Promoting Your Site within the Rules and Good Taste Essay
Introduction
How can you promote a website without a penalty for too many website links? How can you promote website links without a spam penalty or offending your would-be customers? Let’s look at a few options for promoting your website while staying within the limits of good taste.
Pictures and Graphics
A beautiful picture that includes the name of the product and the website where it can be found is a staple of image likes like Pinterest. And unlike a picture that is only the website name, a picture that is relevant to the content that includes the website name is tasteful.
You can list the source of the picture as the website you want to promote. And listing the company name in the description without the URL ending like .com or .org promotes brand awareness without counting against your Hub.
Consider the URL you want to promote as a watermark for each image you put in the Hub.
Another way of implementing this is including your business card or calling card in front of an array of the products. In the case of a service provider, the company’s calling card and contact information in front of a beautiful cake or catering arrangement could be used. Then there is the classic picture of the person in the company uniform standing in front of the business’ sign.
Reference the Products without Endless Links
The best website rankings are those with high domain authority – think Wikipedia and WebMD. Unless you are a famous personality with domain authority because you are yourself, such as Suze Orman ranking highly in searches on her or her books, you don’t have domain authority.
Search engines reward quality content. The average person can optimize content to answer a question. Then promote the product or service you are offering via the website you want to share as the solution. This requires determining a question or searchable phrase consumers would enter and positioning your content as the solution. Your search engine optimization technique in this case is including the question or search phrase in the title of the hub, list it at least once in the content of the Hub, and several variations of it but not simply copied verbatim throughout the article.
You don’t want to have a direct answer to the question in the first four or five sentences, since search engines measure your content’s ability to answer a search query based on how long someone is on the site. If you answer “the best way to remove X from carpet” was “substance Y applied with our ABC carpet cleaner” in the first two sentences, people will read that quickly and bounce off the site – and Google’s artificial intelligence behind the search engine will say this isn’t a good answer for the question and penalize your site. In contrast, stating there are several ways to remove X from the carpet and discussing pre-treatment before outlining the cleaners one can use on different types of carpet to remove that stain will keep readers engaged, boosting your site’s rank through the content’s “stickiness”, the length of time they stay.
You will boost your website URL’s awareness in this case by having pictures of the carpet cleaner with the company name or URL several times in the article but only one or two direct links on the Hub to the desired destination.
Mistakes to Avoid
Do not place affiliate links in a Hub with any external website links, since this will result in spam penalties with search engines or a Hubpages penalty for an overly promotional page.
Don’t include the address of your blog or social media pages on a Hub that already has your desired destination website referenced once or twice.
If you state that the product is available on Amazon, say it is available on Amazon, not https://www followed by Amazon.com. Readers will know what you mean while you avoid getting a spam penalty for listing Amazon’s web address. The same is true for saying check out my store on eBay.