Search engine optimization encompasses link building as one of the cornerstones of off-page optimization. Off-page optimization deals with the number of inbound links a site receives from other websites and how they reference and link to the target site.

Before you look outside of your own site for links, harvesting the “link equity” and internal link opportunities that exist within your own site are paramount when acquiring competitive keywords.Internal links are link wine, they get stronger with age, so how many pages do you have within your site that have page rank (a healthy volume of link weight) that you could harness for a common goal.

As social media moves beyond early adapters to become more mainstream, Marketers are beginning to realize the tremendous opportunities in SMM.

Marketers need to start allocating budget over but to do so requires more reason than just intuitively “knowing” that it’s the right thing to do. Unfortunately marketers are currently ill equipped to sell social media internally to their stakeholders.

Part of our role as Social Media Marketers is to explain social media to our clients so that they can in turn “sell” it internally to their stakeholders. When I talk about social media with a client, I break it down into easily understandable pieces. In essence, a formula….

Awesome Content + Right Vehicle + Network of Users = Thousands of Visits

Find your awesome content
Awesome content falls into three different types of social media content.

With the number of websites and Blogs growing daily you need to make sure your website stands out from your competition. Your product or service needs to be the best solution for their problem, and you need to quickly and clearly convey that.

Previously we talked about the importance of headlines to draw your prospects into your site. Once they are in your site and reading your content you can’t drop the ball. Your text needs to continue to compel and excite your visitors.

You need to remind them why they are there (usually your site visitors are looking for something they want or they are looking for a solution to a problem).

Your copy (text) needs to remind them of their pain and talk about the solution you offer.

Although your website is about you and your products and services, your copy needs to always relate back to them. It needs to make them feel like you understand them and have exactly what they need.

Blogs are now a dime a dozen, and bloggers need to make their blog posts stand out. Developing a blog following is not as easy as it once was. Learn how to write blog posts that attract readers and retain their attention. Follow these guidelines to cultivate readers…

1. Draw Attention

Use titles to attract the reader’s attention to the blog post. The title should mimic newspaper headlines and generate interest in the blog post. The title can be controversial, but not to the extent of being misleading. Use action words in the title. Bloggers will often come up with a handful of potential titles for blog posts, and then settle on the title that is best suited to a particular blog post.

2. Deliver

If you’ve been involved in the design of your company’s web site, you probably already know how difficult it can be to convey the type of website design you want.

Website design is a matter of personal taste. What one person finds attractive and professional, you may not and vice versa. Oftentimes, what you want is a matter of “I’ll know it when I see it,” but unless your graphic designer is a mind reader, that’s not enough information to assure you’ll get what you visualized in your own head.

Below is a list of questions to help you solidify in your own mind and communicate to your website designer the look and feel you believe would best represent your company.

Website Design Questions

• Do you prefer website designs that contain many different colors

(<http://www.reductionengineering.com/> as an example) or designs that use

Is your website a unicycle, a vehicle that requires much training and skill before it can be used? While there are so many “beautiful” websites online, some simply don’t make sense. Have you ever found yourself on a website that seems quite impossible to use? Even worse, landed on a website after doing a search only to wonder why you are there at all?

Site usability is possibly one of the more important factors of a top performing website. While so many will argue that the site is nothing without a genuine web presence, I will argue that some websites rely purely on offline marketing. At the end of the day, if your website is impossible to use, nobody will be able to (or even want to) use it. Points to ponder when designing your website:

Article writing and article marketing today are very effective means of getting traffic to your website. I look at articles that I have written over a year ago and still see traffic being sent to my website from these articles. The key is to write an article that is high enough quality so that web masters want to publish your articles on their web sites, and for your readers to have enough interest to go to your web site after reading your article. This article goes over the features your article should have that will achieve these results.

1. Your Article Should Provide A Solution Or Answer A Common Question

You’ve decided to build a website. Great! Your first step is to determine its structure, the pages you want to include and the information you want provide to visitors. But how to begin?

Your first instinct may be to make your site different from everyone else’s. After all, trying to differentiate your business is what you’ve been doing throughout your branding process.

Building a website is like building a custom home

When you create a custom house, you can arrange your floor plan however you want, paint the walls as you please and fill the house with furniture you love. Your goal is to create a unique space that stands out from everyone else’s.

In the same vein, there are elements of your website where standing out makes sense. For example, the overall look of your site and your copy should be different from other sites, especially those of your competitors.

It is amazing how successful internet home business websites have so much in common. I have analyzed hundreds of times the websites of the best performing internet business owners and seen these similarities.

One common feature is that these successful sites are likable and somehow easy to use. Everything looks so clear, so it is easy to judge whether you like it or not.

They look so simple, that I often ask, what special they have and how they have become so successful? It seems that the simpler and the more user friendly the site is, the better chances it has to create big sales.

Very clearly one big success factor is that the finetuning work should concentrate to take away all the unnecessary elements and non-selling links.

1.Winning Element: Attention Grabbing Title.

The title is absolutely the most important element of the site. It should contain the promise and to describe the content of the site.

It seems as though everywhere I turn I’m bombarded with information about some aspect of social networking — Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Ryze, Fast Pitch…the list goes on and on. I’ve been quite slow to jump on the social networking bandwagon. I did create a MySpace profile about a year ago, and recently gave up on doing anything with it, as I wasn’t seeing any results.  My new choice in the social networking arena is Facebook, which is where my target market appears to be hanging out.

Based on my use and evaluation of several of these platforms over the last few years, here’s my synopsis of the 3 primary social networking sites important for online business owners:  Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn: