Market Your Business

WordPress is a powerful system which can be used to create impressive websites with complex features & integrations. It is super simple to use from an administrator’s point of view and comes with lots of documentation and video tutorials which are freely available on the web.

WordPress is considered the best Blogging systems in the world and allows you to spread your website’s content instantly onto Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and via email to your customers. It is fantastic for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and has the very latest tools to allow you to optimise your site to the max, quickly and simply. This will give your website the best chance to move up the Google rankings.

If you still need convincing, read our 11 Reasons to Use WordPress.

Check out these WordPress websites which you can visit at Mantle Financial Planning, Chem-Dry or SkipHire.me.

Initial Rocket Building Activity

1. Get a Free WordPress.com blog

Get yourself a free WordPress blog at WordPress.com. You can choose from a range of Free Themes and even create your own website using the address yourdomain.wordpress.com. Just give it a whirl and see how easy it is to use.

2. Get a WordPress website on Your Domain

In order to look professional, you need a WordPress website on your own domain name. You can download WordPress yourself from WordPress.org/download and install it onto your domain via your hosting company. This is where things start to get technical and we would advise that you work with a WordPress Specialist to do this. If you are on a tight budget, you can source cheap WordPress developers at Freelancer.com or Elance.com, but check them out their credentials first.

3. Get a Great Theme

Your Theme is basically how your website looks to the public and gets managed from the backend. You can buy cheap Template Themes yourself which look great and are relatively easy to install. Check out Theme Forest or Woo Themes. Some themes are easier to edit in the backend than others and some can be more easily modified than others,  so read reviews carefully.

Alternatively, you can have your own theme/website completely designed from scratch by WordPress Specialists and built on the WordPress system. It is such a powerful CMS and in the right hands, you can complex websites such as eCommerce Stores, Membership Websites or Order Processing Sites . There is no limit to it.

4. Add pages

Create a series of pages describing your products, services and key benefits to customers.Wordpress allows you to add unlimited pages.

5. Create Categeories

You also need to create a series of Categories under which you can blog about such as Latest News, Recent Projects and Testimonials.

6. Add Plugins

Add a range of powerful (and free) plugins to your website to give it extra functionality, including

• Article Templates – Create different templates for you pages and posts
• Contact Form 7 – Add great forms to your website
• Customer Reviews – Get great reviews which appear on Google Places.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – A magical Google Analytics plugin
• Gravity Forms – The best WordPress form plugin. Cost involved.
• Members - Set different permissions and web access for your team
• Vaultpress – Fully backup your website every hour. Cost involved.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags – Easily add videos to your posts and pages
• WordPress SEO by Yoast - An incredibly powerful SEO tool from our friend Yoast
• WP to Twitter – Fire your blog posts through to Twitter with shortlink and hashtags

7. Add testimonials

Turn every page into a testimonial page to prove that you can deliver what you promise. You can use photos, quote or YouTube videos to support the service or product you’re describing.

Ongoing Marketing Activities

To get the most out of your fab WordPress website you need to make sure that you…

1. Add new blogs posts

Google want to see your website growing by a page/post a day and blogging is a great way to achieve this. Seek inspiration from other blogs you subscribe to, books you’re reading and from YouTube.

Other good blog article topics include Local Events, Company Activities, 101 Lists, How-To Articles, Joke of the Week, Inspiration of the Week, Video Funnies, Video Nasties and anything else you can think of.

2. Add new pages

Creating new pages allow you to produce SEO specific content for your key services within key geographical areas. Keep expanding your site; the bigger the better.

3. Develop Your Website

Great websites can take 18 months to refine. You should constantly develop your website based on feedback from clients and new innovations on the market.

4. Add Customer Reviews

Get your customers to regularly add reviews to your website. These will synchronise with Google Places and give more credibility to your service or products.

5. Reflect Your Marketing Campaigns

If you’re distributing leaflets one week or you have a TV advert going live, you should put that same content on the front of your website. This will ensure consistency and help improve your conversion rate.

6. Make Seasonal Changes

You should change your website’s content or basic architecture to reflect different seasons. This will keep your website fresh and encourage visitors to return.

