There is big hype on how to gain more exposure on the search engines. Many small businesses think they just need to “optimize” their website. What exactly does it mean to optimize your website anyway? There are many company’s who will tell you that there are specific things that need to be done to your site to make sure the site is able to be crawled by search engines, and if you are lucky maybe they will talk to you about linking, accessing links to your site from other sites that are relevant, and then it stops there. There is more to optimizing your site than titles, descriptions, and directory links.
As a small business owner what else can you do that won’t break the bank?
1 – User Generated Content – let me explain what this is. Simply stated, it is available content that users are generating on social media sites across the web such as MySpace.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and even Yahoo! Answers just to name a few. These sites allow you to create profiles and add valuable content to them which could be highly relevant to your business. It also allows for huge opportunities to increase traffic to your website which at the end of the day that is what you want to see.
2 – Blogs by far are the easiest ways to generate traffic to your site. How you ask? By simply writing and linking which is exactly what the search engines are looking for. The content within blogs gets crawled by search engines and eventually can make its way into the search results chock full of keyword phrases. It is so easy and it can be done for FREE! The only costs that are related to this effort is maybe ten minutes of your time about 2 times a week. If you are not a believer check out Blogger.com and get your blog started today!
3 – Articles and Press Releases – are also an easy way to generate traffic to your site. With this method you can actually increase your backlinks (links leading back to your website) naturally as well as give the search engines lots of content to crawl. Your article or press release is highly relevant to your business because it is typically about your business once again chock full of keyword phrases. For this effort check out companies such as PRWeb, Market Wire, and Ezine Articles.
4 – Last but certainly not least, there are Viral efforts. Have you checked out YouTube lately? If you don’t have a lot of money to spend on viral efforts my suggestion would be make a video and post it. It is easy and effective. You can also submit it to Google Video and don’t forget to optimize your title and description for this video with links leading back to your website. Imagine that! You can do it for such a low cost and actually get a stream of traffic absolutely free.
Remember having your own business is great but don’t forget that in order for your business to succeed you need to be visible and market your site the right way as well as the smart way.
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