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Posts Tagged ‘link building’

If you own a website then you are certainly concerned with getting it noticed and increasing your traffic. However, you might not have a large budget for advertising or marketing and simply don’t know what to do to get your website noticed without spending a lot of money. Well, the following 5 tips will help your website attract attention without spending any money!

Tip #1 Submit to Directories
Submitting your website to directories is generally free and all you have to do is provide your website’s URL, a brief description, and then your site will be listed in the directory for people to browse. In addition, not only will people be able to browse the listings, but your site will also have more one way links pointing back to your site that will increase your rankings in the search engines.

Tip #2 Submit to Search Engines
If you want to get your site noticed then you want to make it easy on web surfers to find your site. So, submit your site to the search engines to have it indexed. Then , when people search the web for certain keywords they just might find your site and drop by to take a look.

Tip #3 Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links are another good idea if you are interested in increasing your search engine rankings. Simply trade links with other websites and you host their link on your site and they host your link on their site. This does not take much effort or time and once you have the links you will basically have free advertising.

Tip #4 Include Your URL Everywhere
Your URL needs to be on all types of communication you use. For example, make sure your URL is included on your stationary, business cards, in all of your e-mails, and the like. When your URL is posted everywhere you will surely increase your site’s traffic.

Tip #5 Email List
You can create an email list from all the visitors that have visited your website and periodically send them updates advertising different services or specials. Make it easy to unsubscribe, too. Before you know it you will have more people visiting your site and others recommending your site as well.

When planning your first small business website, there are three essential questions you should ask yourself:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. How will your target audience find you?
3. How will you convert your visitors into sales?

These questions sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t bother…and then moan that “our website doesn’t bring us any business”.

1) Who is your target audience?

Give a great deal of thought to your target market. Who do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something – a product, a service, or an idea perhaps.

Claiming that your market is anyone and everyone is far too vague, and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximise its potential. Ideally you should be aiming to create a niche.

2) How will they find you?

Creating a niche will also help you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your site.

Consider what keywords your target market might type into a search engine to find you. Actually do the searches yourself. Who comes up in the top 30? Because that’s where you need to be. Are your competitors there? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.

Those keywords – or keyphrases to be more accurate – need to be incorporated into your pages of your site – in the page titles, in the headings, and in the internal links.
Be specific with your keyphrases. They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your market. You may have to localise or specialise to get in that top 30 – and the top 30 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your site. As I am sure you are aware from your own experience, if you haven’t found what you are looking for in the first 3 results pages, you look elsewhere.

The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages – that is pages on external websites that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth – where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords – especially in the linking text. Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation – your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high ranking) pages say about your page.

3) How will you convert your visitors into sales?

Don’t just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why they want it (yes, want – not need). Offer incentives, freebies, discounts – anything to get that dialogue started.

Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment about a web page within a twentieth of a second! That doesn’t leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible on your home page – and preferably prominent on every one of your other pages. After all, it’s not a given that the home page will be the first page that the visitor sees, particularly if they have found you via a search engine.

Then make sure that you list your bullet-pointed guarantees. Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest, and why they should deal with you and not your competitors. And as we’ve discovered, they have to understand this pretty much instantly.

Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your important pages – usually the “call to action” or purchase pages – and make sure all roads lead to those pages. Your internal links – like their external equivalents – should describe the target page. If you sell blue widgets, don’t call your products page “Products”, call it “blue widgets”, and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say “blue widgets”. This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, it will also lead your visitor to that all important conversion.