SEO, Traffic

This is a great debate, and one that gets a lot of discussion in webmaster forums like digital point or netbuilders, and most people seem to come down on the side of one or the other. Essentially the debate is between on page SEO vs off page SEO.

A lot of MFA promoters tell you to create a small 3-5 page site, through some articles up on ezinearticles, add your Adsense code and wait, and in the past this system could be considered very successful, actually it might still be effective if you fly under the radar, but the bigger your site becomes, and the more traffic you get, the more you start to compete with established sites that do a lot more for their ranking.

I'm not going to sit on the fence, I'm going to tell you to do both, and I'm going to tell you why. You can do an experiment to prove how well this works if you have three new websites in the same niche and on different host accounts. Start a blog on each one, and give each blog maybe 5 posts of similar length, all targeting the same keywords.

To make the experiment even easier, forget about registering domain names, just grab a free blog from Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, and Blog.com, they all give you a subdomain so each blog would be competing fairly, instead of having a mix of top level domains, subdomains, and subfolders.

Then on one of the blog only interlink between posts using keyword rich anchor text, on the second blog don't interlink between posts instead only write articles for ezinearticles, and on the third blog do both interlinking and ezinearticles. Now ping the major RSS readers for each blog and sit back and watch your stats to see which one gets more traffic.

I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the time the two blogs with the ezinearticles will get traffic faster than the blog with only interlinking, but wait a little longer. Soon you'll see the blog with only interlinking will catch up with the blog that only has ezinearticles backlinks, but the blog with both will stay ahead of both of them and after 3 months will have several times more traffic than the other two.

OK, so that isn't an example, I'm not stupid enough to disclose my test blogs, that would ruin the test and I'd have to start again, but I can tell you that I used the results of this test to promote a client who has a website here in Spain and her little B&B that was previously only on page 4 of Google shot up to the #1 position in 2 months.

I did that by interlinking all of her content pages using her main keywords, plus wrote 3-4 ezinearticles for each page on her site, and then just sat back and watched. Of course real SEO never stops, and I'll need to keep adding backlinks and if she wants to target extra keywords she will need more content, but her reservations have increased, her booking ratio is above 50%, and she's very happy. Try this with your own sites, you'll see it works.

In a previous local SEO article I talked about using Facebook and Twitter to promote a local business, here in Spain I've found them to be very effective for driving search engine rankings, though not always effective for connecting with genuine customers, often you'll connect more with other business owners.

Connecting with other business owners is a great concept, you never know when one of them will become a referral or a customer, but with respect the Twitter and Facebook, a lot of their users are there to be entertained, so how do you connect with more business minded contacts?

The answer is still in social networking, using ecademy and InterNations, but the services are different, and I should point out if you are promoting an MFA or non-business website these sites may not be appropriate. But my local clients in Spain get a lot of mileage from them for business networking. For pure SEO, another option is to create a profile on Brown Book.

Let me tell you a bit about the clients I have in Spain, some are owners of small hotels, others are real estate agents, but I also support translators, holiday home management, restaurants, and people who own shops. All of them are finding the current economic crisis is hurting their bottom line, and they all want to connect with customers to build relationships.

Of course any smart business person will know that clients can come from knocks on the door, website referrals, advertising, but the best business always comes from personal connections who know your business and pre-sell your service or product to their friends.

This is where ecademy and InterNations are so valuable - both are professional networking sites, the first is for business people all around the world, the second is for people who are expatriates and have global connections. Do you see why these networks could be so valuable?

Small shops dealing purely with local customers might not get much advantage from membership, but in Spain most of my clients are somehow involved in the tourism industry or they deal with property owners and investors, most of whom are not local.

In bigger cities or regions where business networking is an important part of doing business the story is different and a lot of success follows from joining ecademy. Similarly, people involved in tourism get a lot of value from InterNations because statistically expatriates travel more, and they talk about travel more.

I want to quickly talk about the difference between travel websites like TripAdvisor, GoGecko etc, and ecademy or InterNations. The difference is the level of professionalism and the quality of referrals your business can attract, and in many cases the volume of referrals you can get.

