Increasing online visibility is the goal of most online business owners. After all, without visibility, you have no traffic and thus no business. However, when you start to research how to improve your online visibility, you discover many options, but find that there is little time for research and implementation. Where does an online entrepreneur turn first to get the visibility (and traffic) to promote an online venture?

New tricks and gimmicks come out every day, but unfortunately, most of them are like so many recording artists and become one-hit wonders. In my business, I’ve discovered that there are a handful that are able to stand the test of time. Some have been around for as long as websites have been around, while others are newer kids on the block. Here are my 10 most effective strategies to massively boost your visibility online:

1. Press releases.

Press releases are a well-known marketing strategy that have worked for years with print and broadcast media. In recent years they have found new life as an online visibility tool. Just like in the old days, your release should carry some newsworthy angle that has been optimized with a select few keywords by which you want your business to be found. Don’t waste your time submitting your release to the free press release sites — the release simply sits on the site and goes no where else. Instead, invest in a fee-based service (I prefer PRWeb.com), which will ensure your release gets the recognition it deserves.

2. Social Networking.

A “johnny come lately” to the online visibility scene, social networking now ranks near the top in terms of attracting visibility to your business for a very low cost. If you don’t yet have accounts on the two most popular social networking platforms, Facebook and Twitter, today is the day to hop on board and begin to network. Choose 1-2 social networking platforms where your target market hangs out, and then begin to work it by making connections, joining groups or networks, sharing resources, and asking questions. Dedicate 15-30 minutes each day to your effort to begin to see results.

3. Article Marketing.

Writing and submittíng articles to major article directories has definitely stood the test of time for online visibility. Article marketing will drive traffic to your site, establish you as an expert in your target market’s eyes, and give you valuable content to repurpose into information products. For maximum effectiveness, your article needs to contain a strong resource box (author’s bio) that drives traffic back to your site, needs to contain useful content that solves a problem of your target market, and be written in a tips-based fashion, like this one, since it is the easiest format for a website visitor to read and digest.

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You know it is funny in a way. Webmasters have learned that the most important thing that they can do to improve the traffic to their website and to attract attention from the search engines is to build links to their website.

But when it comes time to actually start building links to one’s website, people typically pick the hardest way to accomplish the task and then they get to work.

Working Hard

People have been told about various ways to build links to one’s website, and they go through the process of picking out the method that they would prefer to use. It is kind of ironic that most people pick the method that they believe will be the easiest and least expensive to achieve, and when all is said and done, they will have picked out the hardest, least effective method of building links.

For example, most newcomers to online business choose:

• Reciprocal links.
• Directory submissions.

With Reciprocal Links, people buy a software package that helps them to search out websites that are supposedly “related” to theirs and then they send an email to the person who owns that website, proclaiming the benefits of trading links and asking for the link.

With directory submissions, webmasters can get software that is supposed to help with the process, but it takes hours just to submít one’s website to a few dozen directories. Fortunately, there are service providers who also provide submissions to web directories. Regardless of how you get links submítted to web directories, you generally have to pray that those web directories are approving submissions, since most owners have abandoned their directories.

Beyond the time required setting up links in this fashion, and the frustration of getting very few links for the amount of time spent, the worst part of the equation is that the search engines tend to ignore links gained through these methods, and few humans find and follow those links.

Internet newcomers using these methods frequently spend a lot of time trying to promote their websites, and in the end, they have accomplished nothing more than wasting a lot of their time and energy.

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This is not exactly a “top 10″ list, as all of the following things could easily be listed as the most important consideration. Individuals, small companies and big corporations all need to consider the same things when choosing a hosting package.

The overall “tip” here is that you need to get accurate information to make comparisons among hosts. Therefore, each individual tip is another, separate aspect of the hosting relationship that you need to investigate. You should take them all seriously.

1. Traffic (”data transfer” or “bandwidth”)

These terms refer to the amount of information, measured in bytes, that is delivered from your website to visitors. Although you will hear about “unlímited bandwidth”, check to see if the same terminology used for marketing purposes is reflected in the contract. In other words, read the contract before signing on the dotted line. Unless you will be uploading photo archives or using your site to swap large files, your small- to mid-size website should normally use no more than 3GB of bandwidth monthly. Watch out for “overage” charges (per additional GB, usually) and consider upgrading your account if the site traffic increases.

2. Disk space

Apply the same skeptical approach to the “unlímited disk space” deals, as you did to the claims about traffic above. Again, the majority of small to mid-size sites need 10-20MB of web space at most, so unless 500MB or “unlímited space” is part of the basic package, don’t bite. You can easily determine how much storage you need by checking your file sizes and adding them up - all the HTML pages (which are small) plus all the images (some of which can be big).

