How to Strengthen Your Online Business

If you rely your business online, especially if your business is 100 per cent online, you need to better place your site in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), that will lead to better exposure.

Why SERP? Because, although direct traffic from your advertisement is nice, most of your potential visitors and clients are coming from the search engines – the more the better – this is called organic traffic.

Strengthen your online business is different from advertising and promotion. It’s more Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) than advertising and promotion process, such as ads placements and campaigns.

The most common term referring to strengthening your site is link building.

How to strengthen your online business

I recommend you to strengthen your online business through:

• Directory submission
  Submit your business website to web directories, both free and paid. In my humble opinion, submitting yours to free directories have almost no different in your SERP placement, but will expose your links more to the directory’s visitors.
• Getting reviewed
  Have your site reviewed, by free or incentivised reviewers. This is big in exposing your site better and pushing your site to higher SERP placement. Choose your reviewers wisely – choose those that offer you high quality and traffic sites, not Google PageRank. Be warned, Google doesn’t like you do this :)
• Have other link to you
  Have other sites, especially those that highly related to your site, link to you will rise your site importance in the eye of search engine. This can be achieved through link exchange, contests, and other free methods, as well as paid method of buying link. Again, Google hates this. Be warned, and continue at your own risk.

Some tips

Choose your link building partners wisely. Some tips from my experience:

• Choose ‘real’ web directories to submit your site to, not link farm or made-to-sell directories.
• Whenever possible, choose paid services over free – money talks.
• Sponsor a website theme – this will bring much back links to your online business, depending on the popularity of the theme.
• Comment on blogs and forums – You will not only raise your business profile, but also your exposure, to both visitors and search engines.
• Sponsor a site that list sponsors on-site – I particularly like sponsorship program from AWStats, the infamous free site stats software – creator.

My main recommendation – learn from forums and blogs, as they are offering unlimited wealth of information for free.

Ivan Widjaya
Business link builder