Living in Spain and not speaking the language fluently means I have to be self employed because my regular paying job (sales management) isn't available to me, but traveling and being an Internet Marketer is very compatible. Consequently, a lot of people ask me to consult with them on improving their local business search results.

I always recommend starting with the basics, and that includes Twitter, and Facebook, both of which are amongst the best ranking websites on the net, and if you use them wisely mean your local business could dominate the top 5 or 6 results in the search pages for your main keyword. If you've read my previous article on using Twitter to promote your business you'll find this article fills in a few of the gaps not mentioned in the first.

Twitter
Twitter is great for connecting with people in your local area, and can also be good for SEO if you can keep your tweets short enough that you can also publish your full URL in your tweet.

The way I use Twitter is that I create a profile that has a very basic about us type of info but I include my main keyword in the profile, and also the website link, then I find all of my peers in the industry, with local websites this means anyone in your town, and anyone internationally who tweets about the same stuff that you do. The reason I follow everyone in my home town is that you just never know when one of them might become a customer.

After creating the profile and following local tweeters and international peers I wait for them to follow me back. Some people advise you to only follow people who return follow, but I think that is really stupid and frankly those idiots aren't real Internet Marketers.

The reality is that if I follow you and you sometimes mention something that I could help you with then I win, if you don't follow me back it isn't a problem, because when you check tweets to you you'll see my tweet, and if I've helped you it is likely you'll start to follow me. Moral of the story, don't try to game Twitter to increase followers, if you have a local business you'd prefer followers who have an interest in your product.

Now the tweeting begins, and for most business people the concept of tweeting seems like a waste of time, but here's the magic of tweeting, it lets a local business have an opinion about your home town, lets you be part of your community, and the effort is minimal. Here's an example, your local business sells widgets, most people will use Twitter to simply blast special offers etc, but let's say the local basketball team has an important game coming up, why not also get behind them with a "Go Sharks! [Business Name] is right behind you, bring it home tonight!"

See how short and sweet that is, and I tell you what it puts you right in there with all your local tweeters who will see you tweeting something they would also tweet. Stuff like that is free advertising because other tweeters will retweet that, or reply to you with their own rah rah, see where this is going? And how super easy it is to use Twitter to really get involved in your community for free, and best of all for minimal effort.

so how many tweets a day should you aim for if you're a local business? Personally I'd aim for one per day, but you need to split the content up a bit for the different audiences you have. Out of 10 tweets I'd probably mention things happening in the business maybe 5 times, from special offers, to sponsorships, members only offers or parties etc. Try to keep the actual tweet to the minimum, and use the rest of the space to link to your webpage with more info. Google loves URLs in tweets, and this will definitely help with your SEO.

Facebook
Facebook is similar to Twitter, but works in a completely different way and has the potential to drive even more business your way because the notes you create can be longer, and you can attach photos or video. In addition, Facebook fan pages often rank very well in Google, so don't be afraid to create a fan page.

I always advise my clients to create a fan page instead of a group, they give a lot more options for configuring the page, and fanpages are public, meaning the search engines will find them, and you get statistics on how many of your fans are interacting with the page.

Once you've created your fanpage, you really need to complete the profile but don't just copy and paste from your website, remember the fanpage will be indexed by the search engines so you don't want duplicate content. Make sure you add your contact details etc, and then also create some photo albums with your products or events that your business is involved in. If you also have short videos you've made upload these as well. It might seem like you're recreating your website on Facebook, but many of the people who use Facebook will never visit your website anyway, and if they still connect with you it doesn't really matter.

The wall in your fanpage is the most important part of the entire page, everything you publish there will also appear on the wall of anyone who is a fan, so make sure you never spam, you never use bad language, and you never write about irrelevant topics. Specifically, your fans are fans because you are a local business for their town, or they feel a connection with your business, so don't abuse this.

I always recommend to clients that they publish to their wall at least 2 or 3 times per week. You can publish more often, but unless you have something good to say it isn't worth it, and 2-3 times per week is great for your SEO activities as well.