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Certain companies are everywhere and they stick in your mind – this is no coincidence; it’s because they have carefully crafted their online presence. A strong online presence is hugely beneficial for businesses as it cements your brand awareness, helps raise your reputation, and ultimately can boost sales and profit.
But how do you do this? Is there a magic formula to follow so your business can become part of the popular crowd? There is no foolproof plan but there are some simple things you can do to improve the online presence of your business and we discuss six of them below.
Love it or loathe it social media is an integral part of modern business and it’s one of the easiest ways to build your online presence.
Many companies have entire teams dedicated to their social media brands and it can also serve as an additional source of income from sponsorships and direct sales.
Developing your social media presence takes time though and it’s something you must be willing to stick at. You can’t simply create an Instagram account, post a couple of pictures and then forget about it – that will achieve nothing.
You have to consistently create quality and useful content that your followers can relate to and/or engage with. Don’t simply sign up to every social media platform either – look at the different options and see which services complement your business the best and concentrate on them.
Not only should you look at content on your own website and social media profiles but building a catalogue of guest posts can really help boost your online presence.
Many companies and websites accept guest blog posts and have a policy and guidelines to follow for submissions. By giving your opinion, sharing your knowledge, or promoting your business on other high-authority websites you can greatly increase your exposure.
It also works to boost your SEO as you can typically include backlinks to your website with targeted keyword anchors.
Search Engine Optimization is a huge part of building your online presence as it improves the chances that customers can find your company via search engines like Google.
This is the process of optimizing your web content for specific keywords so that Google ranks your website higher when people search for them.
ClickSlice for example may want people to find our different SEO services and thus create content for important key phrases like “SEO courses London”, and “SEO training London”.
By creating a sound SEO strategy for important keywords you can build your online presence purely by the volume of people that use Google on a daily basis.
Email marketing is often overlooked but it can still yield results and it is another opportunity to build your online presence.
You could create an email newsletter and have a subscribe pop-up on your website or promote it via your social media profiles. Customers could then opt to receive regular updates from your company relating to new product releases and other useful info.
The key to successful email marketing is to make the content relevant, useful, and unobtrusive. How many times have you unsubscribed from an email newsletter because your getting several emails per week?
No one wants that! All you have to do is create semi-regular email content that customers will enjoy. This could be useful product tips, access to exclusive content, or even promotional material relating to new products. That steady drip-feed of content should work to build your presence and continually remind customers that you exist!
While SEO helps get your website ranked highly on Google it won’t help retain customers or get them to buy your products or services.
For that you actually need a website that is usable and this is still an area many companies fall down. Have you ever opened a website only to find that the content takes forever to load, links are broken, or the text is too small?
Every time I open a website with problems like this I die a little inside and let out an audible sigh. Ultimately I then usually close the site and look for a competitor with a better website. You can guarantee that this is what many others do if they encounter a poorly designed website that is difficult to use.
A great way to boost your online presence is to craft a user-friendly website that customers want to come back to!
Don’t be that quiet kid in the corner anymore – instead, be the loud one, the kid that oozes confidence and gets invited to all the parties! Joking aside you understand the analogy – an online presence is vital to get your business noticed and ultimately improve web traffic, reputation, and custom.
By doing simple things like email marketing, social media posting, and submitting your company to business directories you can boost your online presence and push your business in the right direction.
Guest posting is simply publishing an article on someone else’s website. 60% of bloggers write 1-5 guest posts a month and 3% write more than 100. It has become a massive part of running a successful blog by building potentially useful relationships with other bloggers in a certain niche. It is also an easy way to reach a whole new, relevant audience, and drive traffic back to your site.
In this article, we will show you how to create and execute a successful guest blogging strategy. Our aim is to equip you with all the necessary tools to use guest posting effectively to improve lead generation and gain more visibility for your business.
Before you even start, your first task is to decide what your goal for guest blogging is. This is key in determining the right blogs to submit your guest posts to. Typically, there are three main goals that you should have at the back of your head before you start guest blogging.
You can achieve all these by posting the right content on top blogs. Sometimes you will need to post on a blog with an engaged audience, while sometimes all you need is a blog with a strong root domain authority.
Knowing your goals earlier will help you determine the kind of blog for you to guest post on.
After determining your goals, you’ll have to find a site that accepts guest authors and is looking for the content currently. Beyond that, you’ll need to ensure that posting on the site will help you meet your goals.
