When posting backlinks, keep it varied, but make sure you stick to the relevant keywords. Try branching it out to more related and similar words too.

The idea is to simulate as though there are thousands of people promoting your site. They wouldn’t all be posting the same comment over and over—you need to make it feel more random and human-like.

The strategy for backlinking is all about recreating the process of natural growth in popularity as your readers and customer base grow.

Proper use of this will provide exceptional results both in search engine ranking and unique viewers. The better the posts, the more quality traffic you will receive.

In general, aim for about 40% of your comments to be primary keywords, 30% secondary keywords, 15% filler about the reaction, and then about 5% about the url. Truthfully, the percentages are not all that important just try to stick to those distributions and keep it natural. This is important for effective internet marketing and business strategy.

If you’re looking to gain credibility in your field and want to increase backlinks at the same time, write high quality articles about a field your business is in. Make sure to keep the keyword density in line with your website’s pages, and then submit these to article directories such as EzineArticles and ArticlesBase.

Make sure to keep it professional and include your backlinks. This is a great way to increase customers and ethos.

Once you feel you’ve really started to dive into the world of SEO go back to Google Webmaster Tools and see how people are coming to your site. Adjust your keywords and SEO methods accordingly so as to best maximize your profits and views. Keep making backlinks. Use the best SEO software available to do your keyword research!

It’s important to the search engines that you seem popular, even if you aren’t yet. You can ease up once you have a solid niche and it begins to happen naturally. You should never fully stop though, as you want to keep a fresh source of traffic at all times.

There’s your introduction to small business search engine optimization. Hope this has helped a bit with your SEO adventures!

First off, there is no magical secret to getting your site onto Google’s first page. Search engines are a strange and not-easily-navigated realm with many undisclosed algorithms in place ordering the rankings.

It’s good to know though, that there are a few things you can do to have your site be found much easier. No need to worry about the nitty-gritty, most of SEO is actually fairly simple.

Let me start by simply saying: keywords are how people will find your site.

How do you find a website to solve your problem when you use a search engine? The main search engines rely on keywords associated with, and written on a page. The title of your page has meta-tags which should include some main words detailing what will be found on that page.

When you see pages listed on google, the description meta-tags are what is shown under the URL. This should be clear and to the point—most readers will see this at some point—use it to your advantage. Make sure the tags are unique to each post or page so that you show more content to the search engines, and thus receive a page boost.

Use keywords in your headers! Overall, try to have a density of your keywords be about 3-5% throughout the page. This includes tags and headers. If you need help finding the right keywords, it helps to use the best SEO software available.

The number one determining factor for a higher rank is CONTENT! There’s no point in SEOptimizing a website if it’s got nothing to give to the viewers who click! If you provide the user with desirable content in a way which is easily navigable, they will come back for more. I cannot stress the importance of these points! Really put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers coming to view your site! Also, try not to reuse old content, as most search engines will view this negatively, and your ranking will go down as a result.

Become familiar with your .htaccess file. You can choose if you want the “www.” to appear before your site’s name or if you want it without. Whichever you decide to go with, STICK WITH IT! It’s terrible to your site for page rankings because it will look as if you have two pages for each single page, a definite drop in the rankings!

Note, the .htaccess is only for Apache servers (most servers are), however if you are on a Windows server, it is slightly different. You’ll need to look up how to redirect to one or the other. You can also choose how it should appear in Google Webmaster Tools (I highly recommend them!)

If you want Google to index your site (and you do) you will need a robots.txt file, which tells the search engines what to look for on your site. You should also have a custom 404 error page in case your site returns the error as having not found a page. Another good practice is to set up the sitemap.xml if you have many pages. Google prefers organization to a jumbled mess.

What can you do to increase your rankings off-site? Plenty more benefits exist for a small business off-site than on. You will want customers, and off-site social media is a great place to find them. This one point is crucial to being found on the net!

