack comes helpful features like a keyword popularity tool to help you select those keywords and a deep submit tool that lets you submit all your important internal pages without spending hours entering the same information over and over.

You have enough to do just creating good content for your site. Let Power Pack handle the drudgery while you concentrate on content, contacts, and sales!