But how do you find a site that accepts guest blogging? There are lots of ways to do this. For starters, you can use Google to find these sites by using keywords such as ‘write for us’ or ‘become a contributor.
A site should not only be happy to accept your post, but it must also meet these criteria.
Pitching is approaching site owners to suggest a guest post, But before you do that, you must form a connection with them. For most site owners cold pitches won’t work unless the content is stellar.
Most site owners get tired of irrelevant pitches and poor quality content, according to Pageonepower. For this reason, they’ll only take guest content from people they already know, trust, and are fond of. But the million-dollar question is, how do you become one of those people? Here’s how.
Getting to know and comprehend your target blog’s content is key. Sure, you already know that the content matches your niche. But you need to know even more about that content, such as, what level of audience they are writing for, and what makes most of their content. Is it general concepts or specific, any detailed tutorials? or do they like lists?
Some sites might accept guest posts, but the audience only ends up tuning in for the blog owner. If there are other guest blogs on the blog, you need to know if they do well. Also, check if the owner gives the guest blogs comments and social sharing. If not, you don’t expect to do so well if your goal is to get traffic back to your website.
The next step in creating a guest posting strategy is to finally sell your content idea to the site owners through email.
Make sure to connect with site owners on social media, so you can tag them when you share the content on their site. You can share anything you like and include a comment so it’s not just a plain link. Commenting on their blogs and signing up for their email marketing newsletter are also effective ways of creating a connection.
The common question when it comes to guest blogging is whether or not you should be using your best content for your guest posting. Actually, it depends on the quality of the blog you are submitting the content to.
If the site has 500-word articles with images, then your content should go in line with that trend. Businesses that blog have 434% more indexed pages than businesses that don’t create content, so having state of the art content on your guest blogs is an added advantage. Below are some tips to make your guest post as astounding as you can.
Information about you and your business should be on your author Bio. A guest post should never be all about your business, products, or services. It should be a source of information and not an advertisement. However, occasional mentions here and there won’t do you any harm.
Take a close look at posts on the site. If there is any special formatting on their blogs, make sure that your guest post has similar elements matching other posts on the site. For precise content, you can count on us to provide the best SEO services to take your content to the next level.
Quality guest post content should include internal links to your client’s posts. This will do you a favour by showing them that you have gone through their content and you understand it.
Generally, guest blogging on relevant eminent sites is a great way to soar levels and achieve the success of already popular blogs in your industry. Follow the strategy above and grab those guest blogging opportunities to grow your business or brand.
We all know how important link building is. It is not the funnest part of SEO, but it is a prominent cornerstone. Despite all its significance, building links is not easy. 65% of digital marketers state that link building is the hardest part of SEO, according to SEO Tribunal. This is why most people struggle to build needle-moving links to their site, regardless of the strategies they employ.
Link Building is a gradual process. It doesn’t just happen overnight. It is also reliant on several strategies that vary in terms of efficiency, expertise, and required resources. For starters, the quality and authority of the pages where you build links play a key role in determining how high you’ll rank in search engine results.
If you are new to link building, or you are just looking to grow your site, you most likely need some insights on what you should do, shouldn’t do, and what strategies are available. If Link Building is done right, it can help your rankings. Done wrong, and your rankings disappear.
In this post, we will go over some of the most successful strategies for link building from professional marketers. They’re especially helpful for busy marketers who have a lot on their plate and want to stay mindful of their rankings. They are Link building strategies that you’ll be able to use with ease.
Guest blogging is one of the oldest tactics in the link building book.
But how exactly does it work? You write an article for another website in your niche, link to yourself from that article, and publish it on their website. It’s as simple as that.
In a survey by Semrush, an overwhelming majority of specialists consider Guest blogging to be one of the most effective ways to grow a backlink portfolio. However, there is an old way of mass guest blogging just for links, and that is long dead. You don’t want to post an article on a website that’s not even relevant to your niche and has zero authority, just because you want to get a backlink. That style of guest blogging won’t cut it. Search engines are getting smarter, more advanced and can tell when you’re not guest blogging to add value.
To reap the rewards of guest blogging, you need to be strategic and authentic in your content creation. Make sure that you’re creating unique content for the other site, and ensure that the site is relevant to your niche, authoritative, and attracts your audience.
Guest blogging is a sure way of building links. Just find the right site, create quality content, and join up with the 90% of marketers who utilize content pieces as their main way to generate more backlinks, according to Userp.
Not all link building tactics are outreach-based. It’s very possible to build links by merely changing content to fit in appropriate places such as infographic directories and video-sharing sites.