3. Uptime (”reliability”)

The minimum figure for uptime should be 99%. Today, in fact, that is the minimum advertised amount, as 99.5% or more is referred to all the time. Many people would consider this the most important consideration.

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Are you fed up waiting for your website to reach the top of Google? Or are you getting far less visitors than you would like from Google? If this sounds like you, read on and find out whether you are committing any of these search engine sins!

Sin 1 - Keyword Ignorance

One of the most common mistakes that people make when building a website is to completely disregard keyword research. The result of this is that you could end up building a website around keywords that nobody actually searches on or you could build a site using the most competitive keywords on the internet and have to wait forever to see any results.

At a minimum you should pay a quick visit to the free Google Adwords Keyword tool and type in a few keyword ideas. Take a look at the results and be sure that the keywords you pick have a good number of searches per month. Also type your keywords into Google and make sure that you feel confident about beating the competition and getting your site on to the first page of results.

Sin 2 - Keyword Spamming & Hidden Text

Mentioning your keywords hundreds of times throughout your web page or making big lists of keywords with a font color that is the same as the background color is not going to help your search engine rank. Neither is adding keywords that have nothing to do with the content of your page.

Remember that you are writing primarily for your visitors, not the search engines. You do want to mention your keywords in specific places such as the TITLE tag, H1 tag, alt text and throughout your copy, but don’t overdo it. If it doesn’t sound right when you read it back, you have probably gone too far.

Sin 3 - Only Optimizing the Home Page

Many people will spend all their time concentrating on optimizing the home page. The home page is often the most important page on your website with the most visitors, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect the rest of your website.

Choose different keywords for each page on your website and for each blog post you make. This will allow you to “multiply” your search engine traffic. Even if you choose less popular, less competitive keywords this can have a dramatic impact on your traffic if you have lots of optimized pages on your site.

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One of the most important factors in website optimization is your title tag. This is written in the HTML code for your page in the “head” section. Many companies make the mistake of simply using their company name on every page of their site. This is a costly error, since today, search engines use the title plus key words in your content, more than ever to determine your standings. Here are some tips for getting better standings through the proper use of title tags.

In addition to ranking, your title tag will appear in the title bar of web browsers for visitors who open your page. Having a descriptive title tag is important for visitors as well as for search engines.

A Word About Keywords

Before building any web site or even any web page, it is important that you choose 3 or 4 prime key words and a number of lesser words as well. The web is full of keyword selection tools, but we suggest you begin with an excellent keyword tool that is free from Google. We cannot cover this process in this article, but we have other articles that go into this critical area. For each page of your site, select two or three major keywords you believe people will use to find your page in the search engines.

What To Put In Your Tag

Many web sites just have the company name in the title tag. This is great if you are so well known that people will use your name to search when they want to find your site. For example, www.cocacola.com. However, if your company name is less well known than Coca Cola, GE, IBM and others you will do far better to put your name, your city and two or three of your primary keywords. An example for my company web-star.biz might be , “web-star marketing affordable consulting”. This title has about 60 characters. It describes the prime keyword for the page and identifies the company name.

If you are going for a local market, we suggest you include your area such as Denver or Denver CO or CO because more and more searches on the internet (about 30% in Nov 2008) are searches for local products and services. It is far easier to get to the top of the search engine pile for a city or state than for the world as there is less competition.

Proper Length

We suggest that you limit your title tag to 65 characters or less as that is the limit most search engines display. Don’t waste any characters using “and” or other words that take up space in the prime area.

Critical Title Errors To Avoid

There are three common title errors that really cost. The first is no title. It is amazing to me how many sites have no title. This is very costly as the title is an important factor in telling the search engines what keywords to list you under. The second error is using just your company name. Unless you are world famous, people will not be keying in your name to find you. Use your name but also use two or three prime keywords. The third most common error is using the same title (usually the company name) on every page in your site. Many search engines penalize sites that do this by moving them down in the ranks. More importantly, using a unique title tag for each page allows you to get listed in the search engines for several keywords and make your page content very relevant to those keywords. This makes for better engine placement.

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Hands up if you’re a Twitterholic. Yes, my hand’s up too. If you love the micro-blogging platform Twitter as much as I do, then keep reading.

I’ve put together a líst of the coolest plug-ins and apps designed for us Twitterholics and scored each out of five on the *must have* scale.

Twitter Specific Tools:

1) TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ status on Twitter and lets you make posts from your browser status bar. It also allows you to switch between multiple Twitter accounts in one click. This is my #1 must-have, deal-breaker, cannot live without Twitter plug-in.

Must Have Scale (5): • • • • •

2) Retweet This is an application designed for use with the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in. It allows you to append a retweet button to the end of each Twitter entry to encourage your followers to retweet your posts.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

3) Classify Twitter Users is a script that allows you to classify Twitter users and decide whether they are worth following based on their friends, followers and post ratios. Another Greasemonkey app, it’s a great tool to help you weed out the Twitter spammers and fan boys from the socially healthy.

