Want to Increase Site Traffic? Launch a Contest!
Dr. Michael F. Wilson, an internet marketing consultant and whohas written a handful of useful resources on search engineoptimization, has come up with six categories of internetmarketing strategies. The first is search engine optimization,and the means to achieve this strategy are numerous. Launchingcontests is one, and it ranks up there with careful selection ofkeywords, quality content (not those you can get for free) andhow to use meta tags, headers, links and directories efficiently. Starting good SEO practices early in web design demonstratesheightened sensitivity to the developed intelligence of themajor search engines like yahoo, Google and msn. To market yourproduct or service successfully, you need the search engines tobe your best friend. But you have to play by the rules. For example, Google has devised a way to gauge link popularity.This measures how much quality and quantity links provideincoming traffic to your site. It ties in with their mechanismcalled PageRank. Your web site will fetch a good rank scorebased on the number of visitors to your web site - qualityvisitors that translate into points of sale. How contests contribute to SEO - if you're selling a product orservice, you will want to target your niche audience. Bylaunching a contest, you derive valuable demographiccharacteristics of this niche audience. You tweak your web sitein accordance with consumer profiles. Contests also provideproduct and brand awareness and help develop consumer loyalty.They improve online dialogue long after the contest has ended.As we all know, word of mouth can be a powerful tool. Contests will also enable you to track participation in termsof sellers and territories. Needless to say, if the contestturns out to be a mutually satisfying interaction between thecontest sponsor and the participant, just think how many repeatvisits that would bring to your web site. So get ready for the spiders and robots that the search enginessend out regularly to prowl the Net. Give vent to yourcreativity and start a contest!