Small Business Marketing

Business owners often wonder how their small business marketing needs to include how many backlinks they ought to build and how fast they should build them. Since search engines use backlinks as one method to determine a websites ranking, it is often tempting to rush out and get as many backlinks as possible for your business website. However this mistake of building too many backlinks and building them too quickly can result in Google disregarding those links and even deranking your site.

Here are a few small business marketing tips to use in your backlinking campaign:

1. Generally it is best to start building backlinks slowly and build them up gradually over time. This is especially true if your website is brand new because building 1000 backlinks to a brand new site sends warning signals to Google and your small business marketing will not be as effective as it should be

2. Your link velocity or the rate at which you build your backlinks, is dependant on how competitive your keyword is. For example, local businesses operating out of large cities like Dallas, New York, Florida or Chicago definitely have more online competition than businesses located in smaller towns. However since most local search terms as not as competitive as other internet marketing keywords, 50 or so backlinks per week are adequate. You can then build up to a maximum of 500 backlinks per month for about 1-3 months until your website achieving Page 1 ranking on Google, then you can slow down your campaign to a maintenance mode.
3. When building your backlinks for small business marketing, the anchor text should be a combination of your keyword and the URL of your website. The split should be about 70-80%your keyword and 20-30% your URL. If your site has say 2 keywords, then split the anchor text across those keywords, so that your anchor text is 40% keyword 1, 40 % keyword 2 and 20% your website URL.

4. Keep track of your backlinks by keeping a list of all the URLS of the website pages you have created a link on. This will help you in a number of ways:
* You will know which sites you have already used as a source of backlinks so you don’t duplicate the backlinks
* You will have a list of backlink sources you can use on another project
* You can use the list to create a second layer of backlinks. These are other backlinks that point to the first backlinks – this helps the first backlinks get indexed faster.

Small Business Marketing works! You just need to know how to do it properly and consistently. Let us know if you need a “Virtual Marketing Department”!