You can set the script to use your Twitter user scales (e.g. spammer, social climber, social rock star) or just gather more information about people you are following.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

4) TwittAd allows Twitter users to monetize their account by accepting advertising on the background image of their Twitter user profile. You decide the duration and price advertisers pay for exposure and get paíd for every hour you serve the ad.

Must Have Scale (2): • •

5) TwitterCounter lets you add a daily updating TwitterCounter to your blog so everybody can see how popular you are by the number of persons following you.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •
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As a full-time webmaster and site owner, figuring out just what Google wants has been the most challenging aspect of running an online business. For many webmasters Google is the eight ton elephant in the room and you only have two options: upset the elephant and get trampled or quickly find out what it likes to consume and try to feed it.

In order to keep Google fed, webmasters have to jump through more than one set of hoops. When it comes to getting top rankings in Google’s Index or SERPs, there are 200 of these hoops or ranking factors. And if you want to play in Google’s ballpark, you have to try and master the majority of them.

For years, frustrated webmasters have been guessing and searching for these ranking factors. Asking what does Google want? How does Google rank pages and keywords? How does Google want you to build your site?

Ten years ago it wouldn’t have mattered what Google thought of your site for it wasn’t even in the picture, but now when it comes to online search, Google is king of the hill. And as we all know, kings get whatever they want.

Besides, any webmaster worth his salt, knows Google is what counts when it comes to organic traffic - you can achieve #1 spots for a keyword in all three top search engines (Yahoo and MSN being the other two light-weight contenders) but Google will simply deliver the most traffic to your site.

Google doesn’t as yet have a monopoly on web search, but it’s getting close to 70% of U.S. traffic and in some countries it’s up over 90%. But it’s not only the search numbers which makes Google king - it is the prestige and power of the Google brand name. Google has truly permeated into popular culture and the public psyche like no other brand name in history.

Google brings respect and trust into the equation. Web users respect and trust Google to give them a quality answer to their question. That’s why it was rather ironic, that for years webmasters have been asking Google about their ranking system, their algorithm, their practices… for years Google remained for the most part silent. This was mainly to keep at bay, those who would like to “game” the system in order to get high rankings within Google.

Until now that is, maybe it’s just me but doesn’t it appear that Google is suddenly opening up about its whole ranking procedures and what they expect from webmasters. Maybe the answers have always been there, we just couldn’t find them. However, a more likely scenario is that someone high up within Google made the decision to be more transparent when it comes to webmasters and how much they would tell them.

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There is more to internet exposure for your business than search engines.

To be sure, Google, MSN, Yahoo and the like are all excellent ways of getting your name out there. But it can take a long time to get your site to the top of most of the major categories, and since the number of categories is only limited by the imagination of the typical Google user, getting the results that you want can sometimes take awhile. So while you are waiting to move up the rankings, what else can you do to improve the web presence of your law firm? What can you do to get more clients? What can you do to get better cases?

For one thing, you might want to take a look at what your kids are doing on their computers.

Facebook and MySpace are the scourge of teachers and employers everywhere. In many schools, a student caught looking at one of these sites during class ends up in detention, and younger employees caught on these sites during working hours can get reprimanded or worse. Wikipedia, which is an encyclopedia site that gives brief or lengthy summaries of almost everything, is also the scourge of academics because, since it is updated by users, it can be inaccurate. Many are the lazy college students who have been caught cutting and pasting a Wikipedia entry on their term papers.

While these sites are ridiculously popular with teenagers, they aren’t the only ones using them. Adults have caught on to the Facebook and MySpace craze, seeing them as a great way to stay in touch with friends and to find old ones. In terms of finding old friends, it has been said in some quarters that Facebook and MySpace may be the end of the high school reunion, simply because the internet makes it very easy to find and keep in touch with all of your old classmates.

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The data portability wars may now be in full swing, and Facebook has taken an early lead with the launch of Facebook Connect, a service that lets users log onto other websites through Facebook and view their friends’ activities on those sites.

Some of the third-party websites partnering with the social network include Digg, Twitter, Citisearch and CBS, with the Discovery Channel, San Francisco Chronicle, Hulu and the genealogy network Geni expected to join soon, according to The New York Times.

There is no financial agreement between Facebook and the websites using Facebook Connect, with the only benefit being increased traffic. There are currently no plans to explore advertising potential with Connect, but of course Facebook will now have even more information about which websites its users visit, creating the possibility for better-targeted ads.

The launch of Facebook Connect is the latest chapter in the growing war between Facebook, Google and MySpace as all three companies vie to become a digital hub of sorts, where users update and manage their profiles and information across the web.

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