What’s the easiest and most cost-effective way of increasing your online influence and building search engine rankings?
Unfortunately, the answer depends on who you speak to. Some marketers will tell you that you need to spend big on pay-per-click marketing, whilst others will advise you that the only guaranteed way of building web presence is to concentrate wholly on on-page optimisation strategies. Both of these methods will bring results in one way or other, though pay-per-click will swallow up a significant proportion of your marketing budget. However, there are other ways to build online influence that are cost-free and have been shown to be effective. What we’re talking about here is building your web presence and increasing your online visibility through off-page optimisation. Higher rankings on the likes of Google and other search engines are dependent on making friends and influencing people.
So, how can you achieve this?
How can you promote your brand and increase your online influence through off-page optimisation techniques? Hopefully these 6 simple tips might be of some help.
Be Social.
There are countless social media platforms out there vying for attention. There’s a strong temptation to try your hand at everyone. Unfortunately no business can be all things to all people. Any business that tries will be wasting its time and probably spreading itself too thinly. It’s far better to concentrate all your efforts on a couple of platforms. Engage and interact with the community and share your articles and useful insights with others. If what you post is useful, you’ll get the credit you deserve. The only proviso is, don’t overdo it: less is more, most of the time.
Content.
Users visit online sites to gather information about the products and services on offer. It’s your job to provide this. However, there’s more to it than that. Anyone is capable of producing a list of interesting facts – well, almost everyone. What they can’t do is force visitors to read the list. That’s the real challenge. The stuff you put on the website has to be informative and useful, and it also has to entertain. Achieving that is actually simpler than you might think. Use your expertise and add a little imagination and you won’t go far wrong. If you can enlighten, inform and entertain at the same time, the chances are visitors will want to return, and will therefore link back to your site.
Guest blogging.
Writing guest articles for other blogs is a certain way to build useful and quality backlinks, as long as you’re careful which blogs you contribute to. If you’re capable of writing good-quality, readable articles, then it shouldn’t be a problem. Yes, it’s time-consuming, but the payback is worthwhile. It will bring some good exposure for you and benefit the website you write for: therefore everyone wins in the end. You get your in-bound link, they get a quality article.
Contribute to high quality sites.
Why should you do this? Well, because it’s worth it and it pays dividends. Writing articles for niche sites within your market will get you noticed by the community and earn a big thumbs up from the site you contribute to. They’ll link back to you, and others will more than likely be persuaded by their recommendation.
Local listings.
This is often overlooked, but if you deal with a predominantly local market, then it makes sense to get a local listing to target the audience you’re aiming for. Sign up to Google Places. If you do this properly, you’ll ultimately get a backlink to your website.
Share video content.
Submitting video content to top sites like YouTube can certainly pay dividends and deliver numerous in-bound links. However, you’ll have to be certain that you’re doing this correctly. When you submit the video make sure that you optimise the title, description and Meta tags. You’ll also need to write a description that creates a link pointing to your site which then promotes your videos. This is a great technique and can lead to phenomenal results, assuming the video’s worth watching of course.
So, is that all there is to it? Well no, it’s not. This doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive listing of how businesses can attract backlinks. There are many other techniques that we’ve spoke about in previous articles. What these specific techniques will bring, however, are organic and sustainable results.