Share The WordPress Love

More people search for businesses online than anywhere else, making it super important that your business listing can be easily found on Google. Google Places is where your Business Listing appears in the Map results at the top of localised Google Searches eg Fire Jugglers in London.

It doesn’t cost a thing and doesn’t take too long to create a great listing with Google Places. Your Google Places listing is an easy way to maintain an online presence even if you don’t have a website. You can visit Google Places anytime to edit your information or see how many people have seen and clicked on your listing.

Initial Rocket Building Activity

1. Get a Google mail Account

You will need a Gmail account before you can start to set up your page. It’s really easy to set up and totally free.

2. Claim Your Listing

Claim your business listing on Google for free. Just go to www.Google.com/Places/. Alternatively, if you find your own listing which you haven’t yet claimed, click on Edit this place – Business owner? in the top right of your Place Page.

3. Verify Your Listing

You will either need to verify your listing via a pin code sent instantly to your phone or over a few weeks via postcard. The first is preferable, but various reasons could trigger Google to request verification via postcard, so you’ll just have to wait.

4. Setup Your Google Places Page

Google places is a low-effort, high-return activity so it’s worth doing right first time. Your first aim should be to make your Places Page look as good as possible. This is how you do it:

5. Write Your Company Name Accurately

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: Make sure your business name is written accurately and the same as you write it everywhere else. Don’t try to be fancy with some clever SEO additions. Keep it accurate because Google are looking for consistency across the web with anything relating to your business.

6. Complete Your Profile

Google will help you to complete 100% of your public profile. This should be your first aim.

7. Add Ten Unique Photos

Make your listing really shine with 10 photos. Don’t use stock photography, get your own pictures taken. Use a professional or pay a college student. You could add pictures of your customers, staff, products, services, your building, fleet of vehicles or office pet.

8. Add Five YouTube Videos

Google Places also allows you to add up to 5 YouTube videos which you should take full advantage of. Ideally they would be your own videos of Customer Testimonials, Meet the Team, Company Introduction, Product Overviews or Demonstrations.

9. Add Five Categories

You will have to choose one of Google’s preset categories, but you can add up to 4 more. If Google don’t have anything appropriate, make some up using titles of your key services and key locations eg Will Writing Sheffield.

10. Get Some Reviews

The more reviews you get, the better Google will rate your Place page. Have some focused activity on getting all of your exisitng customers to go to your Place Page and leave a review. You could offer a prize for the best review each month. Make it worth their while.

11. Share an Update

Google Allows you to share an update, rather like how you might update your status on Facebook. Add a new Welcome message to Your Google Places page.

Ongoing Marketing Activity

1. Get Reviews Constantly

Getting your customers to continuously add reviews to you Google Places page is a great way to help with SEO. Develop a strategy to drive customer here to leave reviews. If you read the WordPress section, it tells you about a plugin which take reviews from your website and adds them to Google Places……neat!

2. Keep Sharing Updates

You need to constantly use the Share an Update tool, just to show that you’re still alive and kicking. They only take 2 minutes to do and should be done at least once a week, but preferably once a day, first thing. That’s only 10 minutes a week. Add Coupons, Gift Vouchers, Special Offers, Quotes of the Day, basically anything you like.

Share The Google Places Love

Social Media in an invaluable marketing tool for any business. It provides a fantastic way for you to secure your brand across the web, connect with existing clients & suppliers and to meet potential customers too. With both Google and Bing recently admitting that Social Media signals are being incorporated into their search algorithms Social Media can even help with your SEO.

The Plan you develop for your Social Media activity is arguably the most important part of the process. You need to make sure you are aiming your Social Media efforts at the right audience and that they are interested and willing to engage with what you have to say.

Does my Business Need Social Media?

Initial Rocket Building Activity

1. Identify your target audience

The first thing you need to do is to identify your target market and what they are interested in. Brainstorm your ideas and be very specific. What age are they? What gender? What tv programmes do they watch? What hobbies have they got? Where do they spend most of their time? Where do they live? What do they like to read? etc

Once you have this target market in mind it will make it much easier to come up with posts that they will want to engage with. It will also help you to choose when to post, at times when your target market is likely to be most active.

