Are You Embracing Social Networking?

For budding webmasters or individuals that want to improve their web optimisation, there are tips to help you facilitate this and drive more traffic, more visitors all at the expense of links, wite submission and engaging social networking.

POPULARITY
So you have now made your website as search engine friendly as possible, we now need to give them a bit of help to find you and start indexing your site. We now need to consider the following areas;
1) Inbound Links
2) Search Engine Submission
3) Social Networking

Inbound Links
Links from other websites are an important tool for increasing your popularity. Not only will you get more visitors but the search engines will also hold your website in higher regard the more people who are linking to you. There are some really easy and again free ways to do this;
1) Press Releases
2) Business Directories
3) Networking Forums

Press Releases
This is one of the most powerful free tools, a well written press release both promotes your company to potential customers and can create hundreds of back links to your website. They are often picked up my automated RSS readers and can very quickly spread around the web. You can also create as many as you want!

A few things to bear in mind when you write the release are, make it catchy, always write in the third person, where you can include your logo always do and always put a link back to your website where you can.

There are many free press release sites available, just peform a search for free press release

Business Directories
Business directories are a great way to get some genuine static links to your site, take the time to fill out as much content as you can and be careful which categories you place your business in. A quick web search for Free Business Directories brings up hundreds.

Search Engine Submission
Search Engine submission is an important tool that can help speed up the time it takes for the search engines to find and index your website. It is not recommended to submit your website more often than every 6-8 weeks.

Social Networking
Social Networking for Business is still not being used as much as it should be though websites such as Facebook and Myspace are very highly ranked by the search engines and having a page for your business can prove very useful. You should also encourage your employees to become a fan or join your network as you never know who their friends might be. They might just be your target market. Some of these networks such as Facebook also allow you to have a subdomain such as mynetwork.com/mycompany. A few of the biggest are:
1) Facebook
2) Myspace
3) Linkedin

Another useful tool for your website is to add a way for your visitors to add a link to your website on their own Social networking page. People are often using this now to save their Favourites/BookMarks so that they are accessible wherever they might be, tools such as addthis make it very easy to include these on your site.

SEO is an ongoing project and should be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy and done correctly can provide an excellent, cost effective route to market.

Tracking Your Success
So you have now submitted your website to the search engines, sent out your press release and created your Facebook page, how do you know how successful you have been??

There are lots of ways to measure the traffic to your site, the obvious one being an increase in orders though this does not tell you how many you are missing where customers are visiting your site but not staying or are leaving through the checkout process.

There are a number of free statistical tools available such as Google Analytics that will provide you with detailed statistics for the traffic to your website. All that you need to do is insert a piece of code, similar to embedding a YouTube video, within the code of your website and let it do its job. When signing up you will be given a username and password so you can login and view the information it has collected.

Other websites that hold statistical data or will analyse your traffic for free are:
Alexa
urltrends
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