A Website Marketing Strategy To Increase Your Backlinks

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
by Kathleen Hobbins

An important website marketing strategy is search engine optimization, or SEO.  More than anything else, SEO will help you gain visibility for your site by getting the search engines to recognize how relevant your site is to your keywords and returning your site high in the list of search results for your keywords.  It takes some time and consistent and persistent effort, but using SEO is worth it.

Here are some techniques for backlinks, which is an important part of an SEO campaign.

Press releases.  Write press releases about your site and your company and submit them to press release sites.  This can create a form of viral marketing, as the press release sites submit the press releases to the search engines, and from there they may get noticed and re-released by blog and forum publishers in your niche.  I generally consider press release marketing to be a form of article marketing and advise you to approach it in a similar way.  Always provide original and well-written content; make sure to include your URL so that your site gains the advantage of the backlinks; optimize your press release with your well-chosen keyword phrases.

Blog and forum comments.  Most blogs and forums give you a chance to include your URL in your signature.  This gives you backlinks, which of course your strive for.  When you comment, be a good internet citizen.  Be sure your comment is helpful and to the point and don’t spam by including your URL in the comment block itself.  This should be a daily part of your website marketing strategy.

Article marketing.  Write good, intelligent and well-written articles and submit them to article directories.  Avoid duplicate content by rewriting every article to be sure that you publish a unique article every time.  Use sites that are a combination of web 2.0 and article marketing, like Squidoo, HubPages and Weebly, which allow you to write content, post pictures, import your blog and, of course, add your URL.

Link exchanges.  Seek ways to exchange links with other webmasters.  Although Google doesn’t give a lot of weight to pages and pages of reciprocal links, you can use more imaginative ways.  Exchange guest-author posts with other bloggers.  Do an interview exchange with another webmaster who is in a related but not competitive field.  In both cases, be sure to include your URL in the content.

Product reviews.  Write legitimate and helpful product reviews and publish them on review sites that permit a signature with a URL.

Building backlinks is an important part of SEO.  Engage in some form of it daily to improve your site’s rank.  It is a powerful website marketing strategy.

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And take a look at this website marketing strategy:  a blog-post of backlinks:

 

 

SEO Is A Key Website Marketing Strategy

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

by Kathleen Hobbins

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a series of techniques that will work together to bring your website to the attention of the search engines and permit your site to rank high on the search engine results pages for certain optimized keywords.  Higher ranks in the search engines results in a higher volume of traffic.  Traffic to your site results in more money for you.

Here are five essential steps to optimize your website for the search engines.

  1. Appropriate choice of keywords.  When you optimize your website, you do it for particular keyword phrases.  You need to choose your keyword phrases carefully.  Brainstorm to think of keyword phrases used by your potential customers to search for your products.  Then use the Google keyword tool to find which of those keyword phrases get a sufficient amount of traffic.  Finally, use the Google search results page to see how many sites are optimized for each of those keyword phrases.
  2. Make your website content keyword-rich.  Once you have chosen your keywords, make your website content keyword-rich.  Choose one keyword to optimize per page.  Use the keyword in the first and last paragraph and throughout the page.  This website marketing strategy helps the search engines find you as well as giving your readers important information.
  3. Optimize your website design features for your keywords.  Use your keywords in the headings and sub-headings on your website.
  4. Go after authority backlinks.  Participate in forums and comment on blogs and be sure to use the URL of your website in the signature block.  But putting the URL in the comment box can get your comment deleted for spamming.  Submit articles to article directories and be sure to include a resources box that contains your URL and a for your reader to click on it.  Do link exchanges with other websites, especially those that have a higher page rank than yours, and that are in a related niche to yours.
  5. Use website directories.  Search engines crawl website directories and will find your site there if you have had it listed on them.

SEO is a powerful website marketing strategy.  So make a concerted effort to optimize your site for all your keywords.  Doing so will bring you greater visibility and more traffic.

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To read more about website promotion, take a look at these blogs:

  • Tool Time Friday | A look back at a nifty add-on – Some of you may have been ardent fans of this ‘Tool Time Friday’ happening – but I’m betting there are those who are sorta newish to this gig. So, now and then I repost a ‘Tool’ that I find rather cool. This is from April of this year. …

  • first you plan, then you do – in my travels around the internet, i occasionally bump into an online business concept i really don’t like. though i haven’t heard it in a while, it can be summed up as “ready, fire, aim”: just do something, then you try again if it …

 

 

What Is Search Engine Optimization And What Are Its Benefits?