2. Discover Ways To Engage Them

You need to come up with some ideas for potential blog posts, facebook posts, tweets etc that will get your Target Audience talking. This sounds daunting at first but there are many sources of inspiration. What you are posting on your social media will vary depending on what is relevant / interesting for your target audience at that particular time. Things you can post and the sources you can use for inspiration include:

• Local News – Buy local newspapers, listen to local radio and subscribe to local blogs for post ideas.

• TV Programmes – Search the TV guide each month to find programs which your target audience might be watching.
• Company News – This should be easy for you to source. Write about anything interesting happening in your business
•  Industry related information -Subscribe to industry related publications and magazines. Follow top people in your industry, check out what your competition are saying
• Current news – Keep an eye on anything interesting happening in the national news worth commenting on
• Your own knowledge- You should be an expert in your field and therefore able to give lots of free advice and top tips to your clients. For ideas on what to post look at other peoples tips on YouTube or Google
• Art & culture – if you are a business in a creative industry posts related to art & culture work great. Use websites and magazines such as the Guardian Culture 
• Or just simply something fun or exciting - Not all your social media posts need to be related to your business or industry as long as it is something your target market may find interesting then its worth posting. Maybe you have seen a really funny video on youtube? Or spotted something interesting while out and about. Maybe there’s a new song your target market might love?

3. Choose Your Social Media

Work out which social media platforms are most relevant for your industry and target market. Usually Twitter is best for business to business where as Facebook is great if you have domestic clients and Linkedin is perfect for professionals. There are hundreds of different social media platforms. The more important the platform, the more time you should spend putting your efforts into creating engagement.

4. Plan Your Time

Decide what activity you will be doing and which days and times of the day work best. If you are aiming your posts at teenagers then you might be best posting at 4 o clock when they will be getting home from school and checking their Facebook. Similarly if you are aiming at stay at home mums you might be best posting in the middle of the day when your audience might have some free time and will be checking their news feeds.

If you are watching a TV programme that your target audience might be watching make sure you comment on it there and then as this is when its most relevant.

5. Set Clear Goals

Have some clear goals in place so you can track how well you are doing. Whether it’s a certain amount of Fans you would like in 6 months time, or a certain amount of retweets you want. Having goals will help you to assess whether you are spending your time on the right things.

Ongoing Marketing Activities

1. Review your Efforts

Review your Social Media efforts so far. Regularly make adjustments to your plan based on what is working and what isn’t.

Share The Social Media Love

Mailchimp helps you to keep in constant contact with your customers and help build strong relationships. It even allows you to track your results and review who opened what emails, when, how many times and to see exactly what they clicked. With Mailchimp you can regularly email 2000 contacts for FREE.

Examples of Mailchimp Newsletters

Initial Rocket Building Activities

1. Sign-Up for a FREE Mailchimp Account

Signing up for Mailchimp is totally free! You can send up to 6 emails every month to up to 2000 of your contacts for free too! So what’s stopping you Get a FREE Mailchimp Account Today.

2. Design a Stunning Newsletter Template

It is so important that your newsletter looks as fantastic as possible. If your customers open your email and it doesn’t look great then chances are that they wont even bother to read it. Make sure your newsletter fits with your branding.

3. Create an RSS driven newsletter powered from your website

Your RSS driven newsletter will be automatically updated from the blogs you post on your website, meaning you can get maximum results with minimum effort!

4. Create a Series of Autoresponders

Autoresponders are a fantastic tool. You can use them to send an automatic welcome email to new subscribers or even a happy birthday or anniversary email. Autoresponders can even be used to send an email when someone buys a particular product, thanking them for the purchase and showing them how to use it.

5. Design a subscription form

Just like your newsletter your subscription form needs to look great to in-order to entice customers to sign up. You need to make sure it fits with your branding. Once you have a fab sign up form you need to integrate it within your website and facebook so your customers can sign up easily from either of these platforms. You must have fields for:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email

You can add any additional fields you may need but try to make it as simple as possible.

6. Import all your contacts

From your database of contacts you will need to produce a CSV file. This will need to include

• First Name
• Last Name
• Company Name
• Email

Once you have this upload it to Mailchimp.

