Online Marketing 4 - More Backlinks

So far in this online marketing course, we've covered keyword research, on site optimisation for your key phrase and building your first SEO backlinks by starting a blog.

There are lots of other ways of building backlinks, and also increasing your online presence. Ultimately, you could even take over most of page one of Google for your target key phrase, but that looks a lot more impressive if your website is number one. For that you need more backlinks from high ranking websites.

The easiest places to get high ranking links are directories and social media sites. Two directories we've had excellent results with are Free Index and Touch Local. While the easiest social media site yet invented has to be Twitter. We've also had good and very rapid results with free ads posted on Gumtree and Craigslist.

Facebook may not be free for much longer, but it's also worth using for driving traffic to your site and for SEO backlinks.

You can get a free listing on almost all directory websites, and most of those will give you at least one backlink. Some will only allow you to link to your website's front (index) page, but you should link to your optimised page, like this one to our online marketing Bury St Edmunds page if you can.

With some directories it might be worth paying for an enhanced listing, but there are so many free ones that you probably don't need to. Of course, you may get a few calls from directory owners trying to persuade you otherwise!

With social media, you can include a backlink in every post if you want, as well as the link to your website that you'll include in your profile. One of the benefits of posting links on social media sites is that they actually bring you traffic, not just search engine spiders, and traffic itself helps to improve your website's ranking, as well as bringing you potential customers, of course!

You can easily get ten good backlinks leading to your optimised webpage, or at least to your site, just by spending an hour or so adding yourself to directories and social media sites.

With some sites, that will be a very basic listing, but others allow you to optimise your listing quite a lot, too, and we'll look at that next time.

Until then, get linking!

Roy

Cinnamon Edge - Online Marketing and SEO in Bury St Edmunds

Online Marketing Step Three

We've already looked at choosing your target key phrase (search term) and optimising your website for that phrase, in parts one and two.

Now for the next stage in search engine optimisation, or SEO, which is off-site SEO. This is where you begin to build backlinks to your website. The important thing here is to use your key phrase, and variations of it, for the anchor text of your backlinks.

The anchor text is the words people actually see, but which are a clickable link to your website. For example, we concentrated on the phrase 'online marketing Bury St Edmunds' for our test, which ended with us bagging eleven spots on page one of google for that term. If you click on that link you'll see it goes to the page on our site optimised for that phrase.

Now, the easiest place to put a backlink is on a site you control, like a blog. If you don't have a blog yet, go to Blogger.com, open a Google account if you don't have one already, and create a blog. Ideally, name that blog after your key phrase, but certainly use that phrase for the blog name and for the title of your first post.

Creating a blog takes seconds and costs nothing and it's live straight away.

Add a permanent link to your site (in the links you'll see in the sidebar - just copy the format of one of the existing links) using that phrase as well, and include a text link in your first blog post that uses the same term. Your first post can just be a welcome message and an explanation of what you do, with your key phrase and related words sprinkled in it.

This Marketing Manual blog has been established for some time, but we also have another that uses the phrase 'Online Marketing in Bury St Edmunds' in the title. Naturally, we post keyword rich content on that one, too, with backlinks to our website.

That's it - by starting a blog you've started your link-building strategy. Next time we'll look at where else you can easily add free backlinks and how to start building a brand online.

Roy

PS. I've tried to keep this mini-course simple, but for more help or more detail, just email me roy@cinnamonedge.co.uk or contact me via Twitter http://www.twitter.com/Roy_Everitt

Online Marketing Step Two

Part two of your online marketing course from Cinnamon Edge, Bury St Edmunds.

In the first lesson I talked about how to choose a target key phrase or search term for your business. I've updated that today with more detail on how to use Google's keyword tool.

You can target as many key phrases as you want, especially if your business has a range of products or services.

For our purposes, though, let's assume you've settled on a particular key phrase or search term to target.

Now you need to use that phrase, and variations on it, in various parts of your online marketing strategy, starting with your website.

If you possibly can, get a domain name that includes your key phrase. Next, create a page on your website that uses your target key phrase in its title and description. Do this whether or not your website's domain includes the phrase. Add the key phrase to the metatags as well.

Don't use the website's front ('index') page for this - always create an extra page and link to it from the other pages on the site, using the key phrase for the link text.

On the new page, use the key phrase in the headline, near the beginning of the web page copy and again near the end. There are a few more things you can do, but essentially you now have a page optimised for your target key phrase, making it much easier to find via the search engines.

Your optimised page will also be a perfect landing page for inbound links, and we'll look at a key aspect of that next time.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D) to build a complete 'how-to' tutorial on marketing your business online.

Part three will follow in a couple of days.

Roy

Online Marketing Tips - One

One thing we've proved beyond doubt is that promoting your business online involves more than just building a website and promoting it once. Our online marketing test for Bury St Edmunds was certainly instructive.

Although it's perfectly possible to dominate your local market with online marketing, it's not just something you can 'set and forget'. You need expertise to set up your online marketing campaign and you will need to devote some time to running it.

That doesn't need to be your expertise, of course, or your time - that's what professionals are for. But just so you know it won't be a one-off effort or expense.

Mind you, when you do online marketing right you can get and keep most of page one to yourself, as we've also shown, so you might want to invest some of your time anyway.

So in future posts I'll look at the specific steps you need to take to get your business all over page one of Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Your first step is to decide what search term your customers are most likely to use when they search online for products or services like those you offer. That's the phrase you'll be targeting from now on. So if you're an emergency plumber, do more people search for 'emergency plumber', or '24 hour plumber'?

I don't know but you can easily find out. Google obligingly offers a free keyword tool for you to find your best search term.

Find Google's tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

When you enter a possible keyword into the tool it creates a long list of related terms with numbers of people searching for those specific terms. Don't take these numbers too literally, but use them as a good indication of which phrases are most 'searched for'.

Enter your keyword idea without a local 'qualifier' so the numbers are big enough for Google to measure and you get useful, meaningful results. Pick the most popular and appropriate phrase from Google's results. Then add a local qualifier when you use it - which is what we'll look at next time.

So you might end up with a popular search term like 'emergency plumber', to which you add your local qualifier to get something like 'bury st edmunds emergency plumber' for your target key phrase.

As I say, we'll look at where to use that phrase next time.

Roy