Archive for Building Your Online Presence
5 SEO Strategies for the Long Term
Posted by: | CommentsSearch engine optimisation or SEO is a long-term process, not just for a short run. You have to commit yourself to a long-term SEO plan if you want to achieve and maintain a high ranking in search engines. Optimizing your site once and then forgetting about it is simply not the right approach.
For the purpose of maintaining top place in search engines, here are a few long-term SEO strategies that you can use:
1. Constant Keyword Research
Many people make the mistake of thinking that researching SEO keywords just needs to be done for one-time. This is a very huge mistake. New keyword phrases are always there for you to use and researching for keywords should be an ongoing process. You can always go after recurrent phrases, new keywords and overlooked terms.
2. Regular Content Updates
For sure, the new keywords that you are targeting need to be placed somewhere. That is the reason why your website content has to be regularly updated. You can build trust with humans and search engines if your content is always fresh in addition to the new keywords incorporated. And what’s more, your chances of taking hold of high rankings in search engines will be increased because fresh content is always favored over the old ones.
3. Get Links for Your Content
One of the most significant long-term SEO strategies is link building. You have to make it a point that your website will always get more high quality inbound links. Building the flow of backlinks should not be the only things you should pursue. Always exert effort in creating tools and content that would generate links steadily in due course.
4. Periodical Website Review
At times, some of the pages on your website just won’t work well with SEO. It could be due to poor content, a lack of links, choice of keywords and many other factors. If these pages are not working well, it is your responsibility to conduct periodic website review in order to determine what actions should be taken to address the issue. The page probably needs to be replaced or given a little twist so that it will have a better ranking.
5. Focus on Usability
After everything else is taken into account, usability will always be the center of attention at the end of the day. No matter how high your rankings are, it really won’t matter if humans find the page difficult to use. Proper SEO can actually improve the usability of a website. But when the use of search engine oprimisation goes overboard, usability of the site will always suffer. Your site will always remain popular if the site is designed with the user in mind.
Is The dot com Domain Extension The Best Choice For Your Business Website?
Posted by: | CommentsIf you have done any research before choosing your business domain name, you will likely have read that the .com extension is always the preferable choice; however, this is not always the case for small businesses.
Here are two things you need to consider before making this very important decision.
- Does your company want to do business globally? Meaning, do you want to sell to customers outside your local or national market?
- Do you want to sell to your local community or customers within your own country?
These are very key factors you will need to decide before grabbing a domain name. If you answer yes to both, then it might make sense to register both the regional and the global extension for your business site. This does not mean you must make two websites. You can set the global site up as your main website and simply redirect the regional one to that site.
With Google’s new local search algorithms it is often a wiser choice to choose a regional domain name if you want to make reaching your local market easier. If you have an auto dealership in England, chances are you likely do not want to do business globally. You want your website to bring in as much local business as possible. In this instance, registering a .com domain would make your job of reaching your potential customers much more difficult. A .co.uk extension would be much more efficient and you would benefit from that built in local SEO. This would tell the search engines that you are a business in the UK so when a potential lead is typing in a search query, your site would be much more likely to show up in the search results because Google would know where you are located in correlation to the person doing the search.
This is especially true if you have chosen an international web host; popular hosts such as Hostgator or Bluehost are located in the USA. If you chose a global .com extension and hosted your business website outside of your country the search engines would have no way of knowing you are a UK based company and therefore you would not be included in the local search results. This would not be a good thing for your business.
With all of the competition online and it being harder to get in high ranking spots on the search engines, you do not want to be sabotaging your own success by not giving your business every advantage it can get to compete. Forget the outdated information about domain extensions and do what is best for your business and not what is best for the majority of others.
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Small Business – You Have A Website, Now What?
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are like many small businesses, you have paid a hefty price to have your website designed by a professional and are quite proud of the beautiful representation they have given you online. You can’t quite figure out why you have not seen any business generated from such a lovely looking site. Isn’t the internet supposed to be the way that smart businesses grow their businesses these days? Why isn’t it working for you?