7. Send a welcome email

Your welcome email needs to set the tone for your following emails and hook the person into staying subscribed. Make sure it:

• Lets the recipient know what they’re going to get in terms of content and publication frequency.
• Lets the recipient know how they will benefit from this content.
• Talks to the recipient in a human personable way avoiding a mechanical tone

Ongoing Activities

1. Regularly add interesting engaging content to your blog

The posts you add to your blog will form the basis of the content for your RSS driven newsletter. You will therefore need to regularly add interesting posts to your blog to create this newsletter.

2. Add any new contacts to your list

Constantly updating your list with your new contacts allows you to reach more people. The best way to do this is at the end of every month export your full contact list again. Mailchimp deletes any duplicates so you will just be left with the most up to date list.

3. Send out additional manual newsletters

In addition to your RSS driven newsletters it if often nice to send out manual newsletters every so often too. Things such as special offers, events or any additional content that is important that you want to bring to the attention of your contacts.

4. Review your email campaigns

Track the results of your newsletters and review who opened what emails, when, how many times and to see exactly what they clicked. Using this information you can work out what types of content have the best success rates.

5. Call your number 1 fans

In your results, you can view your subscriber activity and see who’s been opening your email most often. It’s a dead easy phone call to make. Just ring them up and say “I see you’ve been really interested in our newsletter that’s just gone out. Is there anything you read that you’d like to talk about?” Dead easy.

Share the Mailchimp Love

Your aim is to engage with your group and grow its size.

Once you have built a dedicated group of fans at the Facebook party, the idea is to then take them back to your own private party – your website. There are fewer distractions there and you will have a much better chance of converting them into customers. And at your website, shop talk is permissible.

Examples of Fab Facebook Pages

Initial Rocket Building Activities

1. Set Up Your Main Welcome Page

The opening welcome page, which people first arrive at is extremely important. It needs to look great and drive people towards clicking the like button. It should preferably have enhanced functionality above and beyond what you would expect on Facebook to wow visitors

2. Add Mailchimp Contact Form page

A Mailchimp Contact form is a fantastic addition to your facebook page to allows people to sign up to your email marketing more easily.

3. Add YouTube page

The YouTube page will show your YouTube channel

4. Claim your Vanity URL

Once you have over 25 fans you can claim your specific vanity url. Having a URL specific to your business is really important as it makes your facebook page much easier to promote.

5. Configure privacy settings

You need to make sure your privacy settings make it super easy for people to find you and post content to your wall

6. Create the profile picture

Your profile picture needs to be something that showcases your brand. Make sure it stands out from your competition and its obvious what it is

7. Link Your WordPress Website Up to Facebook

This will mean one less job for you as all your blog articles will come through automagically

8. Add facebook buttons EVERYWHERE

Make sure the facebook button appears on your website and email signatures.Add facebook share buttons to your website on specific pages and posts too to make it even easier for people to ‘like’ you.

Ongoing Mission Activities

1.Add Engaging Content

You need to make sure you are regularly adding interesting content to your facebook page that your fans will engage with. As part of this you need to:

Add text posts
A text post is your standard status update. You get 420 characters in the publisher to say what you want. Write interesting quotes. Ask fans for their opinion. Share ideas. The possibilities really are endless.

Add photographs to your wall and photo albums
Upload relevant pictures and be sure to encourage your fans to upload photos anytime they wish. Competitions are a great way to do this have a photo of the week from fans. Set them a challenge maybe you have a cake shop and you want fans to send in their own creations.  Each time your fans upload a photo, the thumbnail goes onto their profile wall and out into the news feeds of their friends so extra free advertisement for your page.

Mention specific people within posts
You can mention any friend, any fan page you’ve joined, any group you’re a member of and any event you’ve RSVPed to attend in a post.Use the @ tagging strategically and your post will show up on your friends’ walls and other fan pages’ walls per the tag. (Just type the @ symbol in the publisher and the first letter or two of who/what you want to tag and a list drops down for you to select from.)

Post link to other pages
You can add links to any interesting content you see. Everytime you post a link in a Facebook displays a preview of it.