First of all, your content needs to be in an appropriate format for you to be able to do that. This is where content repurposing comes in.
For instance, let’s say you have an amazing interactive infographic that you’ve poured your heart and soul into creating, and you wish it had a wider audience. Well, why not transform that content into a different format, such as an infographic or video? Then can submit that content to infographic or video-sharing websites.
Using infographics results in the exposure of your content to a broader audience. This is good because more eyeballs equal more links. Articles with infographics actually earn 178 percent more links than those without, according to Venngage.
Every industry has important key players, and taking steps to grow influence will encourage backlinks from other websites. Posting and sharing relevant case studies are helpful tools in this strategy.
Cultivating influence requires a company or brand to provide value to other members of their industry. Once a brand has established an authoritative or expert image amongst its community, it’s more likely that others will cite or link out to their content.
Utilizing influencers is another way to increase brand awareness. The right influencers provide a bridge to new traffic, and this introduction can lead to conversions and future backlinking.
Building a relationship with the webmaster and decision-making figures of a website is not as easy as it sounds, but it is key for this tactic to work and the results are often worth the effort on both sides. As Join notes, the influencer will gain more credibility because they included some references, and you will become the valuable reference that they made.
So how do you know the right influencers to approach? To find strong potential leads for both industry influencers and guest blogging sites that have proven themselves in your niche, a keyword search will prove pivotal.
Being inactive on social media is doing your brand website a disservice. Social media has revolutionized the marketing space and can be a welcome boon for your link building plan and guest posting efforts.
In an industry survey by Link-assistant on how SEO professionals build links, the results showed that most specialists use social media for link building, with 88% using links on social media profiles and 81% sharing their social media content.
After creating your website, become active on social media by sharing new posts, images, and updates. There’s no better way of helping your fans find what they want to see than by sharing it on multiple social media platforms.
Social media does not require any form of experience, just know your audience better, and you can easily boost engagement. Consequently, you’ll expose your brand and site to more people who could share your best posts with their target audience.
The exposure that social media creates is unmatched. Creating a website without accompanying it with a Social media page is equivalent to not creating it at all.
Most people spend time and money to get new links, but they don’t track their status. This comes as a result of commitment or just laziness.
Without tracking your backlinks, how will you know whether to build more or pause? You may have over 1000 links pointing to your web pages right now, but when you check it after two or three months, some of the links might be gone.
You don’t have control over the blogs and authority sites that link to you. The site owners can easily remove your link from their post or resource page without notifying you.
This is why it’s important to monitor your backlinks and make sure that you maintain steady levels of traffic and higher rankings.
If you want to improve your SEO rankings, you need a winning link building campaign.
Link building is a form of off-page SEO that helps to improve the credibility of your website. Getting links to your site placed on other reputable sites establishes your authenticity and boosts your rankings.
While the premise behind link building sounds simple enough, a successful campaign can be tricky to execute. If you want to get on the first page of Google, take a look at this step by step guide and start building your link building strategy today…
Every website has a domain authority (DA). The DA is a number between 1-100 and, the higher the DA is, the more authority the site has. A website’s domain authority indicates how highly it’s likely to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). Essentially, the higher a website’s DA; the better.
Having your linked placed on high domain authority sites will give your own webpages more credibility and have a greater impact on your own rankings. Getting a link on a site with a DA of 70 will have much more effect than having a link on a site with a DA of 30, for example.
Even if a site has a high domain authority, you won’t necessarily want to target it for you link building campaign. The most effective way to build links to your site is to target other webpages that are relevant to your audience.
If you’re an online clothing retailer, for example, you may want to target fashion blogs and websites of well-known publications, providing they’re reaching your intended demographic. This means that your links are more likely to be relevant to the users who are seeing them on the target page. As well as getting more clicks, the relevancy of your content will increase your conversion rate.
Here, you can see why link building is so powerful. By securing a link on a relevant site, you can boost your rankings on Google. By securing link placements on sites that target the same audience, you can organically grow your reach and increase your sales.
Contacting site owners or editors and asking them to feature your links is one way to start your campaign. However, high DA sites receive numerous link requests every day, so don’t hold out too much hope that you’ll get a positive response (or any response!).
Most sites that accept link placements have an established eligibility criteria and proposal formats. Be sure to read these thoroughly and submit any requests in accordance with the site’s requirements.
Of course, sending out random requests is time-consuming and doesn’t guarantee results. Cultivating a professional network can be a far more effective way to secure link placements, particularly when you’re running an on-going campaign.
