You can read today’s post, or listen here:

Just when you think your great new website will help customers find your company, you learn there’s more to do to keep it in front of people. New websites have to get a lot on the ball quick. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? But you really have no choice on this one, folks, you have to take steps in the right direction regularly or all you have is a pretty, unseen, and virtually unusable website.

I want to spend a little time explaining links, why different links matter, and why you need a healthy mix of them all for maximum benefit. Links show the relationship between your reader’s interests and your website information.

When you have a well-linked business website, you show that your interest is in your visitor’s experience, that you’re a resource for them. When your visitors follow links, they agree with you. Last year, Google made changes concerning ‘content relevance.’ The more easily your visitor browses page to page, following those links in and out of your website, the more authority your website is given because they believe your content is then more relevant. Links weigh in heavily when Google decides who gets top billing, so learn everything you can about how to use them wisely.

Internal Links
Internal links take a reader from one page of your website to another. Done properly, they add value to your reader’s experience because the information on each page adds to the information on the other. Each of your pages should contain some common reason a reader might want to look farther into your website, and a link helps make that easy for them. Make it even easier when you link actual words used in the course of an explanation. For example:

Instead of writing, Click here for more information on your business website page,

An Inside Line reader will be invited to learn more about website marketing strategies.

Additionally, each page of your website should be easily accessed by your visitor from every page, unless you have areas available by subscription only.

From every page, your visitor should be able to get to:

• Navigation bar
• Blog post links to landing pages
• Blog post links to other blog posts, and your
• Contact page

External Links
External links are also valuable, adding credibility to your site. Offer additional detail about your product or service through a link to a higher authority website to become a resource for your reader.

For instance, links to .gov or .edu sites are generally accepted to be trusted resources. If you write about things that can be backed up by information found on a page of a .gov or .edu site, your link to that additional information helps your reader. If you operate a plumbing business, link to a water conservation site. If you own a HVAC company, a link to a page of product information from the brands you carry will also be helpful.

Visitors will be more likely to follow that link, and also more likely to link to your page when it’s a handy reference. Your material becomes more shareable, increasing your website’s value.

Back Links
Back links weigh the heaviest, but building them takes the longest time and most strategic effort. Back links are links that exist in other locations that connect to your website. The sites linking to yours should also come from a healthy mix of locations that vary in authority.

Because of their importance, there are many shady ways to build these. If you use a WordPress website, you notice in your comment dashboard all the totally freaky, terrible ways this is done stemming from all over the globe. Don’t think to yourself, “Oh, that’s how you do it,” you’ll be wrong. Shari wrote about this in her post, How To Recognize Comment Spam, and I showed a good example in my post, Your SEO Company Can Actually Hurt Your Business.

Building back links correctly starts with being absolutely certain that you offer information others need or want. That means good website copywriting, and posts about things that matter to your client base.

The best ways to take advantage of the web are through listing your company in high authority directories. Every company has a ‘Top 5′ directories list their industry typically does well being listed in. A correctly-filled-out profile with an accurate website link will benefit a company three ways:

1. Directories are always listed first in search results so your company is easily found by consumers, and
2. Your company’s link carries the authority from the directory, improving your overall rank, and
3. The best directories give your clients and customers an opportunity to review your company publicly and then share it with their social media contacts. (Super important to Google right now.)

I can’t stress enough how important this is to do.

Additionally, back links can be accumulated when you spend time reading other blogs and commenting on them.

• They can be built using a good 2.0 strategy. (Ask me about this.)
• They’re also built every time you use your website link in a social media profile, usually regardless of whether or not you communicate there. (NOT suggesting to NOT communicate.)
• They can be built using article marketing, and
• Press releases

Get started when you leave me your comments below! We use the CommentLuv plugin to help our readers get exposure for their websites – go ahead, try it out.

There are a lot of ways to develop healthy back links to your business website. MerchantCircle is on our short list because it really does a great job gaining exposure for local business.

This is no stagnant listing, as most are. The more active you are at building connections and adding blogs and newsletters, the more local exposure you gain. The MerchantCircle Newsletter goes out to every business listed in the directory, regardless of whether or not you’ve written a blog post or newsletter. But if you do want the areas and cities you’ve chosen to hear about your company, all you need to do is post a short blog, newsletter – or even answer a question – to be circulated among your neighboring businesses at no charge!

If you budget an hour a month you’ll be able to see big advantages to this directory.

Newsletters
A newsletter through MerchantCircle goes further than their blog post option. It actually goes out to all email addresses you want to import, as well as to the business connections you make when you use their ‘connections’ option. It also goes to every business MerchantCircle sends to in the areas and cities you’ve chosen. You can set the publish time and even review it before you send. I’ve found they actually send it more than once.

