Link Building and Promoting Your Site Through News Articles

A great and free way of getting some link backs to your site as well as promoting certain products to a wider range of customers is using news article sites such as e-zine articles. Sites like these offer content for use to re-post on other websites. You write an article, and someone in need of web content related to your subject will post it on their site. The benefit to you, they need to include a link to your site to credit you for the content. Pending on how general your topic is, it could be re-used on dozens or hundreds of sites. That means dozens or hundreds of link backs to your site, which in turn can significantly boost your search ranking.

Another simple way of promoting your website is to create a press release. There are many sites online that will publish your news and send to the local news wires. The news should be something significant to warrant having a press release such as a launch of a local web business or new product. This will certainly get temporary traffic to your site. This is great to tie this into a product you may be promoting heavily on your site that you want customers to see.

Strategies to Drive Traffic to Your Site

Sometimes large marketing tactics with a small business marketing budget isn’t possible, this is where you need to get creative, go grass roots and get your guerilla marketing on! Getting quality visitors to convert better is tougher to come by. People are keen on bait and switch and other scams, so integrity and quality on your site is important.

The basics which have been covered many times is to setup simple search engine ads through all the top search engine companies. The cost is determined by the keyword you bid on to have your ad show up. The more you’re willing to spend on one click of your ad with a related keyword, the higher you’re placed in the ad results section of the search engine. A way to stretch your budget out is to do some research with International search engines. Most other markets may be cheaper to bid on highly sought after keywords. Also look for alternate keywords related to your product. Don’t always go for the obvious. Use one of the dozens of keyword tools online to determine what is best for your company. Try simple misspellings of certain keywords also.

Next is to brand everything with your domain name. Business cards, email signature, social networking profile pages. Depending on your business model and product offering, you should post flyers with your domain name and offering. Your goal should be to drive as much traffic as possible to your site for little to no cost for the first few months.

Submit your sites URL to all of the top search engines. There usually is an add URL link on their sites but sometimes you have to search around for it. Submit it to directories such as dmoz.org.

Search for user forums related to your business. Get active with posting on the forums, gain credibility, don’t blatantly promote, but discuss with others and drop light mentions of your business and always have your URL in your profile signature.

Social networking sites are great for promoting your business. Make a profile on a few sites like facebook, linked in and twitter with the name of your business. Keep people informed with new products and ideas not only on your main website but in these areas also. Word of mouth buzz is priceless when looking for traffic to your website.

Small strategies like this can gain momentum and you will see a better return on your investment rather than throwing money away without really knowing what works best, and what quality leads and customers your getting.

Best Practices for Web Site Success

Theres really no excuse nowadays to make the mistakes previous companies have made on the web. Your site should be tasteful with a balance between look, functionality, readability and also optimized for search engines. Stay away from heavy flash animations and images. Avoid using text inside images. Instead use html text over images. Text is your friend. Remember the more relevant and unique content on your site the more you’ll be crawled by search engines spiders which in turn results in better organic ranking.

Here’s a quick checklist for your website launch.

Grammar, writing style and spell check. Make sure the customer can easily understand your offering. Don’t ramble on about your products. State the facts in bullet points and a few sentences. An simply resolved issue such as misspelling lends to a lack of credibility so always double spell check. If you don’t take the time and effort to check your work, that ultimately represents you and your business. Write with the masses in mind. Use simple and short as your guideline to writing content for your site. Too much content even if well written will be skipped over. We are a headline driven culture and have learned to read that way. We like short to the point headlines. So stick to small paragraphs and bullets.

Navigation. So important. Most commonly, top navigation or left bar navigation. Many sites have un-intuitive navigation layouts that confuse people. Be sure every page links to its proper section and can cross link back via a site-map. Try and use an easy to understand naming convention for your navigation sections and the pages they link to. Create a site map. Site maps list out every link on the site with its proper section. Site maps also carry value with Web crawlers since this gives a quick snapshot of your sites layout.

Broken links. Ugh, sometimes it just happens when designing a site that you may mis-link a page that won’t exist. Test every link on your site before launching. Not only does it look bad to have broken links on your site, web crawlers may even rank you negatively because of broken links. The best thing to do is to make a custom 404 page instead of getting the default “page cannot be found” that your browser displays. Creating a custom page with a link back to the homepage ensures a better customer experience. This gives the user the option to look around on your site rather than just leaving your site.

Add a sense of community. Add a review and comments section or even better a discussion forum. People want to know about a businesses service and track record before they buy. To build credibility, user reviews are important as well as making other users feel a sense of community on your site. Adding a forum is a great way also of letting your customers speak to each other regarding your product.

