3. Another important reason for not engaging in link exchanges is that you will have to give a link from your pages to someone else’s page, thus giving some of your own page rank and link reputation away. If you just concentrate in producing and distributing good, quality content, you will get lots of one way links and will not have to link back to any of those pages.

Link exchange is a method of the past that, at best, brings you very little seo benefit. It is very time consuming to do it and if a small business website overdoes it, it can actually hurt it’s search engine rankings. Concentrate on content creation and distribution instead and you will soon see the fruits of your effort in the rise of your search engine rankings.

Here is reason two of why trading links with other sites can be a fatal small business seo mistake:

2. Reciprocal links carry almost no weight in the eyes of the search engines as they are obviously manufactured so Google and the rest will almost surely not count those links at all. This method of link building was very effective back in 2004 and 2005 but today it is a pure waste of time. What makes it even worse is that if a small website such a small business website that does not have much content on it engages in active link exchanges with other sites, this can actually hurt their seo rankings as they might be hit with a spam penalty by Google.

There are a lot of “seo experts” and small business marketing consultants out there that actively promote the idea of trading links with other websites. I see a lot of small business websites doing that because the owners have read it somewhere online or they have been told by someone to do so. They send out emails to other small business owners in the field trying to get them to exchange links. Here are 3 reasons why this is such a bad way to get links and how it can actually hurt your small business seo more than it can help.

1. Such a way of getting links is very time consuming first of all. The owner, or the webmaster, or whoever else is in charge of this task needs to go online and find a related small business, but not competing, that has a website and then contact the webmaster. Then, they have to wait for a reply, figure out the terms of the link exchange and then go out and add a link to their own site. In the same time if not less, the same person can write a short article about a related topic and post it to article directories, blog and all other content sharing websites getting times more links back to their website.

It’s definitely true that when you have information on your products and services online, you widen your market with more potential clients. You can include this in your local internet marketing strategy to bring in even more consumers. Marketers say that having your products available online can be a big factor in the profitability of a business, so promoting your products online should be part of a successful local marketing strategy.

As mentioned previously, search engines are a big help in matching you with potential customers. Search engines can be used to advertise your products or services. They do this with local internet marketing software that can target customers from a specific area and direct them to you. This very useful technique can be further enhanced by another strategy where they count the number of times your site is visited compared to your competitor. This way you can learn how to further improve your product and advertising stratagem.

Using the internet is definitely one of the most effective and economical ways to advertise your business, which is especially critical if you’re a small company with tight finances. With local internet marketing, you can even use blogs and local forums as another method to cut costs. An advertising campaign doesn’t have to cost your company an arm and a leg, and it is definitely very effective as a tool to get you local clients. Remember, investing a little time now learning how local internet marketing can benefit you could save you big in the long term.

Getting inbound (links that point to a particular page in your own website) link is one of the most important factors when it comes to improving the rankings of a small business website, and for any other website in that matter. Small business websites are generally in less competitive markets so they will require less links than, let’s say, an affiliate website or an e-commerce website, but they still need to have a certain amount of links in order to rank higher in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Here is a little known but important tip on how to easily get links to your business website:

Search engines favor both types of links, internal and external. The former are links that you have absolute control over as they come from a page to page within your own website and the later are outside pages linking to pages on your website. Naturally, it is easier to get more internal links and the best way to do that is to build more pages in your website. When small business owners hear that, most of the times they freak out as they think that this is a complicated process. In fact, it is just the opposite. All you need is to create a blog (I recommend using WordPress) on your website and start blogging about your industry. If you decide to do this task yourself I’m sure you will have lots of tips and tricks of the trade that you can share as blog posts. If you don’t have the time you can easily delegate this task to your secretary or anyone else in your business for that matter. If they are not experts in the field, use the following tip:

Don’t know what to write about? Just follow the news and events in your industry and provide short summaries of the news as blog posts. Throw in some of your own thoughts and take-aways and you have a brand new page on your website with relevant and unique content. Aim for at least 250 word posts and do it a couple of times a week and you will see your website grow very fast. Let’s do the math, if you do 4 posts a week, which will not take you more than 60 – 75 minutes total depending on your typing skills, that is 16 pages of new content a month. After a couple of months you will have 40 – 50 pages of relevant, unique content. Make sure you include links in the posts to the paged on your website you want to rank and if you make all this a habit of yours, you will be creating links on a regular basis and you will be crushing the local competition in no time!

Building links for a business website can be a hassle. Small business online marketing as a whole can be confusing and you can really hurt your business by not doing it properly. Let our nj seo company help you by providing consulting and guidance to you or even doing the entire online marketing for your small business. We offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee so there is no risk for you!