Why I don’t use this as my primary account:
This isn’t the most professionally crafted newsletter, and often the edits I’ve made before publishing don’t take. Also, I find images are hard to add correctly. The preview usually doesn’t appear as expected, so as a professional writer, it’s not the best place for me to showcase my work. I truly believe ANY OTHER business could use this more often effectively.

Blogs
When you blog through the directory, the MerchantCircle Newsletter will announce that your business recently blogged and share the title with their recipients. It’s smart to link to your business website from here, the authority link is great.

Why I don’t use this often:
Once again, as a professional writer, I have enough to keep up with! Every once and awhile I do post to my local business account, SusanHamiltonCopywriting.com, but image issues and spacing bug me. It simply takes too long for me to keep up this platform as my sole broadcast, and I have no time to deal with those issues when I can use higher quality services for that.

I don’t recommend this as any company’s sole blogging platform, but it is definitely worth using to discuss local recommendations, promotions, and seasonal discounts or coupons. The information will definitely be circulated through their newsletter and benefit your website.

Connections
Connections are a brilliant way to share B2B information and get other companies to frequent your main business website/blog. You become interesting when you’re actively sharing your perspectives throughout their newsletter and blog services, and other companies tend to want to know more about you. Also, they’re more likely to comment on your material and that interaction is pure gold. You get notifications through your email when others want to connect with you, making it very easy to stay involved. I love this feature!

Questions
I give this both a thumbs up and a thumbs down. I see where this is great for local business; I even see where I could use it better. But I’ve also seen really bad recommendations written poorly in response to questions. The answer box can go as long as you need it to, but there isn’t any HTML so even if you think you have paragraphs and links in your answer, you may not. The whole thing can look like a big, unreadable paragraph.

My advice:
Use with caution. Keep answers as tidy as possible, and use sparingly.

Reviews
I suggest taking advantage of the review option. Review other companies, and accurately share your MerchantCircle business listing URL in follow up emails after a sale or service appointment to encourage reviews of your company. Actively ask for these reviews, they weigh heavy and will benefit your reputation for a long time. Bad reviews happen once and awhile, and if you can’t find a solution for an unhappy customer, know that more good reviews push the bad one down the page. Encourage happy people to post reviews for the most benefit from this feature. Ask after a sale, and then send a request link in a follow up email for best results.

MerchantCircle Listing Services
We developed a listing service because MerchantCircle and other local listing services mass upload your company information to many locations, but the listings are often inaccurate due to different criteria requirements between directories, and one solution just can’t do it all well.

We now charge a sizeable fee to do it right, and it includes listing your company with MerchantCircle and 349 others. If you’re going to pay to have it done, have it done right or you’ve wasted your money. If you want to do it yourself, we’ve developed a series of video tutorials that will help you understand what not to miss as you fill out your information.

Sign up to learn how to pace yourself at one per week and get it done right, for free! I’ll show you common mistakes so you can avoid them, and help you develop a plan to help your search engine authority improve realistically over the course of a year.

Sign up today!

As a matter of fact, not all directories are harmless.

Yes, we agree with listing your business in human-edited directories. We teach you how to do it correctly yourself, and we  also offer a service that takes the work out of it for you, making certain your company is listed accurately and professionally in over 300 top-level directories – including search engines and mobile directories like Tom-Tom, Garmin, and On-Star. We suggest and promote listing your company in as many reputable locations as possible to improve your back links and gain exposure.

But watch out.

Some sound good but can suck hundreds of dollars out of your account in the blink of an eye.

I know enough about this stuff that I should have seen it coming, but if I can get swindled, it’s that much easier for a business that doesn’t understand what’s happening.

The directories we use are free. We charge for the service of managing the mundane, time-consuming work you can do yourself. You can spend all your time listing yourself and still get it wrong. When we do it, it’s accurate and completed quickly because we know what we’re doing.

Our directory listings are human-approved, too. They’ll call and confirm your information or email you and expect you to approve your inclusion. It’s all reputable.

But here’s where it can get confusing for many, and now I can include myself because I was ‘had.’

I was in the middle of several tasks, like anyone would be in the middle of the morning. Got a call from a directory ‘updating my listing.’ U.S. Directory no less. I’m listed in so many places I couldn’t possibly, by memory alone, know if I had requested inclusion there. It sounded like a place I may have submitted to, so I answered all of their very detailed questions for quite some time.

Eventually, this guy mentions that it will cost me $5.00 a month, and that I have to give him my credit card info to get started. Now, that made me pause. That was the first I realized that this was a sales call! I had him verify a ton of stuff. He emailed me. He gave me his supervisory credentials and I ended up thinking to myself, “What if this is a great, inexpensive idea that I could use for my clients? I’ll go ahead and check it out for $5.00 a month.”

So then he tells me that I’ll be getting trackable leads, and for that it will cost .25 for each lead that I get. I’m thinking, “Hmm, let’s see what that means. Paying clients are easily worth that. I’ll monitor this and see where it goes.”

One month passes. Got a five dollar charge. Another month passes, got another five dollar charge. I totally forgot about this thing.

On the third month, I was almost charged $400.00! My bank flagged it, and it didn’t get paid, so I got an email. Had I not received the email from U.S. Directory telling me that they paused my activity due to non-payment, I never would have known what they were trying to do!

I immediately went online to my account with U.S. Directory to see what was going on, only to find that they were claiming they had sent me over 1400 leads! Really? No one I spoke to had referred to them – and I ASK. I went into my Google Analytics and could easily see that was crap. They must have counted every robot that ever went into my site as a lead. None of my analytics tools can verify the leads they said they sent me!

Conveniently, their ‘trackable’ analytics were down. Go figure.

I’m not paying for that, and neither should you. I went to my bank to see what could be done, and we disabled that card so they couldn’t  syphon any more money from my account. It bothered me all day. What if this had happened to a business owner whose bank wasn’t as protective and thorough as mine?

That’s a painful bite for anyone to take, for NO REASON WHATSOEVER. I would have gladly paid that for 1400 leads! But it was completely fraudulent. It didn’t happen. How stupid to try that on someone who knows where to look to verify claims like that!

So beware, people. Not everyone sporting a great name is out there to help you. Some are downright predatory.

My advice? Ask at the onset of the call if the directory is paid or free. Many have free versions, and for the back link, that works. Paid versions will claim to post your business listing in premium locations on the search engines. They didn’t send me any leads, folks.  It was a big, fat, hairy lie. Run, don’t walk, away from any service that will fraudulently claim to send you leads for money.

You absolutely have to have your own analytics solutions.

Not all paid directories are dirty, but telling the difference is mighty hard to do. Get a service, like our Local Listing Service, to manage this for you. I tried out the competitors, and quite frankly, for your sake, I’m glad I did.

If you’ve been diligently building links to your website, good for you! Generating inbound links to your site is one of the most important things you can do to improve your website’s visibility on the search engines. But are all those links going to your home page?

SEO Link Building 101

Each page of your website has a job to do. Each page represents a unique opportunity to share information about one specific topic – and to rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for that one topic. If you’re only building links to your home page, you’re limiting the ability of other pages to be found – meaning this grossly limits your website’s potential. Linking to pages other than your home page is referred to as ‘deep linking.’

How to Build Deep Inbound Links

When you leave your name, website address and comment on this site, the ‘Comment Luv’ plugin pulls the title and link to your latest blog post and adds it to your comment. If you’re a blogger, that’s an automatic deep link. If your website doesn’t include a blog, you can accomplish the same thing by leaving a specific page link in the website address field.

Think of other places you can link back to pages on your site. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn quickly come to mind, but those are just the top of the iceberg for social sharing sites.  ‘Add This’ lists 300+ social sharing opportunities! Some business directories allow you to leave deep links. How about industry forums where you participate, publishing your expertise through article directories, guest posting on another business blog?

Since inbound links are so important to the success of your website, make a commitment today to begin or renew your link building efforts. Feel free to begin here. We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Timeless Marketing Principles Pt 3

We’ve all known to have a Web site since the 80′s. We didn’t all do it then, but now it’s just “duh.” Of course you have a Web site.

Since the beginning of it all we needed to ‘be found online.’ How to do that has changed, but now it’s even more important to understand the simple, somewhat-time-consuming-but-free things you can do on a regular basis to stay visible. Older sites have the advantage of domain age, but newer companies are on to that and employing tactics that you need to be ready for by making sure you’re at least covering the basics.

5 basic things you can do now:

• Sign up for Market Samurai and learn what you need understand about keyword research so that you’re taking advantage of words and phrases that people are searching for and your competitors have missed. Of course, we’ll do that for you if you like:)
• Make sure you’re signed up with Google Analytics so you can see what kind of traffic you’re getting. Modify accordingly. If you don’t know how, get advice.
• Make sure your picture, phone, and complete contact information is available for all your viewers and easily found. Make sure all your links are working.
• Take advantage of blogging. If your site won’t support it, use a free 2.0 site like Weebly, Blogger, or WordPress and link it to your Web site. Both ways. Accept worthy comments and reply to them.
• List your Web site in free local listings like Google Local, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp and MerchantCircle, and consider listing in other fee-based directories if they are reputable for your industry.

As you update the content on your blog platform, add your post URL’s and related commentary into a great scheduling tool like SocialOomph. 4-5 different scheduled updates for a day, and remember to schedule other interesting information as well. From that point of entry, your information will go out not only to Twitter, but Facebook and several other social sites that you will get to choose. Handy way to increase your online presence, huh? All of a sudden, the links to your posts are read by viewers and their viewers. Somebody is bound to bite if you write something of value to your audience, and engage.

And it didn’t take you all day to do! Then you can keep your social media tab open while you work and interact socially without having to change your train of thought.

Related Posts:

Marketing Includes Knowing What You Don’t Want Pt 2

People talk often about linking. Linking from one site to another is a pretty common way to show interesting, fun, or informative sites to friends, associates, and even networks on many social sites and emails. I did some research on a site we’ve been upgrading lately, and another common situation came up. As I shared what I had learned with the small business owner, I realized that all the nodding was due to complete and total misunderstanding of how, exactly, linking strategies can offset costs associated with marketing a company.

When you’re working with SEO companies or researching and employing those techniques on your own site, its similar, but not exactly like social networking with your friends for entertainment. When engaging with your friends, there’s no real goal other than to share the information. When you’re marketing however, the goal is to gain authority to your website by the search engine so that you move closer to the top of the search engine research page, or SERP. We need to be on the first page because most searchers don’t get past the first page before they re-enter the search query to try again. If you’re not on the first page, you don’t exist.

This site I’m referring to had initially been optimized for a particular phrase, and like most things associated with technology, the keyword relevance  changed. In this instance, another company in the same business had used ‘black hat’ methods of outranking our client’s site, and had seriously knocked us down several pages. That’s going to work for him until the engines realize what’s been done, and then he will be knocked to the bottom for a long time. So, it hurts our client now and we have to do something about it. What?

How does linking improve rank?
Besides the obvious keyword research update, a site in this scenario has a real shot of outranking the impostor with a good linking strategy. This can be paid for by hiring a good content marketing company, but it can also be done by you, over time, if you’ve got the time to dedicate to it. The more links from other websites back to your site gain it authority by the search engine spiders.  When they see those links, and more coming to it, and the linking increases, they see that searchers are going to it for real, relevant information, and that’s authority. It takes time to build that up naturally, and you don’t want to do anything unnaturally or you can hurt yourself more than help.

Its not just using the right keywords, although that is pretty important. Its also about using an effective linking strategy. Keywords change and have to be updated occasionally, and links go bad and have to be checked occasionally. Using keywords in your links as anchor text is also very important, but you can only control what you link from page to page within your own site or to another site. To give you an idea of what we were up against, one of our outranking competitors had well over 600 inbound links, and our client had 12.

One reason for the low number of links was the newness of the site, but the other reasons had to do with how long that site had just been sitting there without:

1. using a blog
2. updating the blog 2-3 times per week
3. commenting on other relevant blogs and leaving links
4. article submissions referring to the site using, you guessed it, links!

Its easy to find yourself there, as a business owner or marketing director of your company. There are PPC methods to get you to the top also. But this post recognizes that we need to be resourceful today. Successful linking strategies take time and repetition to build, but with dedication your site can become optimized for your customers’ needs.

Related Articles: New Feature: Small Business Marketing Links

Photo Credit: Robert Brook on Flickr

If you build a better website, will the world beat a path to your door? I hate to disappoint anyone, but it’s not likely.

A great website will cause your visitors to hang around to see what you have to say, but on its own, will do little to draw new customers.

Now, if that great website is search engine optimized, contains fresh and interesting content, and has relevant links pointing to it from other sites … well, that’s a completely different story. Note that this isn’t an even / or proposition. Highly visible websites are search engine optimized, have a continual infusion of fresh, interesting content, AND hundreds of inbound links. If your site can’t be found, it’s missing one or more pieces of this puzzle.

Even with all the pieces in place, expect that it will take some time. While you’re waiting, don’t just sit there … continue adding content, continue link building.

What Do You Mean, Link Building?

Inbound links are gained primarily in five ways:

1. Build links through social bookmarking and social networking sites. While hundreds of these sites can be found online, for the sake of brevity (and sanity), I’ll only mention a few popular sites here. And before naming these sites, let me assure you that I’m not advocating spamming them, and to proceed with caution. Create a profile; lurk for awhile; take notice of the prevailing culture before submitting any links from your site. If your content is a poor fit for the site’s audience, skip it and move on. Ok, so with that groundwork barely covered, check out Digg, Delicious, Propeller, and StumbleUpon. And don’t forget about Twitter, covered previously on this blog.
2. Build links through Web 2.0 sites. This class of linkbuilding includes building (writing) a Squidoo lens, Hub page or Weebly site, writing articles for article directories, etc. The advantage is that you’re building and creating your own feeder content to link back to your site. It’s time-intensive, but effective.
3. Build links through directory submissions. This can be further divided into submitting to free and paid directories. I recommend a balanced approach, but there’s more to this category than meets the eye. We’ll come back to this in a future post.
4. Build links through commenting on other blogs. Have you just read something interesting on another blog? Have something to add to what the author said? Write a brief comment and be sure to fill in the optional box on all web comment forms for your website address. Sometimes this box is labeled “URI.” Other times, it’s “URL” or simply “Website.” Don’t spam the blog with comments on every post. Don’t leave any variation of the “hey, come visit my site” comment and say something more intriguing than “hey, nice post.” Commenting on other blogs will draw some of their readers to your blog. It will also draw the attention of the other blog’s author, which can spark new opportunities for you.
5. Build links by asking your business partners, associates and vendors to link back to you.

Leave a comment on this post to get started on point #4 right now. There’s no time like the present, right?

Photo Credit: The Pug Father on flickr

I’ve covered article marketing as it pertains to an author looking for a larger audience in my post to Express Marketing Memo earlier this month. Now, let’s look at the value article writing has for a writer needing a constant stream of readily available content.

Many writers, and even small business owners, are realizing that to truly take advantage of Internet marketing opportunities, coming up with their own original content proves difficult, especially at the rate it must be done to help their Google rankings. Any given site should be posting between 2-5 new articles per week. If a writer supplies content for many sites, or if new articles or blog posts compete for time in the otherwise hectic workplace, using someone else’s content is a pretty smart way to go. I am absolutely not talking about plagiarism! There is a right way and a wrong way to go about this, and doing it correctly is actually a service and not an illegal practice.

Internet marketing veterans have used generated content for some time. You wouldn’t be the first person to wonder how on earth anyone has time to come up with a continual stream of fresh content, take care of other professional responsibilities and have time to sleep, too! Time constraints on our lives can appear endless on occasion. As a time-management junkie, I can tell you to always be on the lookout for ways to work smarter, not longer. We believe that Zero To Sixty Marketing LLC , provides the ability for many small businesses to conduct business as usual while building their online credibility through the content marketing services we offer for that purpose. Content marketing services are only one way to establish a content stream, article submission sites offer a way to do it yourself. It’s an investment in your small business future that pays off over time, exponentially. Your online presence via articles, blog posts, and social media forums builds your client base of the future, and done correctly can yield results rather quickly, sometimes in as little as three months!

No, not tomorrow.

So, how do you use other writers’ content and build your credibility? First of all, you don’t build your own credibility without building theirs. Don’t even think about taking their work without giving them all the credit due in their bio box. If there is any doubt at all, contact the author and retain permission. Make sure that you use it with their copyright information, and link back to that author’s website or article submission site.

Realize that frequent postings of value-added, linked content are some of the things search engines are looking for when ranking your site. There is no reason several authors can’t boost one site’s rankings, if everything else is done right.

Have you ever used article submission sites for content?

If you market to other businesses on any level, and haven’t yet subscribed to B2B Magazine, you’re missing out. We receive both the print and online versions, and tend to read them cover-to-cover each month. Today’s issue just arrived in the mail, and the first thing to catch my eye was the “New Channels” column by Paul Gillin, titled “New PR Reality: Link over Ink.”

Gillen hits the nail on the head when he says that “clients and executives mumble ‘That’s nice’ about a Web link, but get excited about a reference in their daily Wall Street Journal.” We’ve definitely found this to be true. But the rules have changed, and one or two good links can now return far greater results than a mention in the most prominent print publication.

It’s a rare business that won’t find its audience online these days. Unfortunately, it’s also a rarity for small businesses to know how to get found online. Publishing a Web site or starting a blog is not enough. Adding your Web address to your print marketing collateral is not enough. Sending out press releases that mention your business or your site … even that is not enough. Don’t neglect any of those activities, but to achieve your online objectives, you’re going to need links … quality, inbound links from other Web sites, blogs, social networks, and relevant directories.

How many times in the past month have you searched for something you read about in a newspaper or magazine? Ok, now how many times have you followed a link from Google or from within a blog or other online article? Is there any comparison?

By the way, you can subscribe to B2B Magazine and a variety of other useful trade publications for free at www.tradepub.com.