10 Useful ways to explore your Business

I remember the days when advertising a business was completely manual. It was a person to person activity which used to consume lots of days and nights, hoardings, announcements etc. I ‘m not saying that business promotion is easy now but at least we can sit at our home and keep in touch with our customers instead of wasting time at roadside campaigns.

   If ways of business promotion are increasing then competition is high as well. Anyways, I want to discuss some Useful tips which can help you to increase your business awareness among your customers.

PPC
                Pay Per Click is the most effective way to fetch traffic from the first page of Search Engine. PPC is beneficial for a new website as well as for an old site. 

 

You need to choose relevant keywords and make proper ad groups so that you can target the desired market. Thing which I like the most is, you can get traffic for a particular page or a particular product of the website. You can choose Google for your ads because it is the most used search engine or can use any other according to your choice.

Creating business page/account on Social Sites

                Social networking sites are helping out many businesses in exploring their services. You can create a business page on Facebook or can create account with the name of your business in Twitter etc. People love to interact with the brand they use and even this thing helps the business owners to know about the needs of their customers.

Blogging

                Blogs could help you to keep your customers updated with the fresh content which relate to your products or services. Search engines, too, love to have more good quality content. Every website must have a blog linked to the website and must keep updating it. At least one post after every 15 days is must to keep it fresh and updated.

Video Promotions

                Videos are an easy and efficient way to promote your business. We all prefer to see the video of some minutes instead of wasting time on reading an article and then finding out the conclusion. We can add simply make videos of our services and upload same on YouTube, Daily Motion etc. Video Promotion is more beneficial for service website. 

Local Listing

                Local Listing is the process of listing your business in local websites. The only thing needed while listing your business is the physical address and phone number of your website. Local listing is good for small business too which can’t afford to have a website. The benefit to list your business in local sites is that you will get good number of impressions when someone is searching from/with the location for which your business is listed. 

Business Reviews

                Business reviews are must to get to know the satisfaction level of your customers. Every business owner should ask his customers to give their feedback so that every business could improve more. 

And, it helps search engines to determine the actual status of a business among its users. Try to get maximum business review on Google Places, Business directories, Local Listings etc.

Developing Gadgets or widgets on social sites or blogs

                Developing widgets, Gadgets or polls in your website could help you to engage your visitors with your business. You can simply create polls before launching a product or could develop gadgets to promote your business. 

Document Sharing

                Sharing a document describing a process or a service can help to increase your brand awareness. You can share tutorials, processes, algorithms etc which will help the users to gain more information about what they are searching with the name of your business.

Image Sharing

                Image sharing is most beneficial for shopping sites. People love to see images of the products for which they are looking for. You can upload images of your business on Facebook, Pinterest, Flicker etc. Sharing these images on social sites helps to drive more traffic on your website.

Press Releases

                Press Releases are used to get aware the users about the new products or services. This is the way of promotion used since a long time to promote a business or a particular product. It generates brand awareness and keeps your customers more excited to know about the new launch.
 

  These are some of the tactics which could help you to make people aware about your business. These techniques could vary according to the theme.

Let’s be with Google

                Presently, I am working with Net IT Systems. Usually, I have to interview the candidates come for the job of SEO. I got a really different experience two three days back. A girl, who recently passed her graduation in computers, came for the interview. She was topper of her class and had got many scholarships because of her excellence.

                Anyhow, there nothing technical (SEO related) for me to ask her as she was fresher. So, I started with some questions about general terms, some bit related to what she studied and some bit from SEO. Finally, I asked her; ‘what is Google rather than the statement that Google is a search engine and used to find the answers of our queries.’

                And what she replied was a speech of at least 6-7 minutes. ‘It was the idea of that person……, started by those ones……., in that year…, Modified in this n this year; blah blah blah.

Actually, I was really impressed with her capacity of learning lots of names, years and changes. The thing which I realized is what we know about Google. It is a search engine which has 80% share in the market. We know about its updates; we blame Google if our website is dropped and also, we praise it if our website is boosted up in SE rankings. But the thing is we don’t know how to become friendly with Google. Google is working hard on the issues of spam and duplicity. It is making itself more accurate and user friendly and we should contribute in it. Obviously, it will be beneficial for us too but it is necessary to be the part of revolution of spam free searches so that our users or, we can say Google’s users, could easily get high quality, fresh and spam free content.

