I have been a web marketer for the last ten years; there have been many changes to the way people should go about promoting their websites in this time and it can prove to be a bit of nightmare trying to keep in touch with the latest web promotion changes. What worked only three years ago could now result in your site receiving a ban or penalty on the major search engines. Paid links and over-excessive reciprocal linking are seemingly a thing of the past. So as we move through 2009 what types of web promotion strategy should a webmaster be following?

I am also involved with helping people to discover how to stop stuttering and I also work within the cheap holidays sector.

Just one or two years ago you could gain a high ranking within a search engine like Google by simply buying a link on a page which had a high page rank. It did not even seem to matter if the site that was providing the link had anything to do with the site purchasing the link. We therefore saw online poker websites purchasing text link adverts on media and publishing websites which had a high page rank. A lot of people made a lot of money from selling these text links and a new marketplace formed.

But then the major power in the world of the search engines, Google, decided to move the goal posts by declaring war on this paid links market, stating that it was seriously distorting their search results. This upset a lot of people, this tends to happen when money is involved, with many accusing Google of acting as God. The reply from Google was short and to the point and went along the lines of; it is our search engine and we therefore decide our own guidelines; if you want to sell text links that is fine but it may result in some form of penalty as this goes against our current. They were basically saying you can do whatever you want with your website and at the same time we can do whatever we want with our search engine. Fair play, I say. I am actually very happy with the new guidelines; it was very hard to compete with webmasters who had deep pockets etc. Now the one-man band can compete with the big corporation; hard work, keeping up to date with the latest guidelines as well as learning from the SEO experts will once again prove to be very beneficial.

2009 brings about a new watch word in the world of web promotion; relevancy. What does this mean? Well quite simply the backward links that you attempt to obtain now need to be relevant to the site that you run for them to have a real benefit. Again this surely is common sense. If a website about gardening has a link pointing to a website about camping, is this offering any value to its site visitors? Not really.

2009 is also the year when those who are willing to work hard will finally get their rewards. Some of the old favourites such as article marketing are becoming more popular than ever but quality is now far more important than quantity. Only the best articles will be chosen to be published on other people’s websites and let’s face it they have enough articles to choose from.

Ensuring that your website is optimised correctly with the main keywords placed naturally within the text of the homepage will also be essential, be careful not to “keyword stuff” your homepage though.