If you don’t currently have a network that can provide the assistance and introductions you need, don’t panic. Get involved in industry events, attend exhibitions and trade shows and sign up to online seminars. With the right approach and attitude, you can build a strong network in no time.
If a website owner agrees to feature your link on their site, they won’t simply display your link randomly. Instead, you’ll need to supply guest content that contains the link you want them to feature. Crucially, this guest content needs to appeal to their users and meet their criteria.
In many cases, your guest content will be displayed with your name and your company name, so it’s a great way to promote your business. If your content is good enough, you might even find that site owners contact you and ask to display your links on their site!
Becoming well-known in your industry or establishing your credentials can transform your business, so it’s well worth honing your writing skills or creating content that prompts discussion. When your guest content is being actively sought out by other site owners, you’ll find it’s much easier to secure link building opportunities.
Many people assume that the more backlinks you have, the higher your rankings will be. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Google is savvy when it comes to figuring out whether backlinks are genuine or whether they’re simply being used for SEO purposes.
Securing backlinks to less-than-reputable sites won’t have a good impact on your rankings. In fact, it will cause you to drop down the rankings on SERPs. Similarly, featuring your link on sites that aren’t relevant to your content is likely to have a negative effect on your rankings.
Instead of focusing on how many backlinks you can get, spend your time securing high-quality backlinks. This will enhance your site’s credibility and have the biggest impact on your rankings.
If you don’t already have a link building strategy in place, it’s time to create one. Backlinks are a major ranking factor, so it’s one aspect of SEO that you really need to focus on. Remember – link building isn’t a one-off activity. You’ll need to ensure that existing links remain active and continuously secure new backlink opportunities if you want to maintain your rankings.
As many SMEs don’t have the time or resources to devise, create, execute and monitor a successful link building campaign, they struggle to achieve good SEO rankings. At ClickSlice, we understand the difficulties SMEs face, which is why we offer dedicated link building packages.
Managed by experienced SEO specialists, our link building services are unique to every client and designed to deliver measurable results. To find out more or to launch your link building campaign today, contact ClickSlice now on 020 3287 3638.
Backlinks have been the mainstay of search engine optimisation for years, but in a changing digital landscape are they still relevant? With routine algorithm changes and SEO methodologies, how much should you be relying on backlinks to get you to the top of the rankings? More importantly, should you modify your backlink strategy to increase its efficacy?
Backlinks are simply links which connect your website to other sites online, but they’re extremely important when it comes to search engine optimisation. Your backlinks help search engines to determine how important, influential and reliable your website is, and this can boost your rankings.
Traditionally, websites benefitted from having lots of backlinks because this helped to establish the site and its content. In basic terms, the more backlinks you had, the more significant your site was. As a result, high numbers of backlinks were a good way to increase your SEO rankings.
Absolutely. Backlinks still help to establish your website’s authority, and they still play a considerable role in determining your rankings and how search engines view your site. As a form of off-page SEO, backlinks are still extremely important. However, the way backlinks are perceived by search engines has changed in recent years.
The number of backlinks on your site is no longer seen as an indicator of your website’s importance or authenticity. Whilst a healthy number of backlinks may be advantageous when it comes to your rankings, search engines, such as Google, now assess the quality of your backlinks as well.
High-quality backlinks are links high authority domains. Well-known, secure and popular websites are typically deemed high-quality, and they’re often recognisable names. Well-known sites, such as, Facebook, Forbes YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram are all examples of high authority domains, and creating a link between your site and any of these websites would be extremely beneficial for your SEO rankings.
Conversely, lower quality backlinks are connections to websites which don’t necessarily have a high authority domain. These sites may not be as well-established or well-known, and they won’t automatically boost your rankings on search engines either. However, that doesn’t mean you should avoid lower quality backlinks in their entirety.
The quality of your backlinks is crucial to your SEO success, but it’s important to remember that content matters too. If you want to link to a website which doesn’t have a particularly high domain authority but has original, informative and relevant content, then it could be worthwhile. Whilst you may not gain much from this type of link building in terms of SEO, connecting your users to content fresh and interesting content has its own rewards.
However, it is important to avoid low-quality backlinks, as these could actually have a negative impact on your SEO rankings. Traditionally, quantity reigned when it came to backlinks, and this lead to some unscrupulous tactics. With people eager to boost their rankings, sites were created simply to serve as backlink connections, rather than delivering relevant content.
