These days, SEO is one of the most mentioned and familiar words in the online world. Many business owners have SEO done for their website in order to get more traffic and more revenue. However, this also means that many business owners have been kidnapped by SEO. Their core, daily work becomes an endless cycle revolving around SEO. The truth is there are many other effective ways to promote your website.
First of all though, let me point out the strengths and weaknesses of using SEO for your business. Before I share my opinion, these observations are a result of my own experiences as well as the various experiences and opinions of other people. I hope after you read this, you can discuss your own views and share your ideas with us.
The Advantages of SEO
- Low cost. After you’ve created your website, you can immediately start on SEO techniques including on-page optimization (keyword targeting, writing SEO-friendly articles, and increasing your website’s authority) bit by bit to increase your rankings on search engines. Compared to using Google Adwords, you save a lot of money.
- Stability. Once you are ranking well for a keyword phrase, your position is considered pretty stable for the most part. With Google Adwords, your ads stop the moment you stop paying but with SEO, you’ll continue to receive traffic which will only increase as your long-tailed keywords rank and bring in more visitors.
- Targeted traffic. The keywords you target are relevant and target specific users, especially long-tail keywords which have strong and specific search purposes.
The Disadvantages of SEO
- It’s slow. SEO requires a long time to get a stable ranking and recommendation from Google, costing you a lot of time.
- It’s a ton of work. Consider the scale of what you need to do. You need to create a lot of content to support your website and keep updated in order to encourage Google bots to crawl your site daily.
- It’s risky. We all know that search engine algorithms are frequently being adjusted. If your website is mainly relying on SEO to get traffic, this can be dangerous. All it takes is an algorithm change, potentially severely impacting your site and halting all traffic.
As I mentioned before, the above is largely my own opinion of SEO. It’s not suitable for every business. So it’s great news that there are many ways to promote and market your website. Here are some common approaches:
Ad networks. With an ad network, you are paying money to promote your site, therefore it’s best suited for those with a high budget. It can bring in a lot of customers, however the conversion rate is not as high as other methods and you need to put more effort into your website in order to encourage your visitors to stick around.
Auction ads. Auction advertising is not just for search engines, and search engines does not just mean Google. Yahoo and Bing are great options for auction advertising, as are websites related to your business that allow advertising.
Article marketing. Article marketing paves the way for your brand. You can create helpful articles and post them to forums, popular blogs, news websites, and other strategic areas that contain high, related traffic. This is a terrific way to bring visitors to your website.
Facebook marketing. This type of marketing is growing very fast. It seems that just about everyone in the world has a Facebook account (with the exception of China). You are pretty much promoting your product or service to the whole world.
YouTube marketing. Do you know how many people search within YouTube every day? YouTube has more than one billion users. Every day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube, generating billions of views. Why not create your own videos and post them up? You will not be disappointed.
As you can see, there are many ways to market your website and get traffic besides using SEO. What I’ve mentioned here is just the tip of the iceberg. With the fast development of the Internet, new ideas are endless regardless of which method you use. As long as there are people who want to use your website, there is traffic, and there is profit.