Site promotion is not the same as Search Engine Optimisation. Many people use search engines to find information on the internet but even more people will find a site and then follow links on that site, going to other sites and on and on. This is the process which is described in the word "surfing the internet", moving from site to site, just like surfing from wave to wave. Promoting a site is about making sure that people looking at other sites will find you. This is generally done in two ways: you can get your site linked on other sites, often providing a reciprocal link or you can pay for advertising.

Get links to your site

This option is free. Generally it will work by either asking the owner of a site with similar subjects (for example a site about Crete) if they would like to include a link to your site and offering to do the same in exchange. This can work in the interest of both parties because links from well "ranked" sites will improve your own search engine page rankings. If your site provides unique information people will also link to it without you asking them to. See the example of a site we created, agiaroumeli.com. It is a site presenting a business (Studios and Restaurant Artemis) but also provides plenty of information about the village of Agia Roumeli. Other site owners will link to it because of this information and in the process they help directing visitors to their business. So quality and unique content means extra work (and extra costs) but they will get you better results than simply creating one single page describing your business.

Advertise

The second option is paid advertising. A few years ago internet advertising was big business until people realised that they were paying too much money for the returns that they were getting. Then internet advertising fell from favour and advertising costs went sharply down. Now that these costs are down businesses are again starting to advertise on the internet but they do so more carefully. For example, where before someone was paying large sums of money for advertising on web sites with a lot of traffic they are now choosing sites with less traffic but a more focused visitors group. Take the example of a Cretan hotel: if they take an add in CNN they will get millions to see their banner (and also pay very high costs because of this) but from these millions only very few will be in the business for a hotel room in Crete. If they advertise on a Crete web site they will get much less views but they will also pay much less and the people who view the ads will have much more interest in a hotel room in Crete. So advertising is neither good nor bad but it needs to be chosen very carefully so that you do not spend more money for it than you get business from it.

Another form of advertising is paid inclusion with search engines. Here again, it is neither good nor bad but be very very careful how you spend your money.

If you want to plan an advertising budget for your business we can help you with advice on where to advertise. We also have ourselves a few sites that can be used for advertising and we know which other sites might be worth considering. We can also monitor the effects that any advertising has on the number of visitors to your site (which is essential if you want to spend your money carefully).

We can also design advertising banners and promotion texts.