Part of an effective internet marketing strategy is getting listed on social media sites like: Digg, Reddit, Delicio.us, Twitter etc.; directory submissions, profile links, and blog commenting are the most efficient and easiest way to start creating backlinks.

In order to get the most bang for your buck though, they need to be varied and come from different locations. Try these yourself before really going overboard with link building though. Building too fast can look unnatural, just try visiting blogs with relevant keywords and offering a helpful comment along with your URL. Tip: by using the best SEO software, you can find the easier keywords to rank for.

There is no right or wrong way to do this, just have fun with it and be sincere! Once you are really experienced with link-building, try looking into link wheels and link pyramids.

For more information on SEO and SEO software read these articles:

• Best SEO Software—How to Grab the Low Hanging Fruit
• SEO Checklist For Business Owners
• 10 Must-Have Elements Of Successful Online Marketing

Any effective internet marketing strategy must begin with intelligent, focused website design.

The goal for 99% of all websites is to generate leads and make sales.

To accomplish either of these goals, you need to focus your attention on website design, including:

• Strategic Copy
• User Interface Design and Flows
• Calls To Action

These three elements are at the center of lead generating web design. When you get these 3 elements right, you will increase the opportunity for customer acquisition.

Part of creating an effective landing page is the ability to tie all elements together.

Your lead generation web pages should have most (if not all) of the following design elements:

Hero Graphic
Used specifically to catch your user’s attention, the hero graphic should be above the fold and visually appealing (think: eye candy). 

Main Features
Can you describe your product or service in 1 or 2 sentences? This is what your main features should be… quick selling points for your business. Users should be able to read your main features quickly and get a good idea about what your business does.

Benefits
Features and benefits go hand-in-hand. A feature is simply a characteristic of a product or service. Whereas, a benefit explains what the customer has to gain by using your product or service.

Need help coming up with benefits? Try adding the phrase “which means…” to the end of each feature.

How It Works
Customers to your landing page want to know how your product or service works. You use this area to tell them what to expect and/or how the process works.

In most cases, first-time visitors have no idea what your company does or what products you offer. Tell them! 

Testimonials
Praise from your current and past customers shows credibility and legitimacy. Using company names, logos and customer quotes helps your visitors confirm their decision.

Call To Action
No landing page would be complete without a call-to-action (CTA)—what do you want users to do? The goal for your landing page is to convert: get a lead and/or sell a product. Your CTA should tell your visitors exactly what you want them to do.

Lead Capture Form
Aside from selling products, generating leads is the most important job of your landing page. You can’t capture leads without a lead capture form.

Your input form should be simple to produce more conversions. You don’t need to ask for a user’s address if you are only adding them to an email list. *Remember: the less information you ask for, the more leads you’ll get.

Today’s customer doesn’t touch a product, restaurant, or service agreement without researching online first.

These customers—your customers—go to Google Places, Yelp and other peer review sites before making a buying decision.

Think of peer review sites as word-of-mouth marketing, because that’s exactly what it is.

These reviews are a learning experience for your customer. Essentially, these reviews are a snapshot of your customers’ experience with your company.

Take advantage of these review sites by asking your customers, vendors and partners to review your business on these peer review sites. (The best sites are Yelp and Google Places).

Communicate your request to be reviewed via all channels of communication: your email newsletter, your website, in-store displays, social networking accounts, print marketing materials.

Reviews on Yelp and Google Places also help your business rank higher in Google search results.

Recently, I talked about the 8 disciplines of internet marketing. I’ll go in-depth in each of these disciplines soon, but for now, let’s talk about something more important.

If you have a website or online business, what’s the most important metric to measure?

Let me give you a hint, it’s NOT traffic.

If you want to be successful online, you need a website that converts.

What does that mean exactly? A conversion can be a number of different things depending upon your online business goals. The most tracked conversions are 1) Leads and 2) Sales.

