The online presence of your business only starts with a website, it doesn’t end there. Even a perfectly optimized website that showcases your company’s products or services becomes stale after some time, if you don’t add anything new to it. New products, yes, but how often do you launch new products? A blog is the solution for this – and for some other important issues.

Benefits of blogging for businesses, besides constant fresh content, include SEO benefits (more content means more long-tail traffic – and that traffic is highly targeted, if you do it the right way), becoming an authority in your industry, and adding a voice to your brand. However, it’s easy to mess it up: people usually think that blogging is like having an online diary, so it’s important to think about some basic rules to it.

Define your audience

The first thing you should do is to figure out who your audience is and what you want to accomplish with your blog. Are you writing for your customers (old or new), or for the other people in your industry? If it’s for the customers, what problems do they have – and how do they google to find the solution, what words are they using? That way you will know what to write about and what tone to use when you’re addressing them.

Be a human, not a sales person

The purpose of writing a business blog is to connect with your clients or business partners in a more personal way and not to sell – you have other pages on your website for that. It’s ok to announce a big discount or to post other important information, but don’t turn your blog into an advertisement. Provide useful information to your visitors, share tips and tricks, answer their questions. Keep your posts efficient – don’t blog just for the sake of blogging.

Host the blog on your own domain

From an SEO perspective, having a blog on your own domain rather than on an external site (Blogger, Wordpress.org) will be beneficial to the rest of your website – the traffic and inbound links will “spread” from your blog, and the entire website will have much more authority in the eyes of search engines. Also, keeping your blog and the rest of your website together will look more professional from a brand point of view.

Listen to your readers and be mindful of them

Encourage questions and feedbacks, engage with your audience. Ask people what they want to read about, and write about it. Invite your readers to share their opinions in the comments, even if their point of view differs from yours. Always acknowledge what they have to say, and be careful not to let the joke go too far. Also, leave your political and religious views at home – they don’t belong to a business blog, and they can upset your potential customers no matter what side you take.

Blog frequently

Come up with a posting schedule to keep you focused. A blog that isn’t updated regularly looks unprofessional – and sends out bad signals to the search engines. If you don’t know what to write about, start a blog series where you’ll break one general subject into smaller pieces, or make “Friday’s Tip” kind of series.

Make your posts a pleasant read

Use formatting – sub headers and bullet points – to make your posts easier to read, and always double check and proofread what you wrote. It’s easy to make spelling and grammar mistakes when you write, and they give a poor impression of your website and your business in general.

Be patient and don’t give up  

A successful business blog can’t be built in one month, so just stick to it, even if you don’t have any regular readers yet. Over time, your blog will find its way to the right audience. Think of it as a marathon where steady and consistent wins the race.

Write your first post

Now you’re ready – give it a try!

Jeff Gross is an internet marketing expert. Through his company, Jeff successfully leverages social media marketing, SEO, and website development to boost local businesses like SerijskiUbojica.com across the web.

There's no reason in creating a website if there are no visitors and readers coming in. A significant supply of traffic for many websites are coming from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so forth. Hence, by creating a internet search engine friendly site, you'll have the ability to rank easily in search engines  and acquire more site visitors.

Major search engines use programs known as spiders or robots to index websites to list out on the listing pages. They crawl and read your content and store it into their own database and pulling them up when people tend to search for it.

Not using much frames will help you site indexed faster on search engines' databases. Frames is only going to confuse search engine robots plus they could even abandon your website due to that. Furthermore, frames make it difficult for people to take note of a certain page on your own blog without resorting to long, tricky scripts.

Since robots can only read text, refrain posting or having information embedded on images or video files. This can affect your content's indexing as well as your search engine ranking.

Use meta tags accordingly on every single page of the site to ensure that internet search engine robots know initially what that one page is all about and if you should index it. By utilizing meta tags, you're making the internet search engine robot's job simpler so that they will crawl and index your website more often.

Try to avoid the use of wrong HTML tags like <font> to create your page instead use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) since they're more efficient you'll be able to eliminate redundancy on you HTML tag, thus making your blog to load and open faster and more SEO friendly.

Optimizing you website for visitors and search engines as well takes a lot of effort but it creates better results in return. That's why, you have to do it properly and if you can, you have to ask for some supervision from an SEO expert. Well, there are many SEO companies that offer services in this field and you won't have any problems in finding one. However, you have to make sure that it's worth every penny. After this, you have to make a diverse portfolio - one way incoming links, to help you progress in your targeted traffic. This is where link building comes in - a simple process and a challenge to accomplish. It's very important that you take a white hat approach in this field. This means, no link exchanges, farms, spamming blogs, cloaked text, and so on.

There are many things that you can do to avoid these things, but the problem is - you could still mishandle your link building campaign even if you're avoiding any black hat strategies. In fact, there are popular mistakes that are usually done by people and here are some that you should know about.

One Keyword Only
Do you think that people around the world search for the same thing in the same way? Actually, this doesn't really happen. In fact, there are many variations on how people search for something from the web so you have to understand how this thing works. Well, people may have used the same terms but they're actually different in terms of organization. If you apply this idea on your website, you must apply it in your link building campaign as well.

You might want to incorporate a mix of anchor text keywords to keep your link building diverse. Otherwise, search engines might think that you're just trying to spam them. Aside from using a primary keyword, it is best that you use branded keywords as well as secondary keywords in your campaign.

Linking to your Homepage Only
Of course, you want your homepage to be the landing page. However, it doesn't mean that it must be the only page that you should build up links to. It's really good if you can build up links to your product and services as well. Build up quality links to your internal page to provide more value to visitors.

