Jam727 Enterprises

When I talk about website marketing I don’t just mean getting more traffic or Search Engine Optimization (SEO). My feeling is that you should increase your website’s conversion before focusing on traffic. That way the results will be a lot better when the traffic does get added.

The sad truth is many business owners believe traffic is everything on the internet. But it’s not their fault… the world is full of experts guaranteeing riches from huge amounts of website traffic. But they don’t tell you that traffic is a waste of time if your website can’t sell.

What your website should really be doing

My philosophy is to build a relationship with visitors using your website. A big part of this is how you present your business through your website. But more importantly you need to start building a relationship by collecting their contact details.

It’s generally accepted only 1-2% of people will buy when they visit your website. But by taking the time to create a relationship with them that figure will be a lot better. It’s just like the one-hit wonder band competing with another band who creates great albums year after year.

Avoiding the social media buzz

With social media buzzwords flying around constantly now it’s important to remember what it’s all about. We have a lot of good ways to communicate with people around the world… and some bad ones as well. But at the end of the day it’s about creating a relationship.

It doesn’t matter whether this relationship is built over email, or Twitter, or Facebook, or YouTube… or believe it or not through mail, newspapers, fax or phone. It’s a matter of the value you provide the relationship no matter what media you use. In my opinion you should be using a wide variety of these media to connect with your prospects and clients.

Remember what your objective really is

There is no best answer… there is no almighty social media property that you should base your business around. That would be like having a store but deciding a phone was too much inconvenience. Intelligent business owners realize a phone is a useful tool for their business and that’s the same with social media.

The moral of the story is to focus on building a relationship with visitors irrespective of the media. By creating a valuable relationship your sales will rise almost without effort. Because people buy from those they know and trust.

How to implement this concept

Take a long hard look at your website and decide whether your focus is on the relationship or on yourself. What valuable information are you offering? Are you collecting contact details to send this information with?

Building a relationship isn’t really difficult… just pretend someone is standing in front of you right now. The results can be amazing.

Because it’s just another way to be unique.

OK, this is a immersive concept and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my research at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – basics

The more authority your site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will send authority to your web pages. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your site then you inherit their authority and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google goes up.

How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is kept secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group exploiting the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological development of this period in history.

How not to get Backlinks

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some underhand sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the prime offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – web sites where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not related to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from bad reputation web pages – these are particularly nasty as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on dodgy ground, but key media properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….