Value of Directores in SEO

Directory is basically a bunch of information about a particular thing kept together in a proper order so that anyone can find required information easily. Phone directory is a good example and we use it in our daily lives. 

                If we talk about the websites; there was a time in the history of internet when directories were the most used tool to find out required website. Many search engines were invented as directories and the converted to search engines. Directory, itself is a small Search Engine because it is used to find the necessary information. In some cases, I think, directories are better than Search Engines because all the information is kept in an appropriate order, dividing in different categories so that anyone could easily access the data he wants.

                Directory submission can be seen from two different perspectives; one is, it is used to submit a website which creates a link to the site. And, second is, users can easily find the sites according to their needs. Directory Submission is basically a task of SEO and considered as an off-page SEO technique. I think this is the oldest and most used (at some time) technique of website promotion. You can submit your website in the directories according to your theme. Some of the directories are paid and some are free. Even some of those want reciprocal link in return of adding your site’s link.

The main aim of directory submission is to create back links for the website. The process includes submitting the URL with other details like Title and description etc in the most relevant category. Webmaster can do it themselves or can hire the one who is expert in it.

The process of directory submission includes searching good quality directories and finding relevant categories among those. Then add your site’s information; Title, URL, Description, keywords etc. and submit. The approval can be instant but in most vases Directories take minimum one week to approve the submissions.

The most common websites or directories include Dmoz.org which is Google’s directory (as said) and the websites are manually edited before submission. So, it is not easy to get link on this directory site.

Now a days, directory submission is not a ‘must’ task of Off-page SEO. No doubt, it provides back links and traffic but excessive submission could get your website penalized. Directory links with same Anchor Text are considered spam by Google. I ‘m not saying that webmaster should not do directory submission but it should be done in a limit so that it should not got in spam.

Techniques of Off-page SEO

I know, some people still think off-page SEO means directory submission and social bookmarking. I ‘m not saying that these off-page techniques don’t have any value at all but yes, these activities can tend to penalize your website if done in bulk. 

Off-page doesn’t mean adding your website in different directories and social bookmarking sites without bothering about its relevancy and quality. 

I define off-page SEO as an activity to share your website with others in any way. Some of the quality and beneficial activities include sharing videos, pictures and documents of the website. Creating blogs is also a good idea because you can share your website and can provide fresh content to the visitors. The list of off-page SEO techniques is as below: 

1. Directory Submission
2. Video Promotion
3. Picture Sharing
4. Article Submission
5. Blog Submission
6. Forum Posting
7. Document Sharing
8. Social Bookmarking
9. Press Release Submission
10. Creating community pages on social sites
11. RSS Submissions, etc. 

Why Off-page SEO

      The off-page SEO still has a big share in any website’s search results. No doubt, on-page SEO is the base of a website but off-page SEO is must for any website. I had read a beautiful line in an SEO expert’s article that ‘Adding quality fresh content is good for the visitors and search engines but exploring that content is must so that you can get visitors to read that quality content.

       How will you get number of visitors if you have not linked your website to any other site. You must share your sites information through social media and social sites. Many visitors are looking for quality information and may be your website can help them.

       So, explore your website’s content and explore your brand’s awareness so that you can help visitors and can get more traffic and ranking.

Google’s Frequent Updates

  SEO has become more technical and challenging these days. With regular updates of Google, in almost every month, keeps webmaster on their toes. SEO firms, including big giants, are experimenting with new ideas and techniques. But every time Google introduces a fresh update with a comment “Only 1% results will affect.” But 1% is not a small figure; 1% includes thousands of sites.

  As we all know, spam and bad quality sites has compelled Google to update its algorithms day by day but I don’t think Google has become successful in improving its search results. Still you get irrelevant sites and blogs; the sites under maintenance are still on top results. The only improvement I noticed is that expired domains are no more shown in the Google search results.

  I hope Google will improve its algorithm more and will provide results according to the search queries. We still are waiting for the updates which could help the visitors to avoid irrelevant results.

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