Downsize or Just Optimize Everything?

With the major economic downturn, some online businesses find themselves going through another sink or swim moment similar to the dot com bust. One thing thats different and can positively affect your online business is that there are many more strategies you can implement if you’re smart enough. You need to be up to date and educated about the web if you’re running your own online business. You can’t just have a build it and they will come attitude anymore. You need to be cutting edge as much as the agencies out there in order to survive.

Optimization isn’t just a term used for search. You can optimize all facets of your business from yourself to your employee’s to software purchases and web hosting packages. You need to itemize the biggest expenses your company has which is probably advertising and narrow things down from there. I know several large companies with million dollar campaigns running with many inefficiencies where their money can be spent better in other areas.

Look for any and all inefficiencies of your online business. Always stay on top of new marketing techniques, make sure you read current industry blogs within your vertical market and ditch anything that doesn’t convert to sales. Pay close attention when analyzing your site for any holes in the sales conversion process. Getting feedback from customers from a quick multiple choice question form is a great way to find out areas your business may be lacking.

Without any major changes, little by little you can save money and potentially save your web business.

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.

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.