Craft Marketer Newsletter
Issue Number 28, October 2, 2003

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This issue explores common but potential harmful myths about
promoting your craft site online.

Myth #1: Search engines are expensive

You may have heard search engines are too costly and that you
have to use pay-per-clicks to get traffic. But that just isn't so. I
have several sites which generate more than 20,000 visitors per
month and I don't use pay-per-click to get that traffic.

Myth #2: Doorway pages don't work

Most of my traffic comes through more than 300 "doorway" or
"gateway" pages. A doorway page is simply another page on your
site which is designed to rank high in search engines for specific
keywords phrases.

For instance, if you want a page that ranks high for the phrase
"stained glass windows", you would create a new page named:
http://www.yourdomainname.com/stained-glass-windows.htm and
include the phrase "stained glass windows" in these areas of the page:

Title meta tag
Keywords meta tag
Description meta tag
Heading 1 text area
Body text area
Link text area

Make sure you link to the new page from your home page or site map.

Myth #3: You must submit your pages to the search engines to get
indexed

Experts say this is false. And my experience verifies that.

I no longer submit my pages to the search engines. When I put up a
new site, I make sure I am linked to from another site that is already
showing up in search engine queries. Once I stopped submitting
my pages, they got indexed much faster.

NOTE: the page must be linked to from a site or page already showing
up in search queries.

The engines "crawl" the net every month and then rank pages according
to various criteria. So if your site is linked to by an already indexed site,
your pages will get indexed much faster when the search engines find
you naturally through their own crawlers.

Myth #4: The more links to your site, the higher your ranking in the
search engines

Yes, no, maybe. It depends on the quality of those links.

Unless you have no competitors for a particular keyword phrase, the
dominating factors in how your web pages will rank in search engine
queries is the number of incoming links, where they come from, and
what words are in those links.

In other words, your search engine positioning is determined to a large
degree by what other sites say about you in their links to you. It also
matters how popular the sites linking to you are.

The ideal linking solutions:

1. Choose keywords and phrases you want to rank high for and make sure
that when you are exchanging links with other sites, you ask them to link
to you with these important keywords.

For instance, if you want to rank high for "stained glass windows", get
other sites to link to you with a clickable link saying only "stained glass
windows". To help control how other web site owners link to you, send
them the HTML code for how you want to them to post your link.

Example request to a prospective link partner:

Please use the following code when linking to us:
____________________________________________________________

<a href="http://www.yourdomainname.com">stained glass windows</a>
stained glass windows customized for your doors, windows, and skylights.
____________________________________________________________

2. Choose link partner sites who already are indexed and showing up in search
engine queries. The more popular the site linking to you, the higher the value
of those incoming links.

3. Choose link partner sites within your subject area. Your site is relevant to
crafts, seek links from other craft sites. A link to you from an automotive parts
site is not going to help much and may actually count against your site's
ranking.

If your site is craft related and you would like to exchange links with my site:
www.craftmarketer.com, email me with your URL and desired
linking code and I will email you mine. This will only benefit both of us if we
link with each other's specific keywords.

Craftmarketer is a very popular and highly ranked site. A link to you from there
will boost your craft related site in its rankings.

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