We all know the old Internet adage ‘Content is King’ and internet marketers are always telling us that the more content we have the more the indexing engines will like it. Review sites are therefore an attempt at marrying these two ‘truisms’ of the web. A review provides considerable textual content with real meaning and the more reviews that a site has then the more content it has overall.
Review sites are therefore wonderful for the site owner. But is there anything in it for Internet marketers in general? Well, getting a positive review of your site or product is always a good thing. It makes others aware of your product and how good it is. You will also get in-bound links to your website. But the thing is, even a bad review can be good for your site if that review has a link in it (and most do) as you’re still getting an in-bound link.
Review sites also tend to be popular with a high page rank which means that these sites are providing you with valuable in coming links, which increases the page rank and thus the visibility in Google and other search engines of your site. Indeed, submitting your site to to a review site that you pay for reviewing your content can be cheap advertising. Most cost $20–$50 for a paid review which gives you a review of your site written up and submitted to the review site’s archive. Most professional review sites will also have an RSS or other blog-type feed which is continually fed out to blog indexing and annotation sites. Thus you get free ‘blog and ping’ for your article as well as permanent links form a high-Page-Rank site. Basically it’s almost free advertising that’s guaranteed to be indexed by Google.
It also gives you an excellent opportunity to pre-sell your product so that prospective clients coming to your sales page from the review are already eager to buy. They are certainly interested in your product. It’s just up to your to convert this interest into a sale.
All this means is that reviews are an excellent way for your to market your product. You should be on the look out for as many review sites as possible to submit your product to. Just be wary of submitting exactly the same review to too many sites as this may well get you a ‘duplicate content’ penalty in Google, especially if you have the same review, or a close version of it on your own website. Always change your review (at least a little) before submitting it somewhere else.
The message here is that you should always seek opportunities to have reviews of your sites and products published and that you should not necessarily be wary of a negative review as even this can lead visitors to your site and can increase your Google page rank. The old print adage that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ remains true in the internet age.
Dyfed Lloyd Evans is an internet publisher and marketer. He runs the Celtnet Reviews review and review publication site which offers user-authored reviews as well as unbiased reviews of books, eBooks, products and websites. His site also offers a Celtnet Information Forum where internet marketers can get together to discuss various aspects of internet marketing.
Tags: link publication, link submission, page rank, reviesw