Of course there are many ways to advertise via the more popular websites; however, these are becoming increasingly more expensive the more popular they become. Banner and Pay-Per-Click advertising are amongst other successful methods too and can be successful with the correct strategy and budget.

Business directories have been around for years in the well-known form of Yellow Pages. However, businesses are becoming increasingly marketing savvy and they require more than a mere list of local suppliers and printed directories can be limited with regard to easily updating information regularly.

A well established online regional business directory is an excellent marketing tool for any business looking to capture more prospects searching locally for the products and services they’re selling. When coupled with even a modest internet marketing strategy such as a website or blog and perhaps a regular email marketing series, it will attract both new customers and keep existing clientele hot until they’re ready to buy from you.

Business directories aim to gather and promote all types of local businesses in one place on their website simply categorised and so increasing the number of potential customers finding you. Two type of listing are usually offered – regular listing and featured listing:

• Regular listing: is free and allows any business an entry level presence and should be the crucial first stage for any business.
• Featured listing: is an upgrade to the basic free listing allowing increased functionality for a modest cost.

There’s the obvious advantage for you listing your business in the top category of the business directory but the competition here can be quite strong too so careful time spend over content always pays bigger dividends and often you can be too close to your own business so outsourcing this crucial task can be cheap in relation to the benefits gained.

People will find your business from the search engines and the search facility on the business directories so thought is vital when choosing ‘key’ words and phrases describing your business and what your prospects will be searching for to find you.

You should consider the importance of the business directory to increase your business. Find the best directory for your region and place your listing into it. This will be really helpful to you and increase the number of your customers.

Use the leverage of your business directory even if it’s just a free listing; ensure whatever content is allowed in your profile is relevant and regularly up to date and search complimentary businesses in your area to see if you can partner with them or maybe some joint marketing sharing the cost and resources. How about a joint email newsletter or regular offers between customer databases, blog updates and swapping articles all of which can be inexpensive and benefit both parties.

If you would like to ‘brainstorm’ some online and offline low-cost ideas for generating more laser targeted traffic to your website, blog or into your door, contact us.

Because they are the search engines’ way of assessing how good your site is. And if they think your site is good they’ll send you lots of visitors.

The logic goes that if lots of sites (particularly good quality, high traffic sites) are linking to your site it must be good.

Also the number and quality of incoming links forms the major part of the off-site bit of search engine optimisation.

So how do you build lots of incoming links to your site? With a lot of work!

Seriously – off-site optimisation is a never ending process of generating and retaining as many high quality links to your site as possible.

here’s some ways to build high quality links:

1. Blog directories
2. Social sites
3. Coment on other blogs
4. Link from your blog to your own sites
5. Participate in forums
6. Good quality content

If there’s one thing that runs through method though, it’s the need for regular good quality information on your blog. Without that you’ll be dead in the water.

So here’s a good approach to follow:

• Make sure your site is set up properly for the search engines.
• Write good quality, well researched articles that answer questions, solve problems or provide entertainment. And keep doing it.
• Carry out the 6 link building steps set out in this article above – and keep doing it. It’s a continuous process.

It will take time to build links to your site, particularly if you’re writing in a highly competitive niche, so keep at it.

Persistence cannot be over-rated as a requirement for success. So if you need help with these strategies, contact us.

Traditional websites have been the ‘hot thing’, however, today its blogs. Why?

Well, frankly it’s because technology is moving at such an incredible rate of speed and new ways of doing things are being developed all the time. And blogs are just the next step in Internet web technology.

Specifically a traditional website is something that’s ‘static’. It sits on the screen, it presents some sort of information or it sells a product or service, and it ultimately requires some sort of third party application to provide interaction. For example bulletin board software or chat software are usually additional applications to enhance static websites.

These ‘old style’ websites have become boring because they are limited to content that gets stale and also limited by a finite number of pages. The content often isn’t fresh and constantly changing and you the visitor tends to leave to get content from other websites.

Blogs can be very different. They are made specifically with visitor interaction in mind so you can maximise your social standings with your website. They’re also intended to be updated frequently with fresh content, then rather than replacing old content, it coexists with new material to make an even more content rich site. Blog readers expect blogs to have daily or weekly articles postings.

Blogs also give your website visitors, the ability to leave comments to you and others who visit your site about their thoughts regarding your posts and articles.

They also get to use a blogs most useful feature, the RSS feed, to keep updated about the blog via email or other RSS reader application. This is usually referred to a blogs subscriber base.

Importantly, unlike with traditional static websites where search engine rankings were the number one focus, with blogs that focus has drastically changed to reader count. People care more about how many readers subscribe to their blogs then they do about how much traffic comes to their blog. This is what makes blog traffic so very targeted; the readers of a blog are so interested in the topic they have subscribed to keep up to date. It’s similar to the conventional mailing lists.

The last thing about blog that make them really special is the RSS feed. RSS feeds empower blogs with the ability to notify search engines, directories, and similar services of new content and updated content. This means you don’t have to wait until the next time Google decides to visit your website to tell it you have a new article posted, your blog does this automatically by using an RSS ping to tell Google for automatically.

Just by owning a blog will eventually get it indexed by sites like Google, which is NOT true of a standard static site.

Asked us about our special Blogsite packages including regular content for your business