So, how to go about link building to increase Google rankings? Do a bit of research and you’ll quickly discover link building can be a complex task. There are so many do’s and don’ts that it’s easy to get bogged down and move on to something simpler, like sorting out your tax! But by keeping some simple things in mind there are ways that anyone can undertake link building.

Here are seven simple tips:

Stay away from black hat tactics

First and most importantly, don’t resort to black hat tactics to increase Google rankings. These are tactics that search engines frown upon and include sinister sounding phrases such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, webpage flooding and hidden links. Search engines such as Google are well versed in spotting these tactics and will penalise websites by dropping them from search results, which is something any small business should avoid.

Reciprocal links

You scratch my back I’ll scratch yours! Reciprocal linking simply means exchanging links with another website owner. It’s good to keep in mind – and this applies to many link building tactics – that quality is often more important than quantity when you’re trying to increase Google rankings. In reciprocal linking, primarily look to link with websites that are relevant to your website, are established (i.e. generally the older the website the better), are popular (e.g. have a good number of visitors, external links, good PageRank) and have a good reputation.

Links from blogs and forums

If you post comments on blogs and forums – particularly blogs that are relevant to your website – and include a link to your website in these comments you can start to pick up some handy external links. Make sure you follow some simple social media rules when doing so (e.g. make sure comments are relevant and add to the blog/forum discussion, don’t try to sell your services and products, etc) otherwise you risk the wrath of the other blog participants.

Social media

Start a Twitter or Facebook account for your business. Use LinkedIn, Stumble Upon, Digg or one of the many social media sites.

Free content websites

If you enjoy writing articles that are relevant to your business, a good link building tactic can be to submit these articles to free content websites. These are websites that people can go to view and use articles (i.e. use them on their website, newsletter, etc.). If you’re a bricklayer, you could write an article on how to create a brick fence; if you’re an accountant, you could submit an article on tax tips. Always remember to include a link to your website in your bio to increase Google rankings.

Website directories

There are hundreds of website directories where you can place information on your business and provide a link to your website. Google Places is one of the directories I recommend all small businesses to use and there are others that are worthwhile. Some aren’t, so don’t waste your time trying to get hundreds of links this way.

Video websites

Who hasn’t heard of YouTube? Plus there are other video syndication websites worth trying. ‘How to videos’ are always popular, plus there might be other activities or events you can video that are relevant to your business. ‘Go viral’ and you could be on a link building winner!

Summary

If you do undertake a link building campaign an important thing to remember is that it should be ongoing. Make link building part of your weekly or monthly routine and it’s likely you will increase your Google rankings.

But too many times I see companies plastering up a Facebook page just because everyone else is doing it. Or, they shoot out a few tweets and after a few days or weeks give up because no one is paying attention.

Is social media the right tool for your business? Here are some guidelines to help you use social media as a strategic marketing tool:

1. Have a purpose. Like any other marketing strategy, social media should be a tool that helps you meet a goal. You wouldn’t just go out and start buying ads without knowing what you want to accomplish, so don’t do it with social media. It might not cost anything to start a Facebook page, but there is a cost in time and that’s also a valuable resource.
2. Don’t sell. Social media is social. People use it to relate to one another and just like you wouldn’t walk into a party and start pitching your wares, you shouldn’t hard-sell on social media, either. There are ways to get people talking about your products or services, but you have to tread softly or risk losing your audience.
3. Be prepared to invest time and effort into your social media marketing. You will need to understand your target audience and how best to approach them. You need to understand what interests them, and know what it is you have to say that is valuable to that audience. Don’t post or tweet just to do it – make sure you have something to say or you will quickly be dropped by your readers.
4. Understand social media and use it yourself. There is no better way to understand Yelp, Chime In, Twitter, etc. than to participate and use them regularly.
5. Tie your efforts together and integrate them with your overall marketing strategy. You should not be doing something completely different online than you are doing offline. Avoid the split personality – don’t try to be hip and cool online if you are a traditional, conservative business offline. You risk damaging your brand and alienating online audiences who can see right through that.
6. Keep up with the changes. New sites are emerging all the time. Auction sites, gaming sites, photo sharing and music sharing – they are all expanding their focus to include building communities. Some of those communities are bound to include potential customers.
7. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, find someone who can. Often companies have younger employees who are well versed in social media and could, with guidelines, represent the company. There are many agencies that will help you with this.
8. Have guidelines. This ties in with #1because your guidelines will be driven by your purpose. Establish guidelines for anyone posting on behalf of the company about what they can and cannot say. If you don’t want to put pricing on social media, say so. Be clear about what employees can post on their personal sites, as well.
9. Monitor constantly. Many experts in the field recommend that you start your social media adventure by listening first. Find out what your customers and others might be saying about you online. Once you are active in social media, be sure to set up Google Alerts and other tracking to monitor what is being said.
10. React but don’t overreact. If you see something posted about your company online that you don’t like, feel free to respond. But don’t get overly emotional about it, and don’t fire back. Respond with basic facts and a real desire to solve the customer’s problems – that will gain you a lot of credibility from anyone else who sees the exchange. And remember, one complaint is just one complaint, so don’t overreact.
11. Enjoy it. This is a new way to engage your customers and draw in new customers. People of every age are participating in social media, from teenagers to grandmothers, and it is a growing part of our culture. As you bring your business into the discussion, you may find raving fans who will provide recommendations for you.
12. Online marketing is a tool – it doesn’t replace your other marketing efforts. Sure, a lot of what used to be advertised in print media is now online. But there is still an important role for all of the other marketing tools including public relations, direct mail and advertising. Like your toolbox, each tool has a different purpose and you wouldn’t use a hammer to sand wood. Online (or inbound) marketing is a great resource that is very cost effective for businesses, but it must be a part of the larger marketing strategy or it will fail.