To prevent falsely inflated rankings, search engines started to pay more attention to where your backlinks were going. Instead of focusing solely on the number of backlinks on your site, Google cares about their value. As a result, the quality of your backlinks became increasingly important, whilst the quantity of your backlinks became less influential.
Yes. Quantity still matters when it comes to backlinks, but not necessarily in the way you might think. Hundreds of backlinks may have ranked you more highly on a SERP (search engine results page) in the past. Now, however, it could do just the opposite.
Having hundreds of backlinks won’t necessarily improve your SERP position. Furthermore, hundreds of low-quality will actually put you lower down on SERPs and damage your SEO strategy. Whilst a decent number of backlinks can be beneficial for your website and its rankings, quality matters. Backlinks will only have a positive impact if they’re high-quality. Of course, backlinks of moderate quality can be valuable too, providing they link to relevant and worthwhile content.
Most users want to know whether high quantity or high-quality backlinks will benefit their site, but it isn’t quite as simple as that. Whilst high-quality backlinks will place your site higher on SERPs, a high quantity of backlinks could actually lower your rankings, depending on their quality.
Like most digital marketing and SEO concepts, the use of backlinks has changed over time. Whereas quantity once reigned supreme, high quantities of backlinks are now only beneficial if they’re also high-quality. As low-quality backlinks could have a negative impact, it’s important to look at the value of each potential link. In fact, focusing on quality before quantity is essential if you want to use backlinks to boost your SEO rankings.
To learn more or to enhance your backlinks today, contact ClickSlice now on 020 3287 3638.
As the internet gradually expands in reach and value, the conventional methods of link building and SEO are progressively transforming along with it.
Indeed, it has become a priority for any business today to learn the subtleties around creating and executing a high-quality campaign if they hope to thrive in an increasingly competitive online sphere.
A concrete definition of link building eludes most businesses the first time they venture into the field. To set things straight, link building is the process by which a business retrieves hyperlinks from other websites in a bid to improve the quality of their own backlinks and increase user engagement.
Usually, an internet user clicks on a hyperlink to easily from one website to another in search of more information, or information related to the content that they are currently consuming.
Before understanding the vital connection between link building and SEO, you first need to go back to the basics. How does one create a link|? And how do search engines interpret them in text?
To do this, we will begin by first studying the structure of a hyperlink.
That being said, link vital for search engines because:
When assigning an index to the page, the search engine will then analyze the text, as well as the quantity and quality of links that are directed to an external website.
As a rule of thumb, having a large number of quality websites linking back to you means an improved ranking for your website. And a greater ranking translates to more exposure for your business.
As a matter of fact, linking was the predominant factor that Google used in the 1990s to proliferate their influence as the apex search engine in the late 90s. The idea around this business model was to calculate the quality of a particular page depending on the volume of links directed towards it. The metric proved to be a success, and it was adopted as one of the primary signals used by Google to determine a page’s ranking.
Unfortunately, due to unscrupulous link building methods used by some online companies to improve their ranking, Google opted to regularly release Penguin updates to penalize any companies that relied on these underhand tactics to top rankings. When choosing to use a service for link building its important to evaluate what type of links are going to be built.
That being said, it is widely accepted that if all factors remain constant among website pages, links are the final feature used by Google to determine page rankings.
Despite the lucrativeness around link building, not all links are deemed of high quality. In response, search engines created the option of non-follow as shown below:
<a href=”http: //www.concept.com”
rel=”nofollow”>Example</a>
The addition of non-follow by websites is used to tell Google not to include certain links while calculating their page ranking. It is an effective method used to discredit certain links that might tarnish the ranking and reputation of a particular business and its website.
One of the primary reasons why a website adopts non-follow is when it does not have complete control over the websites that are directing their links back to them. This can be in cases such as:
In such scenarios, users have the freedom to add links. And because of the high volume of forums and blogs on the internet, it is impractical to determine each and every link and determine its authenticity.
Hence, the non-follow attribute is employed to deter any spammy links from being considered in Google’s algorithmic ranking. Only familiar links affiliated with the company will be whitelisted.
As we mentioned earlier, link building is extremely important when it comes to search ranking. That being said, here are the other added advantages of link building:
Conventionally, link building requires a business to reach out to relevant blogs and websites pertaining to their industry.
Referral traffic is a great way to boost engagement with new clients. A good link, especially one associated with a high-quality website is surefire to increase interactions with potential clients and advertise your services.
