Branding Your Site: Free Yourself from SERPs! - Go Global
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The Internet provides a world without borders. Your site, written in English, can be accessed by every English speaker on earth, and you can ship a product to anywhere in the world. Depending on your market, you probably don't have to build two versions of your web site to provide for non-English speakers, since there is a trend towards English being a second language in most parts of the world. But as you grow and try to appeal on a more global scale, you might want different translations of your site. However when in doubt, stay with English.
Building your site to cater to foreign countries will increase your traffic. If you are an online store, it will increase your sales. For a business based in America, having a Latin (Spanish language) site is an option; the extra cost is offset by the amount of hits the site will get from countries in South America. It will also increase your perception as a global website.
Publicity and Advertising
Publicity and advertising will do wonders for your site's visibility. Celebrities routinely get hundreds of thousands of hits a day on their websites when they have just recently been in the news. Publicize your site; become known as an expert in the field. If your site is concerned with open source programs, for example, give free training workshops and work on community development schemes, get on talk shows, say controversial things like how open source is going to make Microsoft go bankrupt in the next ten years, send free articles to newspapers, and advertise your site. Advertise online through pay per click and affiliate programs. Write articles and submit them across the net. Become a public speaker; send your name to local newspapers indicating that you are an authority. Become your site's mascot. Huge doses of publicity will do wonders for your hits (as long as other principles are adhered to) and though publicity takes time, it is free, unlike advertising.
A good way to advertise is through search engines' pay per click programs. Bidding for a key word relevant to your site's content ensures visibility on search engines. Paid submission of your commercial web sites to paid directories such as Yahoo! can also be quite helpful in branding your site.
Concluding Thoughts
There are worries about the increasing market share of Google, leading to a large number of sites increasingly depending on Google rankings for traffic. This could be dangerous, or even fatal. What if a slip up is made and a penalty is incurred? Or what if Google decides to overhaul its current system of ranking web sites? Even as competition heats up between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, solely depending on a site's ranking on search engine results pages will lead to a lot of money and man hours spent on optimizing various pages for various sites, with no long term guarantee of your site's survival.
Branding connects you immediately to the man or woman with the mouse, and gives you cyber buzz as people and institutions talk about you, giving you millions of dollars of free publicity. And the easiest way to become a permanent fixture on the Internet is to become a permanent fixture in their minds.
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