Federacion Antiguos

Getting web traffic to your online business without search engine optimization

If you have a company website and have ever thought about trying to increase the amount of exposure and traffic that it gets, then chances are you have heard of search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is an umbrella term that covers many different techniques to increase website exposure, ranking, and ultimately, customer traffic. SEO is what most small companies use to increase their exposure and their custom. However, there are many other ways in which you can gain more traffic to your site without having to rely on search engine optimization, and this article outlines some the best alternative methods.

1) Take advantage of traditional marketing media

The internet one of the most advantageous constructs for advertising, but traditional marketing methods are still widely used and are still highly popular. Advertising in local newspapers, magazines, radio and television are guaranteed to get you extra traffic, and for these forms of media, originality and creativity are both key to standing out from the competition.

2) Be an active blogger and blog poster

Blogging is very popular these days, not least because everyone seems to have an opinion these days, but because blogs allow like-minded people to talk about a related topic. Search through blogs that relate to your website, and post as much as you can. Common forums where small comments can be made are also a good option. Make sure your posts are informative and helpful, so that when you provide links to your site, it does not simply look like spam, making people more inclined to see what you have to offer. Setting up a ghost blog is also a great idea, and you can do so without spending a penny, by using free blog hosting services and content management systems. This allows you to create an entire blog relevant to your business – like this one targeted at online graduate courses for teachers – in which you can include textual and multimedia information, with links and adverts.

3) Social media marketing

Social media marketing is the next big thing for website and brand exposure, and so you will want to look into this, as social media is hugely popular these days, with a trend in popularity and coverage that looks unequivocally set to continue. Millions upon millions of people use social media websites every day, providing a potentially boundless source of custom for your enterprise. You won’t be able to become an expert in social media marketing overnight however, and there are many things that need to be considered. Firstly, you are much more restricted in the realm of social media, because you don’t have your own content management system. Instead, you have to set up your own page and profile on their terms, but this does not have to be a bad thing. You can still make potential customers perfectly aware of your company, and provide links to your website under social media.

4) Paid online advertisements

Online paid advertising is a model where you pay a publisher or a website owner to provide adverts for your website. There are many different ways this can be done, such as approaching a standard site owner, in which a fixed price is set for the advert, or by using search engine advertisements, such as Google Adwords. Search engine advertising works by you bidding on advertisements for your site that will appear when a relevant keyword is entered into the search engine. Paid online advertisements are a proven and low risk way to get your company noticed without having to rely on tricky SEO strategies.

5) Focus on the content of your website

If you have a brilliant website – like this perfectly executed one on chiropractic marketing - then word will naturally spread about it without having to do anything SEO related. The three things you need to keep in mind when making a great website are design, content and user functionality. All three are good on their own, but having all three together gives you the best chance of success. The first thing to do is to ensure all your written content is as good as it can be. Written content needs to be clear, concise, informative, interesting and relevant to your site. Always choose concision in favor of long-windedness, and do your best to grab the reader’s attention at the start of the article with literary techniques.

Design of the website is all about art and creativity, and with most content management systems, you have control over all elements of the webpage, such as the user interface, web page links, and so on. You don’t have to be naturally creative to get ahead with the design, as there are plenty of websites which give pointers and tips, and there are also limitless numbers of attractive templates available for all major CMS’s. User functionality means that the user should find it easy to navigate your site. A custom web site requires a solid grasp of HTML and CSS, among other scripting languages, and if you have no such expertise, then hiring a professional to do it for you is the next best thing.

6) Multimedia marketing

Promoting your site, company, products and services with written content is always effective, but multimedia is at least equally effective, and if done properly, is much more effective. It is important to note that personal multimedia creation is now easier than ever before, and it takes literally a couple of days to become good enough to create your own pictures, video, and audio-snippets. Creative suites such as Adobe provide complete solutions for creating multimedia files, and with them the only limit is your imagination. Once you have your multimedia content, you can market it in the same way as you would standard text, by uploading it to media sites, social network sites, and include them in blogs and blog posts, providing the important titles, descriptions and tags. Common and popular sites such as YouTube are practically search engines in themselves, and offer a highly effective platform in advertising, and picture book websites like Flickr are brilliant for uploading photos and digital marketing content.

