Monte Verde

Web Site Promotion

Ever do a search on Google, Yahoo, or MSN (the three biggies) and discover that the search engine has found about a gazillion web sites out there that match your key words? And yours is not among those listed right up there at the top? Not unusual! Individual web sites are little needles in a very, very big haystack.

This is what promotion is all about. The trick is to drive customers to your site rather than to any of the other gazillion sites out there.

There are several basic steps involved in this, and we follow these basic steps for every site we build. (You'd be amazed at the number of sites out there that don't even take these basic steps!)

1. In the coding of your site, it has to have an approprite title line and appropriate keywords for your site. We include these into every page of every site we build.

2. We include a "sitemap" in each site. The sitemap is invisible to you, the visitor; it is strictly for the benefit of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

3. We register each website via the webmaster tools provided by Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Even taking these basic steps, there's a pretty good chance that your site will not appear right at the top of any given search, given the huge number of websites out there. But that's not the end of the story, either. There are three central ways to achieve a super-high ranking, and we specialize in all three:

1. Lots and lots and lots of links to your site. This is the least expensive way, but it takes a good deal of time, maybe a year or so! We can show our web site clients how to do this; we add the actual links to clients' web sites  without charge.

2. Google/Yahoo Sponsored Links. This will get you up there really fast (within a day or so), but it'll cost money. Charges here include the monthly charge to your credit card directly from Google/Yahoo; these range anywhere from a few dollars to ... well, the sky is the limit. Also, it takes us a hour or two to set the whole business up and anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes per month to maintain it. We charge you $23.65 per hour for this part of the story.

3. Direct Paid Submission to Yahoo/Google. Somewhat similar to Sponsored Links, but a different route. As above, you'll see direct monthly charges from Yahoo/Google plus setup and maintenance charges from us. (Most folks opt for Sponsored Links, though, because they seem to be more effective!.)

4. Other paid memberships. There are lots of paid membership organizations out there, and some of them can be pretty good at sending customers to your site. A good example is your local chamber of commerce web site! Alas, there are also really crummy ones, too. (For example, we recently quit our membership in an organization because we were paying them bunches of money per year, and they were sending us practically no visitors at all!)

Lynn & Maria