Marketing
Written by Dan Kimball, Director of Sales, ModernGigabyte, LLC.
While I don’t actually manage the ModernBill website, I am an armchair quarterback when it comes to website optimization and marketing. So, I am the perfect person to give advice to companies who are looking to grow sales organically. At ModernBill, I run the reseller and sales teams, previously I have run the 2 largest reseller programs in the web hosting industry.
This first article outlines SEO, actually link popularity. Over the last 3 years, I have actually had the pleasure of working with 3 of the top SEO experts on the east coast. Their opinions differed greatly, which represents the armchair community as well. Here are my opinions:
There is no right or wrong way to optimize your website, as long as you don’t get blacklisted. Conventional wisdom will show that the scattergun approach is the only way to be successful in the vast wonderland that is Website Optimization.
- Lists are great and fun
- Create an “easy tips” list like this one
- Create an extensive resource list
- Create a myths list
- Create a list of experts or authorities in certain industry or subset
- Become an Expert or Authority
- Content, Content and more Content
- Professional look and feel
- List your credentials
- Create a blog
- PPC as a link building tool
- Buy relevant traffic, traffic is traffic- hopefully they will link to you
- News and Syndication
- Write lots of articles (like this one)
- Syndicate an article at iSnare, EzineArticles, etc. These site rank really high
- Do a press release- PRweb, PRLeap
- Trade articles with other webmasters
- Get friends with sites and blogs to link your articles
- Offer industry sites exclusive articles
- Write some case studies on a customer’s solution
- Do a survey or study.
- Old School Linking and New Age Social Networking
- Submit your site to DMOZ
- Find some quality paid directories (links are links)
- Create your own topical directory for your industry.
- Tag related sites
- Get your friends to tag your site and directories
- Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading; write an article about the new subject.
- Local and Business Links
- Join the BBB
- Join local associations, have them put a link on their site
- Submit your site to relevant city and state governmental resources
- List your site on your local library’s website
- Have your business partners and suppliers link your site
- Get your resellers to link your site
- Start an affiliates program.
- Free Links
- List your products on Craigslist.org
- Create a wikipedia article about your company
- Do an Ask and Answer on Yahoo!Answers
- GoogleGroups
- www.squidoo.com become an expert
- Submit an article to http://www.digg.com/
- Create an RSS feed and have people syndicate it
- Post to forums
- Good review equals good back links
- Go to Amazon an review products
- Create a products list at Amazon.com
- Review sites at Alexa
- Leave testimonials everywhere
- Epinions.com
- Blogs
- Start a blog and post relevant and timely posts
- Link to other blogs from your blog
- Comment on other blogs
- Technorati tags rank high with Yahoo.com
- List and Link a few high profile blogs
- Design
- Web 2.0 your site! AJAX is cool
- Make sure you clean up your broken links
- Validate and 508 your site
- Do a redesign of your site
- 301 your 404s
- Misc…
- Become a Domainer- use your inventory of unused domains to get traffic.
- Hold a contest
- Sell something on Ebay and give away the proceeds to charity. Many charities will put links up.
- Rent some high quality links from a domain/traffic broker like Sedo.com
Next month article will be about guerilla/unconventional marketing. Below are the links from this article:
http://www.prweb.com/
http://www.prleap.com/
http://www.isnare.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.dmoz.org/
http://www.bbb.org/
http://craigslist.org/
http://www.squidoo.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://answers.yahoo.com/
http://groups.google.com/
http://www.digg.com/
http://www.alexa.com/
http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.epinions.com/
http://www.technorati.com/
http://www.sedo.com
http://www.ebay.com/
Useful Tools:
http://www.wordtracker.com/
http://www.content.overture.com/d/