How video can help search engine optimization for your online business

Using online video promotion – such as this one on the informational training course, affiloblueprint 3 - as a means to promote your online business is an exciting and extremely worthwhile venture. We only have to look at YouTube to see the extent of the situation – over twenty hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube, it has around 800 million users, and 3,000,000,000 hours of video content being watched each month. The statistics are simple vast, and the trend has only ever been an increasing one. Popular content providers can amass hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and gain millions of views per video in a combination of viral marketing and traditional promotion methods.

The implications of just this one site (alongside the burgeoning number of similar video content sites) have important implications for using online video as a means of promoting your business. Having said this, there is surprisingly little information out there on how to help improve website traffic and custom, and how to use video as a part of a wider SEO strategy, despite the fact that research is showing that videos are the most effective way to promote page ranking, over other SEO methods such as written content.

But how is this possible?

This is because Google no longer relies on the indexing methods they used to. These days, every aspect of the web is included in their universal search method, which includes many different types of site media in determining the rankings of web sites. For example, if you search using a popular search term on Google, you are no longer simple provided with a list of traditional web-pages, but with things like news feeds, Twitter feeds, images, blog posts, and of-course, imbedded media content such as videos, and links to video sites like YouTube. With the establishment of universal searching, videos that get selected by Google are given a good ranking automatically, usually on the first page – that is certainly true of a quality site such as this one on the topic of property investment companies, which also used Java to enhance the user experience.

Not only this, but in general, companies across the board are realizing that high rankings are much easier to obtain by using video content, than the same effort taken for other SEO methods. This is because there is less competition for video and video visibility, because of course it takes more consideration and expertise to create a video than it does to write something. Secondly, most promotional video content on the internet is not properly optimized for SEO, with improper tagging and referencing. This means that the search engines have problems in indexing such videos.

This leaves a very wide chasm of opportunity for highly effective business exposure and promotion, which can be used to gain massive amounts of traffic with a very simple SEO video strategy, as long as the basic rules of SEO content optimization are stuck to. The following points will explain to you how to capitalize on this underused method – something also evident on this example lead generation site on solar panels brisbane.

Hosting space

There are many options available for hosting video content, and the primary choices are promoting using sites that you own, using third party hosting space, or using popular video sites like YouTube or Vimeo or even a product on Amazon like this one promoting a paternity test kit. Video sharing sites are the best choice if you want as many people to view your content as you can, because there is already a huge user base. On the other hand, if you want the best chance of luring customers to your domain, then hosting your own content is better, by embedding the video content into the relevant page. This is better for getting more referrals for your business page.

Titles and descriptions

The same SEO rules apply for video description as they do for everything else, such as picking a good and snappy title with relevant keywords suited to your market. Be as clear as possible in the descriptions, and don’t simply cram in as many keywords as you can. The title should flow and be readable like a sentence in a book, and not simply list the information in a more robotic way. There are far too many examples of poor titles and descriptions, but this only makes the opportunity greater for you to stand out from the rest.

Use transcriptions

You might have already guessed that the Google web crawler cannot parse video information like it can with written content. Maybe one day it will be able to, but in the mean time, the use of a transcription service is a way to ‘translate’ your video content into something that the search engine can understand. You can make your own transcript by simply tying out what is said in the video, or if it is long and more complicated, use a transcription program to do the work for you. This site, for example, on suspension lift kits offers video transcriptions deep within their site and that greatly benefits the user experience for certain visitors to the website.

Sitemaps

If you are going to use your own hosting space for your videos, then you need to consider a few things. The search engines need to be able to index pages with video content, and gain information about the videos included on the page (exactly as this best practice example plumbing, kitchen and household appliances site does on the subject of hot water systems), and to do this you should make a video sitemap. This is a document which describes the content of the page to the search engine, providing your content with the best chance of getting indexed directly. An example of a video sitemap would be something that includes the video file itself, an sample image still shot of the video, alongside a good title and description. The difference between having a site map and not having a site map is the difference between having your video included directly in the search results, and not.

