It’s Easier Than You Think to Effectively Promote Your Business Online
We want our affiliates to succeed and after seeing some of your websites, I think you need a little help and guidance. So, with what I’m about to show you below, you should be able to promote any business or product online and do it more effectively than most. You can use it to promote your business or your affiliate products.
“If you build it they will come”. Now that statement might have been true in the past but when it comes to websites, it should be update to; “If you build it and are ranked high on Google then they will come”.
Once you build a website you hope and pray Google and other search engines will just find your website, rank you #1 for your preferred keyword and everyone in your area (nationally, if your national) will find you 1st when they need your services and are searching for them. Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth. But, if you read and follow the following I will teach you exactly how to get ranked #1 for not only your preferred keyword but for several preferred keywords at once. If you want a quick no work involved approach then you’ll have to Google someone else’s approach and probably want to stop reading now. I’ve seen other methods touted but I know this approach works and not only that, it is how Google will tell you to do it – Go to YouTube and type in “Matt Cutts from Google on WordPress and SEO”
Properly SEO your current website
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and what it really means is; when Google sees your website or webpage and determines that it is the most relevant to what a person is searching for then you’ll get ranked and presented to them. The better you match in the relevance test then the higher you’ll rank. Part of the secret sauce is helping Google determine your relevance. If a website uses all images or video with no text and no SEO tags how in the world would Google ever know how to rank them to be relevant in a search.
I’ve seen a thousand websites that don’t even meet the most basic requirements of SEO. To meet the very basic tenets, every page on your website should have a title, description, keyword and robot tag.
Place these tags in the <head> section of every page on your website:
Title tag: <title>Page Title Here</title>. If you keep your titles under 55 characters, you can expect at least 95% of your titles to display properly. Once you add a title tag that info will display at the top of the browser when a person lands on your page and it’s a start at telling Google what the web page and thereby what the website is about. Also, the page title gets used by Google as the title of a search snippet link in its search results pages.
Description tag: <description>Page Description Here</description> or <meta name=”description” content=”Awesome Description Here”>. The “description” tag helps websites in three important ways: a) “Description” tells the search engine what your page or site is about. b) “Description” helps with click through rates to your site. c) “Description” helps with site rankings. The description you provide is what shows up on Google below the title link to your website in search results.
Keyword tag: <keyword>List of comma separated keywords here</keyword>. Some will tell you this tag is not used by search engines anymore. I think it is nowhere near as important as it used to be but it can help the search engines tell what your site or page is about. Only use 3-4 keywords on each page’s keyword tag and make them relevant to the content. Don’t stuff tons of keywords in the keyword tag on every page. It won’t work.
Robots tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>. Use “noindex” if you don’t want the search engines to index a page and use “nofollow” if you don’t want the search engines to index links on the page. Most often I think you would want the page indexed and followed.
If you do the above, your website should start performing a little bit better in search but you’re not done yet.
Blogging and Fresh Content:
You need to be posting new and fresh content on your website at least once a week. The best way to do this is an onsite blog. Get a copy of WordPress, add a blog folder on your website and then place WordPress there. I’ll ramble on and on about WordPress later but this should suffice to say, “You need it so you can add content to your website on a regular basis and it’s FREE”. Many people will start a blog on blogger (google owned which is good but not good enough) or hire someone to blog about their business but on that person’s blog, not theirs. That works too but the most effective is to have your own blog on your own website. Any hosting company worth their salt supports wordpress. You’ll know your blog is on your own website when you can type: www.yourwebsite.com/blog.
Images:
Add images to your website and blog but don’t forget the alt tag. When you add images to your website pages or blogs, add an alt tag to the image tag that has your keyword for that page or blog. Normal: <img src=”smiley.gif” alt=”Smiley face” /> but in our case: <img src=”smiley.gif” alt=”Tax Preparation” />. To be even more effective, wrap the img tag with a link (href tag). <a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com”> <img src=”smiley.gif” alt=”Tax Preparation” /></a>. Now if you do this on your blog, when someone clicks the image they are taken to where you linked to and you get more SEO benefit from the alt tag telling Google, yet again, what your website page or post is about.
Links:
Add links to your website, blog and social media posts. On your website and blog make sure you add the title element to the link. Title specifies extra information about an element (displayed as a tool tip) and is another great place for you to add your keyword. Ex: <a href=http://www.mycoolwebsite.com title=”Tax Preparation”>Link Test Here</a>. When adding your link on social media just copy it straight from your browser url and paste it as is (no title or href tags).
WordPress Blog and how can you use it effectively
WordPress is free blogging software. Dictionary description: A blog is a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, which is written in an informal or conversational style. For me it’s a simple means of posting articles we’ve written about our business that are SEO optimized.
WordPress has different plugins (pieces of software) to help you SEO the post’s you make automatically, such as “Yoast SEO” or “All in one SEO”.
How to write an SEO effective webpage or blog post
To be most effective, make each individual blog post about a single keyword, product or concept. If you want to blog about another keyword, product or concept then write another post. When you write a post about say, “Tax Preparation” you want there to be no ambiguity or uncertainty about what you’re talking about or promoting.
