Would you attempt to use a cell phone with a dead battery? Or drink from a cup with no liquid in it? Drive a car with gas but no oil?

Of course not. Each of those probably sounds like a silly question.

But we often forget that the same thing goes when you're promoting a site. Web site promotion relies on several components to make it successful. And if you're just using one part, it may seem like everything is fine.

For example, perhaps you've been relying on search engine marketing alone in order to get clients to your site. You build a search engine friendly site, with the right keywords, get some links leading back to you, optimized title tags, etc.

And for a few months, you've got a steady stream of traffic leading into your site. Yippee!

Then one day, Google changes its algorithm, and what you thought was a perfect site for a term tanks, and you're suddenly on page 20 of the results. Sales drop, and you have no idea what happened, or how to get back in position.

It's frustrating, I know. I've been there. But this doesn't always need to happen. And if it does, it doesn't have to be a disaster.

How can I say that?

Look at the bottom of my home page (see the resource box below) and see how many people have clicked through to just that page from Google and Yahoo in the past 24 hours. Again, that number represents my home page only, not the rest of my site.

A quick check of my stats tells me that last month, visitors clicked through to my site for "1959 different keyphrases". 15% of those phrases yielded more than 10 unique visitors, with the top result sending 214 people to my site.

And I was slacking last month - I've really been too busy to optimize my blog posts.

"Well, hurray for you Tinu. Where does that leave me?"

The example from this site was to illustrate to you that first - search engine traffic only brought around 6% of my traffic last month and I still did fine in sales and in increasing my subscriber base and exposure. It's none too shabby but I could do a lot better with this site - however, it would mean that I spent most of my time promoting the site instead of working with clients.

On the other hand, if your website promotion was set up like mine, you could be completely dropped from Yahoo, Google, MSN, Alta Vista, Excite, and all the other engines, and still have an okay month. Then the next month you could either recover your position in the search engines, or focus on strengthening your promotion in other areas.

In order to prevent such a fall from happening to start with, or to quickly recover, you need to have more than one web site promotion method in place. What are these other methods and how do they build on each other?

You can find the answers in part two of this article.