Improve your Online Presence without changing your website
Posted by Mary Gammel on February 28, 2011 under Link Building, Local Search | 
4 Comments to Read
Clients mainly come to me for strategies on improving their website performance. We look at getting the correct traffic to the website with the goal of converting more visitors into customers. People are often surprised when I mention that they need to do things outside of their website to get more site traffic. The main goal here is to get quality links to your website and to expand your online presence through link building efforts.
Keep in mind that more links is not necessarily better. Just as with website traffic, you want the right links that make sense for your business and marketing strategy. Google and other search engines rank your web pages based on the quality not the quantity of incoming links. In fact, Google just recently updated their search algorithms to downgrade link farm sites that have little or no original content. For more details, see the Google blog article: Finding more high-quality sites in search.
So, what do you do for effective link building? Try the following free or inexpensive ideas:
- Claim and update your Google Maps listing through www.google.com/places. Used on Android devices, iPhones, iPads.
- Claim and update your Bing Maps listing through https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx. Used by Yahoo, Bing, and Windows phones.
- Claim and update your Yelp.com listing. Yelp allows people to review your products and services.
- Get links to your website from all associations that your business belongs to: Chambers, Networking Clubs, Industry Groups, etc.
- If it makes sense for your industry, get links to your website from other regarded sources such as the Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.org) or Angie’s List (www.angieslist.com).
- If you resell a product or service, contact the supplier or manufacturer to see if you can get a link to your website from their reseller page.
- Participating in blogs or online forums that are related to your products or service.
Three other great ways to create links to your website require more time and effort. These include:
- Create your own blog and post to it at least once a month with useful tips or educational content relating to your business segment.
- Start an email marketing campaign to send out monthly newsletters to clients, prospects, and your networking contacts.
- Implement a social networking strategy for posting on sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Before you embark on the above three items, do your homework and make sure you have enough time to invest in keeping these things going. If you don’t have the time, then it would be best to wait or to hire someone to manage the blog, email marketing, or social media for you.
Mary Gammel is the owner and principal consultant of Quality Web Site Testing, LLC. Mary specializes in organic search engine optimization. Her education includes bachelors and masters degrees in computer science. She’s worked in the computing industry since 1983 with experience in internet consulting, software development, software quality assurance, computer networking, and project management. Mary can be contacted at 630-767-9859 or info@qualitywebsitetesting.com.
Michele Rempel said,
Excellent post, Mary! Thanks for providing valuable information about free or inexpensive ways to improve your online presence. Your company is a great resource for businesses who need to optimize their website at the core BEFORE doing paid searches.
Web Design Norwich said,
Interesting, how would you suggest title optimizations?
Mary Gammel said,
For information on title optimizations, please see this blog article: Optimizing Web Page Titles
Jeffery James said,
Great post. I would add that you don’t need to do all of these but pick one or two that make sense for your target audience and stick to them. Too often people try something for a short time and give up. It takes some time for these things to start to pay off.
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