How to Choose a Web Hosting Company

So you’re ready to start your website. You have a great name and idea, now you need to get your site online. The decision to choose a web hosting company should be based off of word of mouth or reviews on forums and discussion boards. Frustrated customers will certainly let everyone know if they’ve been burned by bad service. To start look for a company that has been around for a few years. Don’t just look for a cheap deal from a company that just setup shop! They’ll probably be growing pains and issues. Make sure the company has a reasonable up time for their sites as well as a 24/7 support number or email address to contact someone if your site happens to go down overnight.

Be sure to choose a dedicated IP address and not a shared IP. An IP address is the actual number (like a phone number) associated with your domain name. A dedicated IP address is best as an insurance policy against your site being grouped together with either competitor or malicious sites. Shared IP addresses can move your site within different groups on a server.

Web hosts are generally $9.99 to $100 or more a month and depends on certain factors. Size of site content, how much traffic will be coming to your site, and the use of a dedicated IP address. To start, the $25-50 range is about right for a startup web business.

How to Choose and Purchase a Domain Name

So you have a business or a business idea and you’re ready to buy a domain name to start your web business. There’s a few things to consider. It used to be necessary to have relevant keywords to your business in your domain name to achieve higher search results. Not so much anymore. The most important aspect to decide on is branding vs. name familiarity in your area of business. Is your idea a new concept? Or has your brand name been out there for a while? This is an important area of your business you need to understand when deciding on a name.

For branding, your overall strategy will be focused more on advertising than getting great search results because you’re presenting your product to people who may not know about it for the first time. This type of marketing strategy is to saturate the web with your name and associate it with your product. For an already known name or product familiarity, you’ll rely less on advertising but will focus more on search engine results. This is because people may be familiar with and know your product but they may not how to find it easily online or through search.

Shorter, easy to remember domain names are most desirable. But since the web is saturated with domain squatters* who have bought most of the great and easy to remember domain names. It’s harder to come by a unique easy to remember name so you’ll need to get creative. Domains with dashes are ok when in a pinch for a name you really want (my-domian-name.com) just try and keep it to about three words max. Purchasing multiple variations and common misspellings of your domain name is also normal procedure. This ensures if someone types in your name wrong, someone else won’t buy that domain and profit on it directing a user to a competitor site.

Domain names are typically $9.99 a year to register and usually has the option to extend for several years at a cheaper cost.

*someone who buys domain names in bulk in hope of someone wanted a name to pay a high price for it.

How to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Why search engine optimization? Well, if your site doesn’t rank high in a search engine, then your business is as good as selling your product to yourself. Web users don’t normally choose to far form the top 5-10 results when doing a search to purchase a product or service. So you need to be front and center to be clicked and even then it’s not guaranteed the user will choose you.

That is one of the keys to a web sites success. The only way you will get great search engine rankings is to make sure your site has the following:

Unique content. Copycats beware. Search engines penalize you for copying content so don’t even go there. If you’re selling a product or service that others are selling also, creative bizarro content (opposite of theirs but related to the product). Original content with proper use of title tags, keywords, meta tags and description is what helps you climb to the top of the search engine results pages. Shoot to have about two or three keyword rich paragraphs per page. Write the content in the perspective of you searching for it online, with terms as how you would type a search request into a search engine, but in a way that blends it into the content and makes sense.

Keywords that are higher on the page top left are ideal. Web spiders (an automated program that search engines use to find your content) hit this area first usually and is common that they’ll rank the page higher.

Name and use alt tag images. The code used to visually display text if your browser doesn’t show the image. Make sure these are named in relation to your sites keyword strategy.

Naming conventions for web pages. The name of your page /my-page.html is important. Make sure it relates to the content on your page and references a keyword. Best way is to have a keyword in the page name and the same keyword in the H1 tag (Header 1).

Cross reference other related pages on your site. If one page has info that leads to the other page, link certain keywords to that page.

How to Start Your Website

How to create and setup your website

First and foremost, your current business or your business idea.

Most ideas and businesses are created out of necessity. Whether it’s financial goals or to make your life easier or both. When creating an online business, your website is your storefront and represents you and your offering. Being honest, maintaining integrity and credibility with customers will ensure your success. Always stick to your gut first decision even if it fails. Learn from your mistakes even though trying to avoid them.

To start your site you need a domain name (www.businessname.com) website content (text and images), knowledge of a web site program to create your site, or hire a designer. There are some good free website template resources available also that are basically pre-built (like a pre-fab house) you just need to add content (like adding furniture to your new pre-fab house). Having your content written and organized before you build the site is ideal. Try to shoot for at least 20 pages of content to launch your site.

Has Your Web Business Turned Into a Zombie?

Is your web business wandering aimlessly through the internet with no real direction or motive? Is so, it’s probably a web zombie. If you’re a small business you probably don’t have the time or resources to commit to learning how to create a marketable website and utilize relevant up to date web marketing strategies.

This site was created with you in mind to answer your questions and give you insight in a quick, simple and understandable way.