search engine optimization

The first topic I will discuss is search engine optimization. This involves tweaking your website and performing backlinking activities, as well as providing good quality content for your visitors. You already have some content on your main site and this is enough to get you started. You can also use some free WordPress plugins to modify your site without any complicated computer code.

So what you want to start doing is getting as many good backlinks to your site as possible. This involves contacting or registering with as many high-traffic and top-ranked sites and forums and linking to your site. This improves search engine rankings – you want to be in the top ten pages of Google, unless you don’t get much business this way.

You should only get a maximum of three backlinks per day, otherwise Google will call you a spammer and ban your site. Also beware of people offering you packages where you get 4000 backlinks in a week. This will destroy your ranking as Google’s algorithms are pretty smart these days and you will be caught immediately.

keyword research

Before you start generating backlinks to your site, you need to figure out which keywords to target, so that search engine users get specifically what they want (content relevancy). The tool I use is Google’s keyword suggestion tool.

What you want to search for here are high traffic keywords with local monthly searches. So choose about ten of the keywords that you think are most relevant to your services.

Now for each backlink title, you need to include a title with your primary keyword (law, attorney, etc.) and a secondary keyword phrase, for example:

LisaWong Law – San Diego’s Top Criminal Law Experts

Now, for each of the ten chosen keywords, create titles like the ones above and save them to a text file. Also, you’ll need a 25-30 word description, and about three or four of those too. The reason for this is that Google will detect duplicate content and the backlink will not count.

Submission to Directories

Online directory sites are a bit like the online Yellow Pages, and most are free. You need to visit each site, register and post your newly created title and description. Now some of the directory sites are manually reviewed by humans, and it may take a couple of months for your link to go public, and for this reason I do this first. Doing this can be a bit tedious, but the links are well worth it. I use free software for this, and it speeds things up a bit.

Remember to rotate your titles and descriptions here.

social bookmarking

When someone visits your site and likes your blog post or article, they can bookmark it, vote for it, and share it with others. However, you can do it yourself and retrieve the links to your site. Therefore, you will need to register with the following sites and place their links to your site. These are the main social bookmarking sites I use:

slashdot.org
digg.com
Delicious
reddit.com
fark.com
Newsvine.com
Connotea.org
link bookmark
blinklist.com
Bibsonomy.org
folkd.com
linkagogo.com
friends marks
karmalynx.com
bookmarksdiary.com

Merchandising of articles

Another great free way to get backlinks and traffic to your site. You write about three articles, each based on a keyword phrase, and you should include that keyword phrase no more than 3 times in the body of the article and only once in the title of the article. It must be between 400 and 600 words and must not contain any promotional text or external links.

So to promote your site using articles, you have a bio box at the bottom. Here you place a small classified ad and your backlink to your site. The important thing here is that the link includes the main keyword of the page it is linking to.

Then you need to submit your article to the top five article directories.

Press releases

Similar to article marketing, only it should be newsworthy and something new. For example, you just opened a new law firm in San Diego, so a press release in a local newspaper could bring in some welcome business.

blog

Another free way to generate traffic. WordPress is the best, but you can use Blogger.com or hubpages.com. I will refer to WordPress here.

Now take the articles you created earlier for the article directories and rewrite them. These should be used for blog content. Or even write some new ones based on your keywords. Now with WordPress, you can schedule your posts to go live at the times and dates you choose. I suggest you set your posts to run 4-7 days apart as search engines like fresh content. Don’t go and post five articles at once.

WordPress plugins

WordPress blogs make it easy to set up your own site without writing a single line of computer code. However, there are hundreds of plugins and it can be difficult to know which one to use and which one suits your website best. Here is a brief overview of the ones I use the most:

WP Policies

This installs all the necessary legal documents that every website must have. It hides them from website visitors because no one hardly reads them, but they are recognized by search engines. It includes privacy policy, anti-spam policy, disclaimer, email policy, terms of use, earnings disclaimer and more. These can be tailored to the needs of each individual site.

Google Analytics for WordPress

It is used to track site visitors, which pages they visit, how long they were on the page, where they came from: Google, other sites, etc., and displays graphs and charts on monthly statistics.

fast ad sense

This makes it easy to add Google Ads to your blog posts and pages. Simply sign up for a free Google AdSense account, copy and paste a code into the plugin, and earn money when visitors click on your ads. Good for a little extra income from your site.

socializing

This plugin will place a row of little Facebook, Twitter, Digg icons at the top of your blog pages and posts, and when clicked, the user can tweet or share the link to your posts on social media .

No blog should be without it, as Facebook and the like are widely used today, with ten percent of the world’s population using them.

That sums up this report on promoting a local business online on a tight budget. There are many other ways to promote online, but they can be expensive and most people burn their fingers and lose their entire marketing budget quickly. Google AdWords is one of them. It is so competitive and difficult to succeed on a limited budget. And the big ones with deep pockets will just eat you up.