Not only is link building essential for organic traffic proliferation, but also plays an important role in enhancing your brand. When your business is associated with trusted and professional websites online, it is deemed reliable by your target audience, and thus translating to more engagements.
ClickSlice is an agency, where you can find the best SEO services in london. We specialise in boosting the search engine rankings of company websites. We take an individualistic approach to SEO and work with businesses to develop a plan that works best for their specific situation.
For more information on how we transform businesses through the power of organic internet traffic, contact ClickSlice today on 020 3287 3638 or email us at hello@clickslice.co.uk.
We all know just how important backlinks are to an SEO campaign. What remains unclear though is just how many backlinks you need to have on your website.
Today, we’ll be seeking to answer the age-old question of quality vs. quantity. To some degree, both these options offer valid reasons as to why you need to back them.
However, for the sake of clarity, we’ll be imploring further into the topic in today’s discussion.
Backlinks are essentially the hyperlinks from your site to other sites. If you happen to be an authority in your industry, then, it’s not uncommon to find websites linking to yours for the sake of credibility.
Those who are renowned for achievements in their industry are oft-referenced in articles by others. The more backlinks you receive, the better your odds of registering increased traffic and seeing a boost in search engine rankings.
Search engines love backlinks since they serve as an indication that other people love your website. Aware of this stance, there are some unscrupulous entrepreneurs who seek to use underhand methods to rank highly.
Such back hat practices usually involve the payment of money for links to your website across various other sites. While this may see you gain some ground over your competition, in the long term, Google and other search engines are bound to discover your exploits. This usually happens because when backlinks are purchased, some emphasis is usually placed on the quantity aspect. The poor sources where your links originate from usually sound the warning bells for Google to respond.
To avoid getting penalised by Google, try steering away from such link schemes. In the worst case scenario, your website may be de-indexed. When this happens, search engines may choose not to display your website completely in search results.
Age plays a key role in determining just how many backlinks you need.
New websites typically little link building activity. Instead, most of the work needs to go into building branded links. If you’re working on local SEO, you need to put more emphasis on developing your social profiles, local citations and branded web 2.0s.
Ideally, you need to wait at least a month building your social profiles and setting up content for your site. Once the groundwork is done, it easy for you to justify just why you’re doing link building.
There’s some wiggle room for you to flex here. You can come up with as many links as you’d wish in this scenario. Having said that, it’s best to wait for a while for the content you post to simmer. Once sufficient traffic is recorded, you can get back to building backlinks. A good waiting period is about a week’s time.
You can play with your options on such websites. The fact that you can come up with as many backlinks as you want however doesn’t mean that you can compromise on the quality.
Setting backlink targets is not the most prudent thing. The best ways to go about is to build steadily and naturally go into building links.
Rather than being an instantaneous activity, link building needs to happen on a consistent basis. As an ongoing process, it doesn’t make sense to include targets and deadlines into the mix. A steady development is the only sure fire way for you to have an edge over your competition.
You should not stop pursuing your SEO targets even once you manage to break into the first page of search results, monthly link building services are offered by multiple companies for a reason.. its an ongoing task and is not a one off thing.
Many people make the mistake of focusing on the number of backlinks instead of quality. 1 high-quality backlink can be just as effective as 100 low-quality backlinks. As such, it’s not a pure numbers game.
You need to strike a perfect balance between the number of backlinks you generate and their quality. If you’re unsure how to do this, you need to ensure that the backlinks you create conform to at least half of these qualities:
You require fewer backlinks if you’ve done due diligence and properly optimised your website. If you have a poorly optimised site, the odds are that the backlinks you share will have zero effect on your audience. This is because you don’t have grounds for prospects to trust your website and regard you as an authority in your field.
Some recommended optimisation steps are:
As you look into your competition, be sure to take note of how many links are pointing to each of their pages on search engine results. While at it, be sure to ignore the numbers from the webpage containing the most backlinks and the webpage with least number of backlinks.
Once you have the numbers right, ensure that you develop high-quality content (whitepapers, infographics, blog posts, and landing pages). Providing in-depth coverage about your industry is likely going to put you in good books with your audience.
With the content sorted out, it’s necessary to come up with smart sharing initiatives, not just to your audience, but also to other industry titans. Striking a rapport with some of the top brass in your field may be a masterstroke on your part since you’ll be able to promote your business on a person-to-person basis.
Directory listings are basically niche/general directories. Their main purpose is to function as an online phonebook for the storage of important information like NAP data (name, address, and phone number), map listing, and website address.