Add videos
Adding videos is another great way to get fans engaged. Ideas for video posts include

• Videos of presentations you have done
• Videos relating to your industry
• Testimonials
• You can even create your own video about one of your services
• Or just add a fun youtube video you think that your fans would find interesting

Share the Facebook Love

Twitter provides a fantastic platform to build your brand, connect with customers and grow interest in what you have to say. It is especially useful for real-time, instant engagement during events, TV shows or as breaking news happens.  Both Google and Bing have admitted that social media signals are being incorporated into the search algorithm as a ranking factor so twitter can also be a great help for SEO purposes too.

Check Out These Great Twitter Pages

Initial Rocket Building Activity

1. Set up your Twitter account

Make sure when doing this that your account is full of your most update to date information. When possible, choose your company name as your user name.

2. Add a profile avatar

Use either a picture of your logo or a nice picture of you if you are going to tweet on a personal level.

3. Create a really cool background

You can use pre-designed twitter themes or alternatively really stand out by having a customised background that fits with your branding.

4. Integrate your account with your WordPress website

By doing this you will save yourself a job as all new blog articles get tweeted automatically

5. Add Twitter buttons EVERYWHERE

Make it as easy as possible for people to find and follow you on twitter. Add twitter buttons to your website and email signatures and Twitter share buttons to your website on specific pages and posts.

Ongoing Mission Activity

1. Add engaging content

You need to make sure you are constantly adding, interesting, engaging posts to your twitter account. Social media is all about being social. Make sure you:

Reply to interesting tweets

Engage with what other people are saying to help “make friends” in the twitter community. People will appreciate you replying to their tweets and commenting on what they have to say.

Retweet others

Similarly to replying to tweeters make sure you are retweeting anything interesting. This saves you the job of finding the information yourself and people will appreciate it and may even return the favour.

Mention other people

Especially clients or suppliers (only positive mentions though!). Mentioning others is a really great way for you to keep in contact with people and strengthen your relationships.

Use hashtags

Place hashtags in front of keywords in your tweet. This makes it easier for people to find your tweet in searches. On a Friday make sure you do the #ff (follow friday) post. This is when you suggest to other people good tweeters worth following.

Upload pictures

Twitter now has a facility for you to upload pictures. People love having a nosy at what your up to and adding pictures to your posts is a great way to keep them exciting.

2. Follow others

Make sure that you follow other tweeters people in your industry, any new clients or suppliers etc. They may return the favour and follow you back and its a great way to have easy access to interesting information.

Share The Twitter Love

You can add your videos to content communities like YouTube in order to increase your brand presence and reach a wide audience. This will help you secure good quality links and attract more traffic back to your website.

Videos also help to get your message across quickly, easily and more effectively and give visitors to your site a media-rich experience that will help increase their interest and more importantly, improve conversion rates.

The more fun, useful and interesting you can make your videos the better.

Initial Rocket Building Activity

1. Get a HD Camera

If you haven’t got a HD video camera on your phone, get a HD Flip camera for under £100.

2. Get a YouTube channel

What your YouTube channel looks like is hugely important. It needs to look great and fit with your branding. Get a YouTube channel and spend time making it look good.

3. Get your first video live

Don’t dwell on the quality of your videos. It’s more important that the message is strong and content genuine. Get it filmed, get it live and move on.

4. Optimise your videos

You can find out what people are searching for on YouTube. Just go to YouTube Keyword Tool and find the phrases. Once you have this information, you can work the keywords into your video descriptions and titles.

5. Develop a video strategy

You need to figure out how your company can get more videos onto YouTube. It might be that each time you stock a new product, you do a demonstration and upload it. You might get a video testimonial every time a large project is completed. Whatever it is, you need to develop your strategy and implement it.

6. Use other video sharing websites

There are many other video sharing sites, each with a slightly different slant. If video is going to be big for you, then it might be worth sharing it across these sites to:

• Vimeo
• Viddler
• Virb
• Revver
• blip.tv
• Metacafe
• DailyMotion

You NEED to be using LinkedIn for your business. Its a fantastic tool and enables you to:

• Acquire new customers through online recommendations and word of mouth
• Keep in touch with people who care most about your business
• Find the right vendors to outsource services you’re not an expert on
• Get answers to tough business questions with a little help from your real friends
• Win new business by answering questions in your area of expertise
• Network with peers in your industry for repeat business referrals
• Raise funding from investors
• Convince potential customers of your expertise by sharing unique blog content
• Keep your friends close and your competition closer

Initial Rocket Building Activities

1. Complete your personal profile to 100%

Add as much information as possible. Think of it as an online CV. If you need any help take a look at the ‘Dummies guide to setting up a LinkedIn page’  below

2. Get all your staff to create a profile

And make sure they fill it in fully too.