Article by Kim Deppe, APR – President, Deppe Communications

Deppe Communications provides marketing strategy and outsourced marketing services for small and medium sized businesses. Services include social media marketing, SEO, marketing planning, advertising, copywriting, and more.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kim_Deppe

One of the interesting points about the artice for me is that in these days of social media and other less traditional marketing tactics, the more traditional marketing and public relations techniques are still considered vital in reaching target audiences.

Here is the author’s list:

1. Referrals

2. Networking

3. Online Assets – website, blog, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

4. Search Engine Marketing

5. Online PR

6. Traditional PR

7. Direct Mail and Telemarketing

8. Newsprint

9. Point of Sale and Packaging

10. Outdoor – signs, billboards, etc.

Email marketing and email newsletters are fantastic, low-cost methods of keeping your business at the forefront of your customers’ minds. Consider the potential benefits of email marketing:

• Emails are an easy and fast way to stay in touch with customers
• Email marketing can provide the opportunity for you to market and sell products and services, and promote specials
• Emails cost less and are more targeted than many other forms of marketing
• Email newsletters can demonstrate that your business is an expert in the field

Most importantly, email marketing and email newsletters are tools that any small businesses can implement and maintain easily and cheaply.

How cheap you might ask? Normally you could begin email marketing for less than $200, with ongoing costs of approximately $10 for each email you send to your client distribution list.

But for a limited time only, En Pointe is reducing the costs of setting up small business email marketing campaigns by 20%. That 20% off our already affordable prices.

But be quick. The offer is only available to the first 5 customers.

Go to www.enpointeconsulting.com.au/developing-your-email-marketing-campaign to find out more about email marketing and the potential costs involved or contact Paul today (9532 5784, 0439 318 621 or email paul@enpointeconsulting.com.au) to take advantage of this offer.

If you want to get good rankings on search engines, there are a few things you’ll need to focus on when developing your content, particularly your textual content.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, you’ll need to know the keyword phrases people use to search for the products or services you sell. This process is a key part of any search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign and it might seem simple but it’s often not. While it’s outside the scope of this article, when researching keywords you should take into account aspects such as competitiveness of the keywords, search volume and relevance. You also need to understand that you should never focus on too many keyword phrases – one or two a page at most.

Once you have decided on the best keywords to focus on for your business you then need to weave these keywords into your content. So if one of your developing a page on SEO copy and one of your keywords is ‘SEO Copy’, you should include this phrase in the main content as well as headings, internal links and bullet points, as well as other key areas of your website.

Another absolutely vital point to make is that when developing content for your website, search engines shouldn’t be your prime target; visitors are. The reason for this should be obvious: if you’re content isn’t well written it doesn’t matter how many visitors you get, no one is going to take further action.

That’s why developing winning website copy needs to be done in two steps:

1. Develop copy that gets visitors to your website through higher search engine rankings.
2. Develop copy that informs, interests and engages your target customer, so people want to stay on your website and follow through with your preferred action, whether it is purchase a product, contact you, leave their details or some other action.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind:

• Don’t overuse keywords. Using our previous example, just because your keyword is SEO Copy doesn’t mean you should use it 50 times on the one page! Keyword stuffing, as it is often referred to, is usually obvious and detracts from visitor experience. Generally you should aim for a keyword density of between 2 – 4%.
• Only use keywords that apply to a page. If your page is about SEO Copy then don’t use keywords that having nothing to do with SEO Copy.
• Choose keywords that you can easily incorporate into text. If you’re finding it difficult to use a keyword you’ve chosen, generally you’re best to find another keyword that’s easier to use.
• This one is a personal one: don’t use incorrect spelling. Let me give you an example. The keyword plumber has an enormous search volume but it’s also highly competitive, so you’re unlikely to rank well if you focus on it. So why not use plummer? It has high search volumes and is nowhere near as competitive. The reason I don’t advocate incorrect spelling even though many people do is that it’s unprofessional. Remember, your main target is visitors not search engines. You may get away with it with lesser-known word but generally I believe you shouldn’t risk it.