Most of the time, people tend to be overwhelmed by your homepage and take off once they saw it - without actually browsing your product and services. This greatly affects your brand recognition, failing to incorporate your brand to your link building campaign. If you build quality links for your internal pages, you might let visitors stay on your page a little longer than expected. With a good internal linking system, it will contribute to the trust factor of all pages in your website - increasing your online brand presence. Always remember that linking to internal pages helps in distributing the link juice evenly.

Going After Every Link Sources
You're very familiar with this line - Quality over Quantity. It does apply in your link building campaign since it greatly affects the kind of audience you get from your website. It is true that more links to your website is great, but the question is - are the links valuable enough for your website? For example, you have a website dedicated for furniture but you end up building a quality link from a website about food. Just because you can build quality links from a website, it doesn't mean that you can always do it. Always remember that you have to make a valuable connection from website to website and this is not a good example of a good link building strategy. You have to make sure that to links are going to provide value for your company by inviting your target audience, not the other way around. It's really better to have fewer quality links that will actually help drive targeted traffic than thousands of links on off-topic sites that won't help you at all.

These things are going to help you a lot in your link building campaign and it’s great that you follow the rules. That way, you won't have to start from scratch from having different audiences for your website and invisible brand on the web. There are many things that you can do to accomplish your target web traffic - you just have to avoid mistakes that might bring you down in the long run.

Search engines view link building as a system for popularity. The more votes you acquire in your website, the more popular you are considered by the algorithm, making your website to top the ranks. If the contents of your links get the attention of many, your website will most probably have more visits. Here are some of the important ingredients in an effective link building campaign.

☞ Targeting the most appropriate keywords is the foundation of this system. Thus, you will need to have great ideas of the most effective keywords that your prospect consumers will most likely look for in search engines.

☞ You have to create an engaging and unique page that will prove popular for web browsers who search for useful information. 

☞ If you’re already done with creating a great page and content, it’s best to link it to relevant sites to gain some more popularity and exposure. You can do it yourself, but it’s also great to have someone to help you with this rigorous task. You can hire a professional from link building companies or you can also hire an experienced link builder from outsourcing websites.

Social networking sites have evolved from a way of communicating with your friends to an effective tool in SEO. Nowadays, you can attach link building in social media too. You can establish yourself as an important source of information where sharing is very important. You can even ask website owners for links to your site that they normally accept if the contents are pretty relevant to their field.

The importance of link building will always be addressed by SEO professionals especially if you use it in your marketing strategy. However, you must be wary of backlinks from irrelevant sources – you might get penalized by search engines such for trying to cheat the system. Be careful in choosing votes for your website and aim for the ones who have a good reputation and high page ranking. Always remember that it’s not practical to create links to and from unpopular or disregarded sites. In addition, search engines are clever enough to detect whether you’ve paid for links in high position – not something ideal to do. 

To boost your ranking in a legit way, placing an immense dose of “Link Juice” is the only way. No matter how clever you are in using inappropriate techniques, search engines will always find the way to chase it – fast! If you’re having a hard time in choosing the best linking services on the web, there are lots of reputable SEO companies that will offer an affordable link building service that ensures great results to businesses like your own. 

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a vital part of an online company’s reception. While some use it as an advantageous tool for creating high internet traffic, most marketers often miss a lot of things. They only focus on a few keywords and forget about how people search for services and products online. By extending the use of SEO strategies, your business will reap bigger results in the future. Here are some of the things you need to consider too in your Search Engine Optimization strategy.

☑ You might be concerned about traffic, but turning visitors into customers is better. Focus on the keywords that will provide consumers. If you have a good standing in page raking systems, earning profit from sold merchandize of products will bring better results. 

☑ You have to know your market well. Having a couple of keywords won’t help you a lot in achieving qualified visitors into your website. You will have to dig deeper and go beyond one or two phrase keywords. Misspelled keywords and more specific ones often create huge traffic since people are most likely bound to it. Of course, always make sure that your content is rich in context.

☑ Geographical approach may not be very useful if your business is global. However, it will be very advantageous for local markets. It’s best to add geographical keywords to your website content. Just make sure it makes sense to make an avenue for your business on other local platforms.

☑ Social media is in the midst of development nowadays. Links from social networking sites provide credibility in your own website and you can already optimize profiles just like you can optimize websites. Thus, it’ll be easier for your target market to find you.

Social media marketing is a very effective tool. A person who knows how to wield it very well usually results in great numbers of visitors, fans, and friends – internet traffic. The most important thing for an effective social media marketing strategy is to understand the channel’s services and how to use it effectively in the framework of your own business. Before you implement something, you should develop goals and effective strategies first.

Here are the top five social media outlets that most people use in media marketing. 

The power and reach of Facebook is undeniable with more than 750 million users online. It’s very essential for business if you equip your Facebook page with great visuals to keep in touch with your fan base and prospective customers. The viral nature of Facebook is astounding, taking it as an advantage for media marketing is something you need. 

It is another viral tool alongside Facebook. You can gain many followers quickly and they are not afraid to cross platforms. It is very important to your social media marketing to build a great number of followers in Twitter.

YouTube has been entertaining people for years in showing interesting videos around the world from its users. Getting your videos popular in YouTube is a traffic generation method you can use. A viral video can turn into thousands and even millions of visitors, new followers, and subscribers. YouTube is one of the best marketing outlets that you can use on regular basis for your success. 

Often overlooked in social media, people think of it as something for business professionals and corporate executives purposes only. However, more small business owners and entrepreneurs are embracing this kind of social media connection that results into fruitful business relationships. 

This is something that most people use in starting a small business. If you have a company or brand, blogging in a regular basis is a must. Implementing business in social media needs blogging as the focal point of your social media marketing strategy.

All these elements are very useful in business. The most important thing you must know is how to implement it in an efficient and effective way in social marketing. Trying all of these elements will help you in looking for something you understand the most.