Doing business smarter online

Carpentry Apprentices Ben Payne (left) and Stone Crothers, of Apprenticeships Queensland, are participating in the Bundamba Flood Recovery program.

David Nielsen

IN CHALLENGING times we need to do business smarter.

Many of us in business want to find better, more effective ways to promote our services online.

We’d all like to increase our link placement on other sites, improve ranking in search engines, and drive more traffic to our websites.

Most of us in small to medium business have limited marketing budgets for online activities, making this task even more difficult.

If you are looking for free and inexpensive solutions, the following is a good place to start:

Google places

This is by far one of the most important places to register your business. Google Places powers Google Maps, Google Search and Google Hotpot.

Facebook places

For organisations that have a physical location, it makes sense to be included in Facebook Places in order to track the people who are visiting your shop or venue.

Bing, Google, Yahoo

Ensure your business listing is accurate and complete with all GPS devices, and on Yahoo, Bing and Google.

Backlinks

The number of backlinks to a site is an indication of the popularity or importance of the website to which it is linking. Backlinks are important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) because search engines use them as one of many methods to decide whether a website is worthy of first-page results. When finding backlinks, you should only use sources that have a high Google Page Rank and get high traffic.

Bing Local

As Bing grows with market share, it is important for your business to have a presence where your customers are located. Microsoft has created a free system called Bing Local. When you register with Bing Local you will be able to put in your address, phone, website, email, hours, payment methods, photos, and additional information about your business.

Email signatures

Websites are using social networking integrated tools, so it is extremely important to use an email signature whenever you post a response to a topic within your realm of expertise.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has over 10 million users and, of those, half are comprised of unique business users. Chances are if you Google your company name, LinkedIn will show on the first page of the search results. If you are a Twitter user, connect Twitter to LinkedIn.

Media releases

When you send out this newsworthy information online, are you using SEO keywords that may drive traffic to your site?