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Web marketing and promotion primer
The fundamental benefit that websites yield their owners is as a very inexpensive global marketing channel, since they can be accessed by any Internet user anytime, from any part of the world. It is obvious that the benefit of a website to its owner would be directly proportionate to the number of visitors and the amount of traffic it can attract.

Thus, in order to derive the maximum benefit from a website, it is impetrative that it receives the maximum number of visitors. But how can one achieve this?

According to a study conducted by Forrester Research in 2000, 59% of users fine new websites by following links from other websites. Thus, to increase its traffic, it is very important for a website to be linked with as many other websites as possible.

The same Forrester study revealed that 81% of users also find websites of their interest via the major search engines. With the exponential growth of the WWW, these search engines typically contain hundreds of millions of WebPages in their databases and therefore, any search performed by the users will usually have at least a few hundred thousand pages in the search results. As common sense would dictate (and practical studies and surveys confirm) most users will visit only the first 20-30 websites listed in the search results.

HOW DO PEOPLE FIND WEBSITES?

% Mentions

Search engines

81%

Link from other site

59%

Viral marketing (word of mouth)

56%

TV

48%

Guessed URL

41%

Online advertising

20%

Radio

19%

Direct mail

10%

Source: Jun. 2000 Forrester Research Inc

So, a website can get large amounts of referrals and traffic via the search engines if it is listed in the top 30 results when queries related to its theme are performed. There is, however, no pre-defined and easy method available to do this.

 Interestingly, following the lead of Google, most major search engines today treat Link Popularity, which is a measure of how many other websites are linking to a particular website, as an important factor in terms of ranking it in the results. In general, the higher a website’s link popularity, the higher its rankings on the major search engines.

 Thus, if a website gets a large number of other websites to link to it, it stands to boost its traffic in two ways: 1. Via direct visitors who follow the links to reach it and 2. Via the higher search engine rankings resulting into more referrals.

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