How to get online traction for your business

The internet and online marketing can often appear to be confusing, phrases including the dark arts, smoke and mirrors come to mind, and not without good reason.

This is an area where there can be many wrong turns made, and mistakes that come back to trip up the inexperienced marketer. There are also, no end of low-cost services and gig platforms offering SEO services for a few dollars, all of which add to the impression that there are fortunes to be made for minimal costs and that success comes easily.  Whilst there were no doubt fortunes made in the early days of the internet, in many ways this is no different to being first to market in any traditional business.

Google has become the dominant player internationally and for good reason they have an approach that is quality focussed so to keep on their good side and to do well within their SERPS (search engine results placements) you need to stick to their guidelines and keep quality in your mind at all times.

Success comes to those that work hard, put in a lot of effort, stick to their guidelines, and focus on quality in all you do.

Online success is made up of three factors, on site issues, offsite issues and user experience.

On site

You need the following components to be right

• Quality look and feel, Google measures this by comparing your sites metrics to your peers – using time on page, bounce rates and Click Through Rates (CTR)
• Good usability so you do not loose visitors and your conversion rate is high
• Good grammar and spelling – Google measures this in a scientific way, using detailed math algorithms that have billons of documents to cross reference against
• Good use of headings / titles and meta descriptions.

Offsite

• A low spam scores.
• Lots of high-quality links to your site from authority sites
• Low numbers of low-quality links.

Link building is an industry, and a high-quality link can cost £1K or more and can be worth that also to the right company competing for high value money phrases.

Building links can be a problem for the newbie, there are loads of gig sites that seem to offer solutions, with links for $5 etc, but these should be avoided as either the links never get indexed at all or if they do then they get removed after a short time.

Google use time on page, bounce rates and other similar metrics and the owners of worthwhile sites know this very well.  They therefore regularly audit their sites and prune content with poor metrics.  As most of the cheap gig sites uses short and poorly written content this quickly gets indentified and removed.

So the overview is like this

Your site needs to have:-

• High quality content
• Content that performs well in terms of users experience ie your visitors don't quickly click away but instead remain engaged and return frequently.
• Linked to by high quality established sites - the more the better.
• Have few if any spammy links to it.
• Be better on those measures that your competitors.

So where to get good links?  A few good places to try.

The internet has evolved a lot since its early days back in 2005, now to be succesful you need to have genuine content, a genuine good experience for your users and really high quality backlinks to your website, to get to that, you need to invest a lot of time, hard work, effort and money into your website, that is the challenge.

Feedburner this is owned by Google and allows RSS feeds to be published.

Medium.com is another quality place that allows you to publish your content if it is of a good standard it will get indexed and stay there.

References

• Google’s guidelines – read these regularly and note they change from time to time.
• Moz – a community site aimed at the high-quality end of the market, and catering for the sophisticated Search marketeer.
• Linkidiser – a professional quality link building provider.

Bio Adrian is the CEO of reportingaccounts and his content can be found around the web such as on shutterfly