Monday, November 16th, 2009

by Kathleen Hobbins

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial website marketing strategy.  SEO is the practice of taking intentional steps to make it easy for search engines to find your site.  Through prudent choice of keywords and the use of on-page and off-page SEO techniques, it is possible to bring your website to the forefront of search results from the search engines.  As a result, your website gets traffic, the raison d’etre of an online presence.  SEO is crucial to making money online and is therefore crucial to your success.

Establishing and implementing your SEO strategy deserves significant resources.  But it is not necessary for many website owners to spend a lot of money to implement this important website marketing strategy.  With the necessary knowledge of SEO principles and techniques, and clear focus on carrying them through, you can optimize your website for search engines yourself.

Make a commitment now to exploit this fundamental website marketing strategy to the fullest extent.  Here are some of the benefits that you will reap by doing so:

  • You probably know that if you type a word or phrase into a search engine, you will be taken to a page with both paid and organic results for the word or phrase.  As a websurfer, you probably know that you are likely to click on the results at the top of the first page of the results returned.  SEO can help you move your website to the top of the first page.  As a result, your traffic will soar and your sales or leads will increase.
  • SEO will save you money.  The paid results at the top of the first page cost you money every time someone clicks on the ad, whether they buy anything or not.  But if you have used SEO, the website marketing strategy that gets you free traffic, you can stop paying for traffic. 
  • SEO will ensure that the visitors to your site are targeted.  That is, that traffic is looking for the information or products you have on your site because they typed your keywords into the search engine.  In that way, you are actually doing your potential customers a favor by using SEO.  They want to find what they are looking for and your use of SEO will help them find it.
  • Appropriate use of SEO raises your profile in the search engines and gives you niche domination.  If you rank high for a number of related keywords across all of the search engines, you will build your reputation as an expert in your market.

Learning and practicing the techniques of SEO will bring traffic and a good reputation to your site.  So make your choice to use this important website marketing strategy today.

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Read more about SEO here:

  • master SEO the easy way SEO Newbies – Alex Becker’s site, the Chicago SEO ExpertYou can read all about internet marketing, seo, social media marketing, video marketing, and more on his site. He wrote up a post about Los Angeles SEO that is definitely worth taking a look at. Also, be sure to check out his Hall of Fame posts some REALLY good and advanced marketing practices.

  • comment on google’s “good writing” content filter by saptarshi – while i agree to the fact that google definitely rewards for good content, i find it very difficult to believe that pages built in frame can rank in top 5 for 5 most competitive keywords. can you mail me with any one specific example ? …


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How Exactly Do You Optimize Your Site for Search Engines?

Monday, November 16th, 2009
by Kathleen Hobbins

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an important website marketing strategy.  SEO can make it easy for search engines to find your site and can place your site at the top of the results pages for your keywords.  The more visible and easily-found your site is, the more targeted traffic you will receive.  SEO will lift your presence and reputation in the online community.  These things, of course, can make you money.  

Okay, so you buy the argument and you are ready to optimize your site.  Now what do you do?

First of all, decide on your keywords.  Then use them on your website.  There is an art to that.  You want the search engines to be able to find your keywords but you also want your human readers to make sense of your prose.  So, in general, use your keyword instead of a pronoun or euphemism.  But don’t use convoluted English to do it. 

Secondly, update your website continually with fresh content.  Let’s talk about what that means for a minute.  The search engines hate to be bored.  They love new pages on a website and new text on old pages.  They hate duplicate content.  That means that you can’t get away with swiping something off somebody else’s site and sticking it on yours.  Now, there is probably a copyright violation with that kind of action, but even if there isn’t Google won’t like it.  If Google has seen it, she’s done with it and wants to move on.  So the best website marketing strategy is to post new content on your site regularly, and make sure it doesn’t show up anywhere else on the web.

Thirdly, submit your website to web directories.  The search engines crawl directories and will find and rank your site through them.

Fourthly, create authority backlinks to your site.  Basically, a backlink is a link from another site to your site.  If the other site is high ranking, a little bit of its Google luster will rub off on your site when it links to yours.  There are a number of techniques to use to do this.  They include posting to forums and other high-ranking blogs, article marketing and social bookmarking.  We will cover them more extensively elsewhere in this series because this is a very powerful website marketing strategy. 

Lastly, create a blog and post to it regularly.  As you see, my site itself is a blog.  Some website owners have a static site with an RSS feed of their blog on one of their pages.  And others keep an off-site blog and link back to there static site regularly.  The search engines love blogs and they will love you for blogging.

So, those are the basic strategies involved in search engine optimization.  If you practice them regularly, you will find a dramatic increase to your website and will understand why I call SEO a crucial website marketing strategy.

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Read more about SEO for newbies here:


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