Search engine optimization can raise your website's profile, delivering more traffic, more customers, and bigger revenues. Here's how to make the most of this essential marketing tool.
Trying to improve your website's search engine ranking can seem a bit like the quest for romance. Like people looking for love, websites looking for a high search ranking can find it many different ways and with varying degrees of success. As with romance, you don't need to spend a lot of money; your intrinsic appeal matters more than the size of your investment. And, as with love, you can't achieve a high search engine ranking once and then never worry about it again. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing effort, and the more you work at it, the better it will be.
There are many things that any small business—even one with no budget for SEO—can do to improve its search rankings. Here's a look at some of the most effective ways to raise your profile in search.
SEO Tips: Five Ways to Get Linked
1. Give stuff away. Does your company offer free samples of its product? Do you have any handy applications or an ebook you can let site visitors download for free? There are few more effective ways to get people to link to your site than to offer something for nothing.
2. Share useful information. Links are commonly used to share information, so putting useful information on your site, such as articles or how-to guides will help draw links.
3. Connect with your community. This can be either your geographic community or a community based on your industry. Sponsoring an event at a local charity, interviewing an industry expert and posting the interview on your site or writing articles and blog entries for others to post can all bring inbound links.
4. Reach out to the blogosphere. Bloggers are always looking for new ideas, new websites to link to, and new products to write about, and they can be a great source of link love.
5. Use good old-fashioned PR. Getting mentioned in the press is good for your company in many different ways, and one of them is that online publications may include links to your site or your information if your company is mentioned in an article.
WARNING: Whatever you do, don't join a "link farm"—a website consisting only of links whose only goal is to raise rankings. Search companies are liable to punish sites listed in link farms by lowering their rankings instead.
Trying to improve your website's search engine ranking can seem a bit like the quest for romance. Like people looking for love, websites looking for a high search ranking can find it many different ways and with varying degrees of success. As with romance, you don't need to spend a lot of money; your intrinsic appeal matters more than the size of your investment. And, as with love, you can't achieve a high search engine ranking once and then never worry about it again. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing effort, and the more you work at it, the better it will be.
There are many things that any small business—even one with no budget for SEO—can do to improve its search rankings. Here's a look at some of the most effective ways to raise your profile in search.
SEO Tips: Five Ways to Get Linked
1. Give stuff away. Does your company offer free samples of its product? Do you have any handy applications or an ebook you can let site visitors download for free? There are few more effective ways to get people to link to your site than to offer something for nothing.
2. Share useful information. Links are commonly used to share information, so putting useful information on your site, such as articles or how-to guides will help draw links.
3. Connect with your community. This can be either your geographic community or a community based on your industry. Sponsoring an event at a local charity, interviewing an industry expert and posting the interview on your site or writing articles and blog entries for others to post can all bring inbound links.
4. Reach out to the blogosphere. Bloggers are always looking for new ideas, new websites to link to, and new products to write about, and they can be a great source of link love.
5. Use good old-fashioned PR. Getting mentioned in the press is good for your company in many different ways, and one of them is that online publications may include links to your site or your information if your company is mentioned in an article.
WARNING: Whatever you do, don't join a "link farm"—a website consisting only of links whose only goal is to raise rankings. Search companies are liable to punish sites listed in link farms by lowering their rankings instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment