Local Service Business Online Promotion

Search Engine Optimization

The first topic I will discuss is Search Engine Optimization. This involves tweaking your website and performing backlinking activities, as well as providing good quality content for your visitors. You already have some content on your main site, and this is sufficient for getting started. Also you can use some free WordPress plugins can be used to tweak your site without any complicated computer code.

So what you want to start doing is getting as many good backlinks to your site as possible. This involves contacting or registering with as many top ranked, high traffic sites and forums and linking back to your site. This improves search engine positions - you want to be in the top ten page of a Google unless you'll not get much business this way.

You should only get a maximum of three backlinks a day, otherwise Google will flare you up as a spammer and ban your site. Also be cautious with people offering you packages where you get 4000 backlinks in a week. This will destroy your ranking, as Google's algorithms are quite smart these days and you'll be snared right away.

Keyword Research

Before you begin generating backlinks to your site, you must find out which keywords to target, so the search engine users get specifically what they want (content relevance). The tool I use is the Google keyword suggestion tool

What you want to look for here is high traffic keywords with local monthly searches. So choose around ten of the keywords you think are most relevant to your services.

Now for each backlink title, you must include a title with your main keyword (law, lawyer, etc) and one secondary keyword phrase, for example:

LisaWong Law - Top San Diego Criminal Law Experts

Now for each of your ten chosen keywords, create titles like those above and save in a text file. Also, you'll need a 25 - 30 word description, and around three or four of those too. Reason for this is because Google will detect duplicate content and the backlink will not count.

Submitting to Directories

Online directory sites are a bit like the Yellow Pages online, and most are free. You need to visit each site, register and post your title and description you've just made up. Now some of the directory sites are manually reviewed by humans, and can take a couple of months for your link to be made public, and for this reason I do this first. It can be a bit tedious doing this, but the links are well worth it. I use a free software for this, and it speeds things up a little.

Remember to rotate your titles and descriptions here.

Social Bookmarking

When someone visits your site and likes your blog post or article, they can bookmark it, vote on it and share it with others. However, you can do this yourself and get the links back to your site. So you'll need to register for the following sites, and place your links to your site. Here are the top social bookmarking sites I use:

Slashdot.org
Digg.com
Del.icio.us
Reddit.com
Fark.com
Newsvine.com
Connotea.org
Links Marker
Blinklist.com
Bibsonomy.org
Folkd.com
Linkagogo.com
Buddy Marks
Karmalynx.com
bookmarksdiary.com

Article Marketing

Another great free way to get backlinks and traffic to your site. You write about three or so articles, each one based on a keyword phrase, and should not include that keyword phrase no more than 3 times in the article body, and just once in the article title. It should be 400 - 600 words long, and must not contain any promotional text or links out.

So for promoting your site using articles, you have a bio box at the bottom. Here you place a little classified ad and your backlink to your site. The important thing here is to have the link include the main keyword of the page you are linking to.

Then you must submit your article to the top five or so article directories.

Press Releases

Similar to article marketing, only it must be newsworthy and something new. For example, you've just opened up a new law firm in San Diego, so a press release to a local newspaper could bring some welcome business.

Blogs

Another free way to drive traffic. WordPress is the best one, but you could use Blogger.com or hubpages.com. I will refer to WordPress here.

Now, take the articles you created earlier for the article directories, and re-write them. These should be used for blog content. Or even write a few new ones based on your keywords. Now using WordPress, you can schedule your posts to go live on the times/dates of your choice. I suggest you set your posts to go live between 4 - 7 days apart, as the search engines like new content. Don't go and post five articles at once.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress blogs make it easy to set up your own site without writing a single line of computer code. However, there are hundreds of plugins and it can be hard to know which to use and which are best suited to your website. Here is a brief description of the ones I use most:

WP Policies

This one installs all the necessary legal documents every website should have. It hides these from website visitors because no-one hardly reads them but the search engines acknowledge them. Includes privacy policy, anti-spam policy, disclaimer, email policy, terms of use, earnings disclaimer and more. These can be tailored to the needs of each individual site.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Used for tracking site visitors, which pages they visit, length of time on the page, where they came from - Google, other sites etc, and displays graphs and charts on monthly statistics.

Quick AdSense

This makes it easy to add Google adverts on your blog posts and pages. You simply sign up for a free AdSense account with Google, copy and paste some code into the plugin, and you make money when visitors click on the ads. Good for a little extra income from your site.

Socializer

This plugin will place a row of little Facebook, Twitter, Digg icons at the top of your blog pages and posts, and when clicked on, the user can tweet or share the link to your posts on the social networks.

No blog should be without this one, as Facebook and the like are widely used nowadays, with ten percent of the world's population using them.

That sums up this report on promoting a local business online on a tight budget. There are many other ways you can promote online, but the can be costly and most people get their fingers burnt and lose their whole marketing budget quickly. Google AdWords being one of them. It's just so competitive and hard to succeed on a limited budget. And the big boys with deep pockets will just eat you up.

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