And that’s one of the reasons why using WordPress as a CMS or content management system makes sense.

What is a content management system?

In simple terms, a CMS separates the coding and design of a website from the content. For the end user, which for many small businesses is the owner or manager of the business, a CMS allows them to update their own website content – such as headings, text, images and links – without having to learn about website coding. Many content management systems also allow users to set up blogs, which are increasingly becoming popular businesses tools.

There are many different content management systems available worldwide, many of which are free. Importantly, once a website is built on a particular CMS it can’t be simply swapped to another CMS.

Why WordPress is the best CMS

Having a CMS is obviously attractive to most small business website owners. The ability to edit information, change prices, add pages, insert images and make other changes without having to call a website developer makes sense, from a cost and efficiency perspective. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many small business owners struggle with making even the simplest of changes because the CMS they’re website is built on isn’t all that easy to use.

To me this is the key reason why more small businesses should be using WordPress as s CMS. Compared to most content management systems, using WordPress is quite easy to learn. And once you learn how to use WordPress, editing is easy. This is important because if you’re like most business owners, you don’t have the time, resources or skills to spend on keeping your website up to date.

Here are some other reasons why I believe WordPress is the best CMS:

• For developers, WordPress is easy to install and is free to use. The developer still needs to design/code for each business’ brand, style, features and needs, but these points do help to minimise the cost of developing websites.
• While you will be able to edit your website, there will be times when you’ll need to call on your website developer to make changes and improvements. Most website developers can work with WordPress, which allows you to easily seek assistance elsewhere if required.
• WordPress is continually improved and updating is easy.
• There are literally thousands of WordPress ‘plugins’ available which either improve the user experience or help website owners administer their website.
• A WordPress website can grow as your business or resources grow.
• WordPress is a brilliant blogging tool. So if you’re interested in developing a blog, articles, news or posts section on your website, WordPress is even more attractive.

Another great thing about WordPress is that you can create a test website and see how easy it is to manage – for free. Go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a new blog. While the resulting website will look vastly different from your intended business website, it will give you first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to work with WordPress.

If you’re interested in having a WordPress website design for your business, see our WordPress page for more details.

One of the first things you should do when thinking about creating a new small business website is to develop a website design plan template. It doesn’t need to be too detailed at this stage but should include points such as:

• What are the objectives you want your website to achieve?
• What do you want people who view your website to do? For example, do you want them to contact you, provide their details to go on a distribution list, buy products, etc.
• Who is your target audience?
• What are your business’ key points of difference or, in other words, what sets you apart from your competition?

It’s also a good idea when developing a website design plan template to think about the key aspects of your website. Again, you don’t need to go into too much detail but outline points such as:

• When do you want the website completed?
• Do you want a website that you can easily update yourself?
• How many pages are you likely to want and what are they likely to be? For example, Home, About Us, Services, Testimonials, Contact Us.
• Do you have a logo that you want to include on the website?
• What colours do you want your website to include?
• Are there images you’d like to include in your website or do you want the website designer to provide images?
• Will you write the content yourself or do you want the website designer to develop content?
• Is search engine optimisation important? In other words, do you want your business’ services and/or products easily found by customers in search engines such as Google?
• Have you already organised domain registration and web hosting? If yes, your website designer will need the details.
• What features do you want your website to have? E.G. Ecommerce, customer forms, animation, drop-down menus, etc.
• Have you seen other websites that you like, whether or not they relate to your business?

A good website designer will help you complete your website design plan template will very likely have ideas that will greatly enhance your planning and thinking. But by doing some homework before you contact a website designer at the very least you’ll have a better idea of the website you need for your business.

To help you make a great start to your next affordable small business website design, click here to download a website design plan template form.

Traffic

It still amazes me that many small businesses don’t have access to or don’t regularly look at their website statistics, because these statistics can provide very useful information, particularly if you’re trying to increase sales online. A good statistics package will tell you much more than how many visitors your website has enjoyed in the past month (or other given range). It will also highlight key information such as average time on the site, which pages have been viewed and which keywords people used to find your site.