Notably, some directory listings are customised to allow you to share photos of your business, the hours of operation, and other valid data.
It’s also worth documenting that there are various other directory listing types out there which are dependent on how long you’d like your listing to remain active.
You have the option of having your business permanently listed in the directory listing, or over a short period like 1 year. Thanks to the options available in the market, you can choose to use directory listings free of charge or part with a small fee. ClickDo offers a local citation service which will get your business listed on the top 100 directories in the UK, we’ve personally used this service ourselves and highly recommend it to any local business owner in the UK.
Having pointed this out, the onus is therefore on your to ensure that your business is listed on at least a couple of directory listing on the web. By doing so, you’ll be helping your business take that next leap forward.
If you want to learn the ropes on directory listings, there’s a couple of websites that you can’t ignore.
These 10 directory listings serve as a great example of the options in the market. Acquainting yourself with them will help you comprehend the nature of directory listings and delve further into the field.
All the directories are structured differently. As you sample each of them, you may find yourself ranking higher in search engines and build trust with your clientele.
That said, it’s of the essence to comprehend that not all directory listings are created equal. Some of them can give you an edge over the rest. As such, it’s important that you carefully evaluate the nature of your business before zoning in on one.
The one trait you need to check out in when reviewing the quality of directory is whether the directory is monitored by a human, or if it has an open submission.
Human monitoring usually has an edge over open submission because there’s some cross-checking of submitted content. To stand out, you want to avoid having your information paired up with plenty of other spam listings.
As a rule of thumb, it’s important to stay away from directories that have a keyword anchor text, directories containing the text “add your link” or “suggest a site”, and low domain authorities.
The more accessible your business is online, the more likely people will be exposed to your product offering. As a consequence of this, you’re likely to realise that more people will be making utility of your services and willing to buy the items you’re selling. Brand Development plays a key role in your marketing strategy
On the flip side, if people are unable to locate your website or track it down over the web, there’s a very low chance that you’ll be able to unlock new clients.
Importantly, directory listings also serve as great tools to reach out to specific audiences and capture their imaginations. Who doesn’t want that?
With directory listings, you can choose to concentrate your efforts on a specific state, town, city, or zip code. Alternatively, you can decide to go big and advertise your products and services internationally. To get the most of your efforts, tools like Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Yellow Pages, and Yelp Advertising, are recommended.
Using these tools, you’ll be able to target specific prospects. Some of these platforms have mass appeal among entrepreneurs due to the fact that they offer free advertising capabilities.
Directory listings and SEO are a match made in heaven. Because listings get plenty of hits, it’s easy for businesses to rank higher on search engines. The backlinks from online directories are also high quality since they originate from recognised sources.
Having your business on the lips of everyone is no mean feat. For this to happen, you need to put the word out there in a number of listing directories, social platforms, review sites, and search engines.
The net result? Enhanced odds of customers finding your products and services on the web. Truthfully, there are hundreds of directory listings out there, this means that it may take an eternity for you to go solo. As such, we recommend hiring the services of an established company like ClickSlice to help you with your efforts.
Interestingly, you can have your business listed on a number of search engines, directories, review sites, and social platforms at no charge.
Before you commit to having your information displayed on such platforms, we advise that you first work on bolstering your profile. Once that is done, you’ll find it easy to make it to the top of search lists when people are seeking specific services and products.
A well-crafted strategy can effectively help you avoid annoying ad pop-ups and keep competitors looking for a slice of your business at bay.
If you want to have your business listed, you can do so for free. Since there’s a greater risk of getting things wrong with this approach, you need to carefully scan the information you provide to weed out the errors. Having a single dashboard from where you can review all the listings you’ve created is also recommended because it facilitates easy management.
Embracing a DIY approach sometimes leaves you vulnerable. In a bid to come up with an excel spreadsheet that lists out all the usernames and passwords of the various search engines, social media platforms, review sites and directories that you’ve come up with, you may find that the information is not accurate.
Having a single dashboard is a safer option because you can keep track of all the changes you make along the way without necessarily having to constantly perform password resets.
If you’ve dabbled in the world of Search Engine Optimisation, there’s a fairly good chance that you’ve encountered the term “backlink” at least once.
For those new to the SEO scene, it’s important for us to demystify what backlinks are and just essential they are.
In the current setup of SEO, backlinks play a pivotal role. With that in mind, we’ll invest some time trying to fully elaborate just what backlinks are why you need to embrace them in your marketing strategy. As we provide this in-depth analysis, we’ll be sure to mention a couple of pointers on what you can do to help gain them without going against the rules of play defined by search engine algorithms.