Your website should be designed in a way that generates leads and (if you have an online business) makes sales.

Most business owners make the mistake of creating a website, setting up a PPC campaign, throwing $$ at the PPC campaign, then wondering why they have very little leads and sales.

Part of the problem is sub-par website design.

When you shop for website design companies, most have basic web design packages you can choose from. Most typically have a standard package and an ecommerce package. But very few web design companies offer lead generating web design services.

This is a problem because generating leads and sales should be the number one goal of your website. In other words: converting traffic should be your 1st priority.

You’d be amazed at how many businesses know this, but choose to ignore it and funnel more money into their PPC budgets.

Your focus should be on maximizing the number of conversions from traffic you already have… before you do any other internet (or offline) marketing activities!

If you’re not doing this, you are wasting money.

Let me give you an example. We recently launched Dana DeSarle Systems, a workout program designed to lower belly fat.

The home page for DDS has had relatively good conversion rates.

What we’re looking for is 1) People to purchase the system, and/or 2) Visitors to opt-in to our list.

Some people might say, “Well, you’re getting pretty good conversions, let’s increase it by creating a PPC campaign.”

I don’t agree. Matter of fact, we’re redesigning the home page right now so we can test the new home page against our current “control” page.

We have spent some money with PPC, but haven’t gone all-out yet. I want to make sure the site converts better before we take the next step.

This is not hard to do. And, more important, this method saves money.

Online marketing is an animal that needs constant care and attention… food, water, shelter, taken on walks, etc. You can’t just go out and buy it, leave it in the kennel and expect it to survive.

Effective internet marketing takes work and dedication.

The good news is, it’s not extremely difficult. It’s not rocket surgery.

Now if you have a team of marketers at your company, online marketing becomes even easier. (Yea. Sure.)

Chances are, you don’t have a team of marketers under your employ. You might have one or two—it’s more realistic that YOU are doing the marketing. Not to fear. You can do this, it’s like eating an elephant: one bite at a time!

Online marketing can be broken down into 8 distinct disciplines:

1. Organic SEO
2. Conversion Optimization
3. Website Analytics
4. Content Marketing
5. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
6. Social Media Marketing
7. Email Marketing
8. Lead Generation

The best way to tackle online marketing is to break these 8 disciplines down into specific tasks that need to be completed.

Successful online marketing takes a lot of work. But to be successful, you need to plan things out, make it easier on yourself.

More on this later…

Differentiate your small business by being present where your customers are: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Just as most consumers want peer recommendations before making a purchase, they also want to connect with companies in new, refreshing ways that help them understand the company’s products or services.

Businesses that provide customers multiple opportunities to connect not only add to and enhance their current online marketing programs, but also strengthen the relationships they have with their customers in unprecedented ways.

There are hundreds and hundreds of social media networks out there… but you really only need to focus on the big 4: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. If you’re feeling adventurous, add Google +.

I’m sure you’re wondering what’s the advantage of having a social network pages when your business already has a website. The answer is widening your sphere of influence.

You want your story to reach as many customers as possible. (A cornerstone for effective internet marketing).

The problem for many businesses is being intimidated or overwhelmed by creating their own page, but in reality, making pages is not that hard—and, it is one of the easiest marketing tools that businesses can use to attract new customers.

In addition, company profiles on these social network sites will often rank high for your business name, especially if you optimize your profiles to include your official business name in the content.

How Online Traffic Works

If you’ve recently published a website, say within the last six months, and you don’t have much traffic to your site – that’s completely normal.

Unless your company is a recognized brand name (like Apple, Dolce & Gabbana, Whirlpool) that users are likely to search for, new website owners cannot expect to publish their website and expect traffic to come rolling in a week or two later.

The newer the site, the farther down search results it will be. So, you’ve figured out how to build a website from scratch, now you have to figure out how to build website traffic.

Once you have an understanding that it takes patience to increase website traffic, also understand it takes constant effort to become visible in search results.