Video Tips

It is pointless to follow all the previous advice to the letter, and then not have a good enough video with which to promote your business. There is no definite piece of advice that can be given here in terms of style and content, because everyone has different opinions and tastes. You should however ensure that your videos are concise and to the point. The shorter the video the better, and do say things with 20 words that you can say with 5.

And for our friends in Italy, we have this online marketing advice:

Il sistema franchising italiano ha esibito le sue capacità di tenuta anche nel 2010, in un triennio di grande difficoltà per il sistema economico e finanziario internazionale. Le periodiche rilevazioni di Rapporto Assofranchising 2010. Strutture Tendenze e Scenari, a cura di Assofranchising, Quadrante e Osservatorio permanente del franchising, offrono tutte le luci e le ombre del comparto, ma nel complesso rimane una visione d’insieme solida e vitale, che spazza ogni possibile dubbio sulla efficacia della formula. Tra i principali indicatori, spicca quello relativo al numero di reti operative in Italia, passato da 869 a 883 nel 2010. Contribuiscono a questo dato positivo ben 62 reti in fase di lancio e altre 44 che hanno superato per la prima volta la soglia minima di tre punti vendita tra diretti e affiliati. Tra le ombre, possiamo collocare i 33 franchisor che hanno dismesso i loro progetti, le 34 reti che hanno fatto perdere le loro tracce, le 11 aziende fallite, altre 4 che hanno cessato l’attività, 4 che hanno momentaneamente sospeso il recruiting e le 10 che hanno diminuito sotto la soglia minima di tre il numero dei loro punti vendita diretti o affiliati. Altra luce proviene invece dalle indicazioni sul giro d’affari complessivo che ha registrato una crescita (+1,8 %) ancora più significativa se confrontata con il +1,7% ottenuto tra 2008 e 2009.

In cifra positiva è anche il numero delle unità in franchising, con un saldo attivo di circa 700 franchisee (+1,2%) rispetto al 2009 e una dimensione media delle reti sostanzialmente stabile, di 61,2 franchisee per franchisor. Anche il numero degli occupati nelle reti di franchising sale, in controtendenza rispetto a un mercato del lavoro che in generale registra segni negativi. Rispetto all’anno precedente, nel 2010 le reti hanno assorbito il 3,3% in più di occupati. Se i franchisor italiani crescono, in parallelo aumenta la presenza di franchisor stranieri che utilizzano la formula master per operare in Italia, con il +7,1% rispetto al periodo 2008/2009. In leggero incremento anche le reti straniere che operano in Italia con singole unità affiliate (+2 marchi). Contrastanti sono invece gli indicatori riguardanti la presenza all’estero di marchi italiani. Premesso che i settori di punta per il nostro sviluppo all’estero continuano a essere l’abbigliamento e il calzaturiero, si registra un calo delle reti attive (-8, con un decremento del 3,6%), ma contemporaneamente un aumento delle unità affiliate all’estero (+1.023 in valore assoluto con un +16,8%). È inoltre cresciuta da 27 a 33 franchisee la dimensione media delle reti italiane all’estero. La lettura di questi dati proposta da Assofranchising è che la contrazione dei consumi domestici può aver spinto le insegne più forti a potenziare la loro presenza internazionale, mentre ha costretto le aziende meno strutturate ad abbandonare o ridimensionare la loro operatività all’estero. Ulteriore dimostrazione che, laddove il franchising è proposto in modo serio e strutturato il potenziale di mercato viene sfruttato, anche in periodi di difficoltà come quelli più recenti. Riprendendo le parole di Graziano Fiorelli, presidente di Assofranchising, “…il franchising è vincente perché coniuga la forza di un sistema organizzato ed efficiente, la sua razionalità, e le economie di scala delle strutture organizzate con il dinamismo, la motivazione e la flessibilità dell’imprenditore commerciale autonomo, in una vera e propria partnership la cui produttività, quando i fattori sono ben combinati, non ha pari”.