Web promotion - advice needed

[Katherine]

I run my own internet based business from home. It has been developing slowely but steadily over the last few years and I realy enjoy it. Best of all it doesn't take much time and I can fit in around the kids allowing me to virutally be a full time mum. I don't want to go into too much details though as it would be inappropriate here - I just need a bit of advice.

My problem is that although my site has all the ingrediants it needs to be successful and I have an excellent relationship with my customers, I just need more hits on the site to keep my customers happy. I'm getting 600+ hits per day which is pretty good but my biggest competitor (with a big company behind them) gets 6000 and its hard to compete when its just little old me.

I've taught myself all about search engines etc and have learned a lot but obviously I'm not an expert and could do with some help. Am toying with idea of web promotion services (the sort who guarentee to get you to the top) but can't afford much and there are so many companies out there I'm not sure where to start. Has anyone ever used this with any success and what would you suggest I do? Or is it a load of rubbish and do I just plod on?

The web promotion services seem to me a bit dubious, although some might be quite good (I seem to get a lot of web promotion spam because I registered my mother's site with a lot of search engines so that probably colours my view). Have you thought about just checking with one of the more popular search engines how much to advertise with them? Someone such as Google would give you a wide audience (but I don't know how much they cost - this of course could be prohibitive). Also if there are special interest sites that coincide with your business perhaps you could arrange a deal that they link to your site in exchange for you linking to them - you'd be surprised how many are happy to do that for free as long as it's like for like in prominence.

Thanks. I've got lots of links on other sites and I do really well on Google anyway - its the others I need to do better on even though I pay to be listed as this doesn't affect ranking. I tired overture for a while but its too easy to spend money without creating revenue. Its hard to explain without going into details but Customers pay me to be on my site and that is my revenue. I don't get revenue from hits, its not a selling site if that makes sense, but I need the hits to keep the customers happy so that they pay me to stay on there. Lots of them are really chuffed with what I do - I just want to match the big guys and wish I knew how to do it. I am very wary of the web promotion services, hence this thread, I'm just not sure what else to try. Or do I just admit defeat. The big guys can strike bigger deals with the engines that I ever could.

I would be careful Katherine. My DH has his own web-site for his business and decided to go with a company that offered free hosting giving him better positioning with the search engines. This particular one worked by leaving those horrible ads when you close a window but DH decided to try it anyhow, they promised to make sure the ads were appropriate to his clientelle, ie nothing dodgy, but within a few weeks we were seeing the standard go downhill so decided to drop them before things got any worse. A customer of DH's did say that the web hosting that you pay for is better but as only a small amount of DH's business comes in via the web we did not look into it any further. HTH.

Katherine - I am an internet programmer and so know a bit about this.

Firstly any company that "guarantees" No 1 rankings will either be lying, only guaranteeing rankings on unpopular search terms or will be using pay-per-click search engines which could work out very expensive.

There are basically two parts to web promotion - finding the search terms that people would actually use if they were interested in your site and optimising your pages to those search terms. If you want a full blown analysis then I would recommend Search Engine Concepts who we have worked with in the past and who are very good. They're not cheap though - about £800 for a full analysis. Otherwise I could help you based on a bit of common sense and experience (I could do it on a payment per extra hits basis or something). My email is lucy at future-shock.biz (obviously with the @ symbol - I'm attempting to avoid spam)

PS link swapping can be very helpful like Georgina says - it's just a question of choosing the right sites to link to.

I have asked the question on a forum I know set up for the purpose of asking questions like these. The address is www.jirehmedia.com and go to forums. Only one reply as yet but there are some clever IT bods on the forum who might have some more ideas.