Search engine visibility is accomplished through SEO.

If you don’t know what SEO is, then you have a lot to learn before you build more website traffic. If you are a busy entrepreneur or business manager/owner, seriously consider hiring a reputable SEO/Online marketing company to provide SEO and online marketing for your website.

SEO Strategies for Better Online Visibility

The key to acquiring more traffic is through online visibility—primarily within search engine results—after a relevent keyword phrase is queried.

For example, if you have recently built and published a website that sells hand–knit apparel and accessories, you probably want to show up in search results for “hand–knit sweaters” or “hand–knit gloves and hats,” and so on.

*Tip: The more specific and closely matched your targeted keywords are to the purpose of your website, the better. Trying to get visible search results rankings for a general keyword phrase like “professional web design” is pointless for a new website, because there are millions of bigger, older websites with established traffic flow that already have competing for the exact same keyword phrase.

Google Webmaster & Google Analytics

The very first thing to do once your website is published is to submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster.

If you don’t know how to create one, don’t worry – Google Webmaster has a step–by–step sitemap creation tool that makes it easy.

If your sitemap is not submitted to Google Webmaster, any other efforts you’re taking will be pointless, because Google won’t even have your site indexed.

Once you have a sitemap submitted, Google your URL. If your website pops up, then you’re good to go. If not, check the Webmaster site for possible mistakes and solutions.

To figure out which keywords to target within your website (words/terms/phrases you want to be found in search results with), is through Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a valuable tool for effective internet marketing for small business. It offers a keyword research tool, which tells you how many users are searching for that term (monthly), and what kind of competition it has.

Ideally, you want to optimize your website content for keywords that have a high number of searches, and low competition. This is simple, but not easy, given the billions of websites on the web.

Compile a list of keywords that are the best possible choices considering competition, number of monthly searches, and relevance to your website – above all, relevance is the most important factor.

Content SEO

The first and most crucial element of on–site SEO is to consistently update your site with fresh, unique content. Consistently updated content is important for several reasons:

• It is a priority in Google’s search results algorithm. Google places websites with useful, consistently updated content above sites that have little content, poor content, and/or repetitive, shallow content. This is why sites like About.com, eHow, Suite101, and other content farms no longer show in the top of search results.
• It establishes trust with new website visitors.
• If the content provides valuable information, eventually other websites will notice, and link to your site, which can drastically increase search result rankings.
• It gives the website more opportunity to insert keyword content and other SEO elements.

*Tip: Do not get caught up in keyword density. Keyword density is not SEO, and does not affect search engine rankings, and certainly not online visibility. As long as you use your keywords naturally throughout the content, that’s enough. Remember, you want to focus on effective internet marketing, not tricking search engines.

Meta–Data, Page Title, URL and Sub–title Tags

Some basic on–site SEO to help your online visibility:

• Meta–descriptions and meta–tags – these are found on the html or CMS set–up side of your content page. Use the same keywords focused on in your content in both of these, but no more than 2 or 3 keyword or keyword phrases.
• Page title – this is what appears at the very top left of the browser, and also signals the search engines about what your web page is about. Keep page titles simple and searchable, relevant to your content, and keyword focused.
• Subheadings – H2 tags are an SEO–friendly way to create content subheadings that help to emphasize your keywords to search engine crawlers.
• URL – Do not let your CMS create your URLs. Unless it was developed to be SEO–friendly, program–created URLs will typically not be SEO–friendly.
• An example of an SEO–friendly URL: www.mywebsite.com/new–web–content.php
• SEO–unfriendly URL: www.mywebsite.com/new.a4#00?web.%00$8h?content.php

Beyond SEO

There are many, many more aspects to SEO not mentioned here, so the best advice to building traffic is to consult a professional SEO agency.

In addition to practicing SEO, you will probably also need to invest in SEM – search engine marketing – in order to drive traffic to your website and increase conversion rates.