In part one of my guide to social media success I went through the basics of setting up your social media accounts and connecting them through jet pack on your WordPress site, you can do this through a standard HTML site, but using the tools integrated into WordPress is quicker, there are also other CMS’s like Joomla which can also be used to publish your content but for this guide we will stick to WordPress enabled sites.
Once you have your site up and running you still have some work to do if you want to beat the competition in your given field, you can use pay per click through Bing, Google or Yahoo but for popular keywords you could be charged up to £10 a click, believe me this is a VERY expensive way of getting extra clients to visit your site.
Natural or organic key search rankings work best, and they won’t cost you an arm and a leg but you must invest the time to get the results.
Keyword research can be done using many platforms but for this guide we will stick to google webmasters as this is industry standard, you should not ignore Bing as lots of potential customers use Bing search.
Key words are words that are in plain english this means the search terms that someone looking for a service might type in on their phone or PC, you can try searching what you think your customers are searching for and see if you can find your website or service, you can also find out who your competition are and where they rank compared to you, obviously the higher ranking you are, the more likely they are to click on your website.
The content on your website is what the search engines crawl to rank your site they all look at website speed, code, mistakes, backlinks, image tags, duplication of content and relevance to your market.
They do this by using algorithms to calculate the importance of your site compared to other websites in a similar area then rank you accordingly, lets do a quick recap of these points.
- Do your research
- Pick your desired keywords
- Check the competition for those keywords
- Visit your site regularly searching those keywords
You need to create content that will drive clients or customers to your website these can consist of the following.
- Blog posting
- Competitions
- Quiz
- Q and A
Every time you create content, much like this blog post, you can link it to previous blog posts or any other content on your site, these back links bring continuity to your site and for users and also help the bots that crawl your site for content.
Many website owners do a couple of posts and give up because they don’t see the results to really battle for the top placings you must be consistent with regular blog posts. Because you have connected WordPress to social media using Jetpack every time you hit the publish button Jetpack sends this blog post with picture to all of your followers on social media saving you the time and effort of logging in to five or six different services and posting them individually.
We also need quality backlinks from high page rank sites, this part can be quite tricky because search engines like to rank your site on it’s importance, not only on its content but its importance in the world wide web you can do this in a number of ways.
Many people use a paid for service like Fiver to buy backlinks this can be risky because the search engines can view these links as server farm links, although I must confess if chosen well they can make a big difference, but five thousand poor quality backlinks will not be better than 10 quality ones, and the search engines may become suspicious if all of a sudden you have thousands of back links so slow and steady wins the race.
You can also backlink from other services like Reddit or forums or blogs or commenting on youtube videos leaving your web address at the end.
So lets recap.
- Add content consistently
- Backlinks either paid for or organic
- Backlinks from forums or other blogs
- Slow and easy does it with backlinks and content
You may also want to consider a you tube channel if you have a certain type of service that suits video.
The search engines see this as high quality information linking back to your site, many make a good living from posting quality content so why cant you display your service, promotion or explainer video on youtube.
You can also use a paid for service lime Fiverr to create a infographic of your services, potential clients find this useful to understand what you are actually offering as a business, a picture tells a thousand words.
You should also include a subscription popup on your website and in the footer because every email you collect is a potential future client or customer, this can be done simply through jetpack or you can use mail chimp or any other mailing service then every time you have a new blog post or item to sell you can send out a mail to all of your subscribers as well.
Finally from my experience learn to enjoy updating your website with blog posts and offers, as its about showing others what you are offering and why they should choose you over the competition if you would like any help with the above services please contact us