Titles:
When you write webpage content or a blog post, you will most likely have paragraph headers or you should. You need one
<h1>My Main Title Here Including my Keyword</h1> and one or more <h2>My sub title here including my keyword</h2>
or <h3>My third level title here including my keyword</h3> tags per page or post. Each title in the post should include your keyword. Ex. If I wanted to write about Tax Professionals, One of the titles in my post would probably be something like; “Why a Tax Professional is better than Some Dumb Software”. Another would be something like; “Who’s been Your Local Tax Professional for 12 Years?”
Keywords:
You should have a webpage on your site for each service or product that you sell. It should have the best keyword you can think of for that product or service in its title, description, keyword, image alt tag and href title. Further, you should have a few paragraphs with your keyword in each title and once in the content of each paragraph. Don’t stuff keywords and don’t try the shotgun approach where you try to put all your keywords on every post every time. It stands to reason, if you’ve put your keyword in all the places we’ve mentioned then all search engines will know exactly what your web page or blog post is about and if they know what it’s about they’ll know exactly how to properly rank it when someone searches for that keyword or product.
Social Media:
Finally, set up what I call the trinity of social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter and Google+).
Facebook: Easy to setup, easy to disseminate information about your website, business or product and easy to place links on it that link back to your website. Search engines use social sites to see what people are talking about and sharing. Even if it’s just you talking about your business or product the search engines can and will see your business being talked about. To me and I believe to Google, it’s not how many likes you have, it’s what and who are being talking about.
Twitter: Easy to setup, can be automated to have tweets with information and links to your website repeated on a regular basis. I use a plugin on WordPress to tweet about our blogs when they are posted and then as an automated way to tweet about all our blog posts again and again every two hours..
Google+: Google plus is Google’s version of Facebook. Like the others, Google+ is also easy to setup. It just takes the time and willingness to get it done. So, think about it, would Google like posts on Google+ or Facebook more when it comes to ranking a website? Does Google give more precedence when ranking a website when that website get’s mentioned on Google+ regularly? You tell me. Once you answer these questions you’ll know why you want to post about your website and products on Google+ When posting always add links back to your website and products pages.
A little something about social media: a) Don’t fear it. Once you use these FREE social services you’ll wonder why you didn’t use them before to promote your business. 2) Don’t believe it is just for social people. Your being social about your business and what you offer and even if no one ever see or reads a single post you make, know this; Google sees it, Google reads it, Google counts it and Google Ranks It. So, have a bigger count of social items talking about you then your competitor even if you’re the one who’s putting those items on social media .
It is not enough to just set up social media accounts and say, “Well that’s done, we’re social”. You or your staff needs to post on these accounts on a regular basis. Most importantly include a link back to your website or one of its pages. We post on all three social sites and do it almost every day and some day’s multiple times. It’s a good idea to also include links on your website back to your social media accounts.
One other thing we do that I’ve never seen done before is if we make great post on one social media account we take the link to that post and post that link on the other social sites. Also, talk about and link to one social account from the others (i.e. On Google+ say, “Have you seen us on Twitter, come tell us your thoughts.” Or on Twitter say, “I have something to tell you but no room here, come see us on Facebook”.
Hashtags are another very important part of getting your keywords out there. All the three social accounts above, Facebook, Twitter and Google+, accept and use hashtags. Ex: “Looking for the best tax preparer with the best attitude, come to XYZ Taxes. #taxpreparer #tax #XYZTaxes”. Some people put the hashtags directly in the post content instead of at the end. That works too so it’s a personal preference. Ex: “Looking for the best #tax #preparer, come see #XYZTax today”. Typically, I like to use about three short hashtags per social post. Every wonder how anybody finds anything on Twitter, it’s hashtags.
How we do it at IncomeTaxAdvances.com
How often you blog or use social media is up to you. Our procedure is to post a blog, on our onsite blog, about a single keyword, product or service every day then go to our three social media accounts and tell everyone about that new post and then add a link back to the post and/or our main website page or both. The content you post on your website or blog must be unique content or search engines will not rank you. We have writers that write our content for us but when I first started I used to write all my own content. A good writer should be able to write as many articles as you want or need about any keyword, product or service. If you want to hire a good writer, I recommend UpWork or Craigslist. Most people know more about their own business or service than anyone else and therefore should be able to explain it and talk about it to others on their blog and social media accounts.
My approach is not the only approach
Of course, my approach is not the only approach. Either way, I’m giving you all this information for free just so you can get more business and thus send me more business. The social media services and blog software it takes to implement this strategy are all free. All you needed was to know why you needed to use them and now you do, so now you should be able to use them and use them effectively.
If you’ve read this whole content you’ll know exactly what we do to promote IncomeTaxAdvances.com and have done for several years to get ranked 1st for our desired keywords, products and services.
Share Your Ideas with Us
Ok, we’ve given you all our secrets on how we get ranked #1 on Google and other search engines. If you have any approaches or methods you’ve used that work and are willing to share then email them over. Send My SEO Tip