When I’m designing a website for my small business clients using my favourite content management system, WordPress, I always include a statistics package in the Dashboard. This allows small business owners to quickly and easily check their website stats each time they login. If you can do similar for your website, I’d recommend it.

Conversions   

Now that you know a little more about the traffic that is coming to your website, it’s time to look at the next key factor to increase sales online: conversions. Put simply, this is the number of visitors to your website who did what you want them to do. Depending on your business and your website, this could be any number of things, such as:

• Purchase a product
• Download a free tool or product
• Submit a form for more information
• Phone or email the business
• Go on your business’ email distribution list

You may have heard of a term called conversion rate, which is the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors to your website. Generally, a conversion rate of between 1% and 5% is considered normal.

Sales

Next comes the bit we all love and it requires little explanation. It is wise to note, however, that you need to focus on sales derived from your website, not other marketing tactics.

Put it together and what have you got?

Now, here’s a commonsense yet often overlooked observation: By taking a look at these factors more closely, we can determine where our online endeavours may be failing and then take steps to increase sales online.

So, for example, if your website is getting very few visitors you’ll need to put more effort into getting more traffic. If you’re getting plenty of traffic but few conversions, you’ll need to look more closely at why your website isn’t converting customers. If you’re getting enough traffic and conversions but few sales, examine your sales process or the services or products you’re providing.

This is when the real work begins and you may need to enlist the help of an online marketing specialist, small business website designer, sales expert or other professional to help you increase sales online. But at the very least you’ll have a better understanding of how your website is performing and where improvements can be made.

The reason? Small business use email marketing to sell to rather than inform their clients.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not inappropriate to use email marketing to spruik your small business’ products or services. To be effective, however, you need to maintain a balance between selling and providing valuable and interesting information to clients.

For example, if you’re a lawyer who distributes a regular newsletter to clients, the majority of the newsletter should provide engaging information that’s likely to be relevant to your readers. You might pop in one or two articles that are selling pieces, but they shouldn’t make up the bulk of the newsletter. Better still, directly link your selling pieces to your information pieces. If you’ve written an article about the importance of having a will, mention your legal will making services or provide a short-term discount offer to clients.

What if you want to inform clients about a special offer your business is running? Personally, I see nothing wrong in sending out occasional emails such as these. Just make sure the offer is genuine and indeed worthwhile and don’t do it regularly. If you’re emailing clients weekly or even monthly with special offers, your emails will quickly be deleted or blocked.

With some thought and regular effort, email marketing can be a valuable tool for your small business. Just keep some simple factors in mind to make it work for you.

So here are my personal top four things to watch out for if you’re considering website development for your small business.

Website hosting and domain registration

While all websites require ongoing payments for domain registration and web hosting, be careful of web designers who charge fees well in excess of normal. These fees should be approximately $15 a year for domain registration and shouldn’t exceed $200 a year for web hosting (most small businesses can actually pay much less than this).

It’s worth noting that in some cases it can be wise to pay your website designer a little extra for web hosting. Then, if something goes wrong, you can pick up the phone and call your website designer rather than trying to get in contact with your web host yourself. Web hosting services can be notoriously difficult to contact on the phone and in many cases will be difficult to understand for most non-IT people.

Content management systems

Most websites these days are built on content management systems, which allow small business people to update their website without having knowledge about website coding. Make sure you know what content management system your website will be built on and be careful if it’s the website designer’s own system. My reasoning for this is that if your relationship with your website designer turns sour or they go out of business, you may need to develop another website. If you have your website built using freeware such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, for example, you can simply go to another website designer for support.

Search engine optimisation

There are too many search engine optimisation (SEO) cons to list here but, in general, be wary of web designers or search engine optimisation companies who make guarantees. A common one, for example, is a guarantee that a website designer or SEO firm can get your business to number one in Google. The obvious response to this is number one for what? If it’s for your business name, in most cases this isn’t too difficult to achieve but it serves little value. What you want is to be number one or top 10 for your services or products and to achieve this is something that nobody can guarantee.

Price

I had a client who showed me his business website and mentioned that it cost him $6K to develop. It was less than 10 pages, had only basic features, no SEO and he had to provide the content himself. I had to put on my best diplomatic face and tell him it was great, knowing that I and many other website designers could have produced a similar website for $2K or much less. Worse still, the $6K website wasn’t bringing customers to his business.

The lesson here is to that if you’re in doubt about any aspect of a website design quote, get another quote or two. You may still go with the original quote but at least you’ll be satisfied that you’re not getting ripped off.