Backlinks refer to a link found on another website that directs visitors back to yours.
In a way, you can view backlinks as the resultant product from link building. So, what exactly is link building? Well, this refers to the process of getting hyperlinks from other websites to your own landing page.
A hyperlink (in simple terms known as a link), describes the way users are able to navigate the various pages on the web. Since search engines use links when crawling through the web, it’s important to come up with ways in which you can assist the algorithm to find a connection between your platform and others.
When it comes to building links, the difficulty is of varying degrees. That said, many analysts in the world of SEO tend to agree that link building is one of the most complex aspects of the job. Since many SEO experts invest heavily in devising ways of doing link building just right, it’s quite important to master the very art of developing high-quality links. Once you’re able to master this art down to a tee, then you can stand tall against the competition.
Since backlinks usually involve outreach to other relevant websites and blogs in your industry, there’s a fairly good chance you can establish a good rapport as you go about your business.
Having such partnerships with key influencers in your trade can lead to bolster your brand’s image. This means that backlinks are a valuable business strategy since it creates unpretentious believers and evangelists for your enterprise.
Already, we’ve referenced just important backlinking can help improve your search engine rankings. What we’ve not shared is that backlinking can also help improve the traffic to your website.
While being exposed to a large audience is a fantastic strategy, there’s also plenty of benefits to be found in being exposed to a smaller community of passionate supporters.
In essence, striking the right cords that resonate with keen supporters of a particular blog is where you should launch every backlinking campaign. Then, you can seek to grow further outwards.
Given just how important backlinks are in determining how your website performs in search results, it’s necessary to come up with a firm backlink foundation.
It’s worth noting that getting backlinks is often a lengthy and mind-numbing process. However, to save time you can can outsource the link building process to a dedicated link service like Linkplicity, who are known for delivering high quality backlinks across a wide spectrum of niches.
Thankfully, there are numerous ways for you to get backlinks if you would rather do it in house, all of which are helpful in building your website’s backlink portfolio.
Having your enterprise listed in online and local directories can benefit your cause with a strong backlink, despite the fact that they may be nofollow backlinks.
Despite this, having your business in directories like Yellow Pages, Yelp, and Four Square makes it relatively easy for prospects to find your website, check out the reviews and decide whether you’re the best option to handle their issues.
Notably, Google’s My Business pages give users the ability to have their businesses and website on Google Maps. This can massively help you connect with clients looking for your services. Should you decide to take this option, make sure that you’re listed with the correct name, phone number, and address unfailingly all through the online directory listings.
This has quickly gained prominence as one of the best ways for businesses to generate high-quality follow backlinks. Guest blogging on other websites within your niche usually helps build your brand reputation.
While it’s relatively more time consuming than the other options highlighted, it’s still regarded as the best way for enterprises to come up with high-quality backlinks. For you to start off as a guest blogger, you need to look up quality sites within your trade and discover which ones give you the freedom to guest blog.
After you note them down, you’ll need to make sure that the content you develop conforms to the provided guidelines and send it over to them for review. Before you dispatch it, ensure that you include a link back to your website somewhere in the copy. This is usually the key premise of guest blogging.
While it’s true that many websites aren’t usually interested in a guest blog, you’re sure to find a couple that wants to get such services, especially when they keep in mind the free content they’ll be receiving thanks to the backlinks.
This tactic can be quite rewarding to your website. You can register backlinks to your website by checking out a good number of authoritative websites, review the blogs shared and leave comments on them expressing just how wonderful the content was. Right before you leave, ensure that you pose a thoughtful question. While at it, also don’t forget to link back to your website.
While there’s a high chance these are likely to be nofollow backlinks, they can still help build a good rapport with influential companies and websites in your industry.
All the same, you need to ensure that you only comment on suitable and pertinent posts for your industry. Else, the comments you leave may be regarded as spammy and you may find your comment barred by the website administrator.
Having listed out a couple of backlinking manoeuvres to gain strong inbound links for your website, you should not forget that you still have to put emphasis on devising content that will need backlinks itself. This process is no different than the content you discover to comment and share a link of your platform. If you pen amazing content that’s beneficial to members of your industry, the odds are that they’ll start to link to it all on their own.
If you require help with any of the processes stated above then feel free to get in touch with our SEO Consultant Joshua George and he will be more than happy to offer some solid consulting services to help you get things in order.
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