Balancing SEO and Other Forms Of Advertising

By Dan J. Fry
Posted Monday, December 13, 2004

Search engines are by and far the largest supplier of traffic to your web site. Moreover, its targeted, meaning the visitors that arrive at your site were looking for information that you are delivering. At least this is the goal of the search engines: to deliver high quality results to web surfers.

Recent major changes in Google, Yahoo and MSN have put the internet market however in a frenzy. As the search engines battle it out to be the one producing the highest quality results by frequently altering their index algorithm, search engine optimization has taken an almost obsessive importance.

The problem I see is that the battle is not going to end soon and repeatedly trying to stay ahead by optimizing after each re- indexing is truly a never ending battle. A balance must be struck between search engine advertising and other online venues.

Starting out with an online home business business is intimidating. There is pressure to build a quality site, offer valuable information, promote, build subscribers,...and the list goes on and on. Having a few different forms of advertising that you slowly utilize can payoff big in the long run. With a market that can change on an hourly basis, you musn't focus too heavily on any single form of site promotion.

Think of it as your advertising bag of goodies. You reach in and pull out one method and give it a try. Don't dump all of your resources into it. Spread them out. Reach in and pick another, until you have a few in the works. Now pause and see which is working. Tweak a bit here and there and sit back again. Continuously re-evaluating your advertising campaigns, you will begin to grow a deep feeling as to which works for your online business.

Here are a few types of advertising for your home business you should consider:

(1) Classified Ads - cheap and short to write.
(2) Article submission - write an article and post for free.The rewards reaped can be enormous in the long term.
(3) Paid ads in E-Zines - hit those seldom used small niche markets!
(4) Link exchange - can you bring in traffic from another site? You betcha!
(5) Newsgroup and Discussion lists - join in on discussions and pass out a small blurb about your business at the end. (6) Sig files - after all your online! Make use of all of the emails you send out daily.
(7) Flyers - yep, offline!

The bottom line here is not to stagnate. Search engines are important but not the only way to promote. Its better to balance your site optimization with other promotion strategies. If one method fails you at least have others to fall back on.

About the Author
Dan J. Fry is an independent researcher and owner of e-Kinetic.com, a site devoted to providing resources for small budget home businesses. He has a PhD in Physics and is married with two daughters and two cats. Subscribe to his free E-Zine on home business resources at mailto:e-kinetic@GetResponse.com or by visiting his site at (http://www.e-kinetic.com). He can be reached at mailto:comp@e-kinetic.com .