Maybe I should have titled this article; “What works and what doesn’t work promoting your site”. Anyway, here it is.
Are you aware that Google and Facebook could care less about getting your business if you’re the little guy? They’re already making a ton of money advertising for the big corporations. They seem to think that the little guy isn’t worth their time. Don’t believe me? Why not spend some quality time looking at the testimonials on the various message boards where the little guy’s Google Ads account was suspended without any explanation at all. You’ll quickly see the pattern.
By the way, there’s no charge for this information. This article isn’t some landing page that goes on and on to convince you to spend even more money on web advertising. Shoot, you’ve probably already probably spent more cash promoting your website in a week than your yearly bill for having your site up in the first place. I’m not after your money, but I do want to share.
I’m a tinkerer. To tinker means that I like to figure out how things work and I’ve been tinkering with the web since the late 1990’s. Yeah, I’ve been around for a while. Although Google and Facebook are run by people wanting to make the most money, they still have a software making things tick. I don’t care how many updates Google makes to it’s algorithm, as a search engine, it’s still expected to give search results. Now, unlike a directory, it relies on links and descriptions or narratives to give said results. For as many times on as many different sites, link popularity is how Google scores the value of a link in its rankings more than keywords themselves. Sure, keywords are important. I didn’t say they weren’t. Keywords however, don’t come into play until after the popularity of the link is considered. If this isn’t common knowledge, it sure should be.
In a nut shell, in order for Google to be effective, it has to consider link popularity over the big guys putting the big money in their pockets in order to keep the big money advertisers interested in them. Does that make sense? It should. The exact same thing applies to Facebook, even though they aren’t relying on search results to keep them running. They’re relying on person to person communications, but that really doesn’t work unless there’s a way to search all those communications inside their own software. It’s not common knowledge, but I believe that Facebook relies on link popularity in one way or another to generate it’s own internal search results.
Now, what can we do with all this information?
Google – There are 3 things inside Google that will build you up in popularity.
- Google Blogs: This is a blogging system inside of Google and is indexed even before anything else submitted to Google. They can’t help it because it’s part of their integrated infrastructure. If they tried to block content coming from their own body of information, it would throw a monkey wrench into their own gears and cogs. If you don’t have a Google Blog, get one. Post to it regularly mentioning your link you’re promoting without a bunch of hype.
- Google +: This is Googles answer to Twitter and Facebook. Again, it’s part of Googles infrastructure and can’t really be ignored by the search engine giant. If you don’t have a Google+ account, create on and every single post you make on your blog, submitted articles, and even your Google blog, make mention to it on Google+.
- Webmaster Tools: Using this set of tools is just downright necessary because the more information you place in them about your site becomes an integral part of Google.
Facebook – There are 2 things you really must do inside of Facebook to get your links out there.
- Build a Facebook Fan Page for the site you’re promoting: I know it may seem redundant, but it’s a necessary redundancy. Not only is Facebook’s looking at that page for link popularity, but so is Google because of Facebook and it’s popularity inside of Google. Make sure that the fan page isn’t an exact duplicate of your own website, re-word it’s contents so that it’s unique. It’ll carry your links into it’s system, therefore giving those links value inside Facebook, and so will Google.
- Ever single time you write an article or blog post, mention it on Facebook: It’s as simple as that. With the Facebook mention, the URL and a brief description will be in your posting. Make sure that you mention only the specific URL of the article or blog post and not the main URL of your site. Again, this is for link popularity but also for diversity of links inside your domain. Google will eat that up as it’s algorithm eats up the many Facebook mentions of the various URLs inside your site. Likes also are URL mentions in a smaller format that carry almost as much link popularity weight as mentions do.
Did you also know that when you visit a particular blog or article directory researching whatever subject you’re researching, if you’ll post a comment related to the post, Google also adds that comment to it’s vast database? Comment on every article you read if the author allows it… And if you comment, make sure that the comment is relevant to that post and your URL is contained somewhere in it. Do the author and yourself a favor and like or mention that article. After a while, you’ll see your link popularity go higher and higher.
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The true genius shudders at incompleteness and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be. Edgar Allan Poe