Unfortunately, that is the way a great deal of business owners think. If you are asking yourself these questions, the answer is yes; it is the smart way for people to grow their business and compete in today’s market. The reason it isn’t working for you yet is because you have only completed the first step in creating an online presence but there is much more to be done before you are successful online.
Your next step is to take your pretty new website to a search engine optimisation(SEO) specialist to ensure the search engines can find your website. Yes, your web designer may have said they included SEO in the design, but the truth is that most web designers do not have the knowledge about search engines to do the job properly. It is similar to going to a doctor for a tooth ache, they are in the same health field, but only a dentist is specialised enough to actually fix the tooth. The same holds true for SEO. Only an expert will give you results.
Once your site is at it’s best for search engines, you next need to look at effective ways to reach your target market and get traffic to your website. This is the key factor. If you don’t have web traffic then you can’t make sales. There are many ways to begin building an online presence.
These are what I consider to be the five most important ways to get traffic.
- Article Marketing. Writing articles and submitting them to article directories has many benefits to your business and is a very effective means to get traffic to your site.
- Building Inbound Links. This is often referred to as Off Page SEO because it is an important factor that search engines use to determine where your website should appear in the search results. It is very difficult to get to page one of the search results without a great deal of inbound links.
- Social Networking. In order to get more business, you need to go where the customers are. These days, that is FaceBook, Twitter, Hi5, etc. You need to establish yourself in those sites so people who frequently use them can find you. There are millions of customers all gathered in one place. It is a very powerful marketing medium.
- An Active Blog. Building and maintaining an active small business blog on your website will go a long way to bringing targeted traffic to your site. You can add fresh content daily that you can use to bring more visitors to your website. If you think of your website as a gun to shoot at your target, then you must consider the blog as your bullets. You won’t hit the target without them.
- Advertising. This is an optional way to speed up the process if your budget allows. There are a number of advertising services available to you. PPC (pay per click), banner ads and email solo ads are just a few ways you can pay for visitors to your site, but they are not 100% guaranteed for results without an experienced person managing the campaigns.
Action and Consistency. This is not a technique, but it is a very important factor. This is where most small businesses fail. In order to really succeed online you must do all of the above on a regular and consistent basis. Taking action in one area for a short time, then jumping ship and doing another area for a time before jumping on to the next will keep you feeling like you are working hard but getting no results. You must make a concentrated effort in all areas to get results. If you do not have the staff to do this, then you must hire an expert who can handle it for you. The return on investment will pay off in the long run.
Search Engine Ranking Criteria – Making Your Business Visible
Posted by: | CommentsUK Internet Marketing Service – Search Engine Ranking
In the world of the internet, you want your business to be easily found. In this sense, doing online business is kind of like doing storefront business. It’s all about location. If your customer base can’t locate your business, then they’re not going to be doing business with you. It’s as easy as that. If you are opening a store, this is easy to understand. You should open your store in a place where there is heavy traffic. On the internet, use the same logic. You want to get the most traffic to pass through your website. So now you’re asking how this can be done. In this article, you will learn the basics of search engine ranking criteria.
The first rule of search engine ranking criteria is to get more hits and visits. To get hits from search engines, you need to be getting hits in the first place. This might sound difficult, but it’s easier than you might imagine. Make sure when you are putting key words, tags, and titles on your website that you are using unique words that will bring your product or service to mind. You will want to use terms that people will think of when they consider your product, but you will not want to use the words that everyone else uses. If you are selling diet foods, don’t just use “diet foods” as your key word. Be more specific. Think about exactly which foods you’re selling. This will limit your competition.
The next rule of search engine ranking criteria is to get your name out there. This is all about social networking, links, and pay per click ads. The more people who are aware of your site, the more clicks you will get. The moment more and more people begin clicking on your site, the bots will begin indexing your information. When the bots start indexing, this means the major search engines are keeping track of what you’re doing. This is a good thing.
To summarize, the key to mastering the search engine ranking criteria is to get your name out there in a unique and powerful way. The same old rules of advertising apply. Make your business visible by offering your customer base what they need in an attractive and unique way. Make them stop and think about your ads. Use fresh designs and place links and ads where your potential customers will see you and know that you are a presence.