Website Design and Promotion

Foundational Links

There's a good post by Debra Mastaler, on Search Engine Land, about "Foundational Links". Debra talks about how to start building inbound links to your web site, which is one of the big pieces in getting your site ranked well by Google, et al, by "establishing a base of links from authority sites that work toward building their business reputations." These foundational links are from solid, reputable sources and are generally inexpensive or free.

First are the directories, such as JoeAnt, Best of the Web, GoGuides, and the Open Directory Project.

Second are authority links, such as industry associations you or your business belong to, the Chamber of Commerce, etc. These can improve your reputation within your industry. Also, you'll want to see if you can get links from high ranking sites (if these aren't the same as the aforementioned ones).

Online newsletters may give you a chance to get either paid links by advertising in them or free links by writing articles for them.

Debra also suggests Yellow Pages ads, of which I'm not a huge fan, since they're often expensive and I haven't seen them drive the kind of traffic that businesses are looking for. I suppose it depends on the type of business you're in.

Are you Baffled by the Key Word Selection Process?

As small businesses, socially responsible, health or healing businesses often don't have budgets to hire search engine experts to optimize their websites. While Nathaniel and I help our clients with basic search engine optimization (SEO) as most of them have no idea have to do this themselves, I encourage my clients to learn the basics. Even knowing just a bit of SEO information can help with your search engines rankings.

SEO expert Aaron Wall was recently interviewed by Kelly Spors from The Wall Street Journal on Keyword Selection. Aaron clearly explains the often confusing process of selecting keywords.

Some of the methods Aaron suggests for determining keywords include:

• for established sites, check your web traffic logs to see how people are finding you

• write down all the keywords you would use to search for your product or service

• ask past and current customers/clients what they would use to search for your product or service

• research what terms are being used on blogs and discussion forums related to your topic

• determine what keywords are being used for the top competing sites in your area

• finally, use a keyword tool like www.wordtracker.com, www.keyworddiscovery.com or some of the ones that are available to use for free. i.e. Google's Keyword Tool.

All this and more on this great podcast. You can listen to the podcast for free here.