online marketing

Long-term authority is the name of the game!

Paul TagentLeave a comment

Once launched, a new website is unlikely to see much SEO traffic to start with, so Bath Marketing Consultancy’s suggestion is to focus on making long-term plans to get your website onto the radars that you want to be on. I have identified the need for your website to build “trust” and to ensure that your expectations of organic dominance be realistic, so below is an idea about the long term strategies you could consider.


I know I am in charge

One great strategy is to become an authority in some niche area. If you do this, you will earn links when other webmasters will need to link to credible sources and they will quite possibly link to you. When search engines see many consistent, new (quality) links into a website, the search engines begin to think that this site has authority and having authority is one of the biggest single determining factors in the rankings of pages within search results.


Unfortunately, if you are like a lot of websites, you don’t and won’t have real authority so it is up to you to make this into a non-problem. It is possible to mimic authority by providing a widget or an embed tag that lives on other sites. Since every time someone uses your widget that is hosted on your site, it also creates a link to your site, over time this will create an appearance of authority when many sites link to you just by using your widget.

However, a widget is not an easy thing to do so another way is to position your site as an expert in its field thus encouraging sites to link to you for reference purposes. For example, I have a client who operates in a very niche market and I suggested he get in touch with other (more established) site owners within his sector asking them to link to his site as the content he had written would support their site. In addition, I encouraged him to leave comments wherever possible on relevant Blogs and/or sites demonstrating his credibility within the sector. 


Sure enough, this process resulted in his website becoming more and more credible in its field and hence its position within Google has started to increase.


My next post will be on creating content for your website…..



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Twitter Facts for Internet Marketers

Paul TagentLeave a comment

I recently came across a very interesting article by By Anna Johnson about Twitter based on Twitter’s recent 2010 developer conference, Chirp, the company’s co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone revealed some intriguing statistics about the company.

Here are some facts and figures of interest to Internet marketers:

Twitter has 105,779,710 (just under 106 million) users
Twitter is growing by 300,000 users per day
Twitter gets 180 million unique visitors per day
75 percent of Twitter’s traffic is outside Twitter.com i.e. one out of four Twitter users accesses Twitter via a third party like Tweet Deck
Twitter users post 55 million tweets per day
Twitter’s search engine gets 600 million search queries per day and are expected to rise to 1 billion per day by May 2010

If anyone is ever in doubt about the use of Twitter within online marketing, I think these should dispell any negative myths!

Blogs & how to use one

Paul TagentLeave a comment

Do you blog? As you probably know, a blog is an online site in diary form. The most typical blog is one that has articles that are posted periodically with the newest appearing at the top of the page; above the previous one. There are also static pages like the about us or profile pages that provide information about the site owner. A blog can also link to other blogs and/or websites, display a calendar of events & many other features. In fact, blogs are so versatile that they sometime replace actual websites.

There are millions of blogs out there in numerous formats and maintaining a blog requires considerable work and effort. However, if the content is relevant and interesting to read, blogs can rapidly become new business tools as well as a great PR tool for the owner.

I use my blog as a way of demonstrating my market (or marketing!) knowledge; a sort of reputation management tool that I hope helps my readers. I have installed analytics to my blog so I know where readers come from and how long they spend on the blog. I have also linked up both my blogs for link building purposes.

However you use your blog, here are some functions that it can perform:

1.keep customers up to date with your latest offerings
2.help establish a dialogue with customers, especially if you allow customers to leave comments
3.provide a platform for you to inform people of developments within your business – although a “news” section on your website can also perform this function
4.raise your profile as an expert in your field
5.list other sites with which you are associated – Twitter, Linkedin etc
6.it can even bring in revenue by allowing adverts to appear on it or by asking people to subscribe to it

As you have probably gathered, I love blogs, but don’t start one unless you can maintain it. If need be, enlist the help of someone who can help you write content and someone to help you optimise and link it. Every little helps!!