3. Create a company profile

Create a separate company page for your business. Just like with your personal profile add as much up to date information as possible and all your employees.

4. Get recommendations

Have it as your company policy to get genuine recommendations. These work just like testimonials and are a great free advertisement for you and your service.

5. Get Connected

You need to make sure you have plenty of good quality connections. Make sure you connect with all customers, suppliers, enquiries & anyone you meet.

6. Create a meet the team page and add everyone’s linked in details to it

On your website include everyone’s LinkedIn details on their meet the team page to make it easy for people to connect with you.

7. Add LinkedIn buttons EVERYWHERE

Make sure you have LinkedIn buttons on your website and email signatures and ddd linked in share buttons to specific pages and posts. This makes it even easier for people to connect with you.

Ongoing Mission Activities

1. Write recommendations for other people

Only write recommendations for people you would genuinely recommend to friends and family. Make sure they are clear and honest.

2. Get recommendations for yourself

The more recommendations you can get the better. Once you have them copy them onto the Customer Reviews section of your website so more people can see them. 

3. Start and engage in group discussions

Group discussions on LinkedIn are a fantastic networking tool. You should start and engage in group discussions to:

• Quickly discover the most popular discussions in your professional groups.
• Have an active part in determining the top discussions by liking and commenting.
• Follow the most influential people in your groups by checking the Top Influencers board or clicking their profile image to see all their group activity.
• See both member-generated discussions and news in one setting.
• Easily browse previews of the last three comments in a discussion.
• Find interesting discussions by seeing who liked a discussion and how many people commented.

4. Connect with other people

Build up your list of connections by adding any other professionals you meet.

5. Add events

Adding your events to LinkedIn will help you to promote your workshops, training events, seminars etc to a wider audience. Send targeted messages to help really sell your event.

6. Promote your job vacancies

Advertise any job vacancies you have on LinkedIn Jobs to help attract the attention of your ideal candidates

Share The LinkedIn Love

You need to make sure you develop a powerful corporate identity for your business that will help you outshine your competition & attract more of the customers you want.

Your brand needs to reflect your company’s personality and aspirations, making it more attractive to your dream customers. Once you have your fabulous brand you need to make sure it can be found all over the web and if you ever come to sell your business, a powerful brand can really add to the value.

Great Branding Example

Initial Rocket Building Activities

1. Get a great company company name

If you haven’t decided on your company name try using Wordoid to help. You company name needs to be available across the web as a domain and on social networks. If it is a competitive phrase across the web, you need to make sure you get the domain name with the greatest SEO pulling potential or it will be an uphill struggle for you.

2. Get a great company slogan

Make sure its catchy and clearly reflects your business

3. Get a powerful logo

Your logo has to look amazing as it will give the first impression of your company you will be using it EVERYWHERE. When you sell your business, it could add serious value to the cost so it’s worth getting right. This is certainly something I would suggest investing in because it will either help you to attract the right kind of customers or put them off. We provide a Complete Branding service which starts at £1250, but you will be able to find cheaper on the web if you search. I would personally be wary about paying anything less than £350.

4. Secure your brand across domain names

Whenever possible make sure your brand name is in your domain. This can either link back to your main website or be used to create smaller sub sites. You can search for your domain names now through the Rocket Powered Control Panel >

5. Use knowem to secure your brand.

You can secure your brand across 350 social media websites quickly and easily using knowem. A profile will be created

7. Register your trademark

Registering your trademark will allow you to use the ™ and ® symbols next to your Company Name.  This will help make your company name look more professional and also helps protect you from other companies misusing your logo. TOP TIP” It looks great in Google Search results and in Google Adword campaigns. It makes you stand out.

8. Have some amazing literature designed

Whether its business cards, letterheads or adverts stand out from the crowd with stunning stationery & literature

Ongoing Marketing Activities

1. Tweak your brand seasonally

It might not be such a great cost to have a set of seasonal variances produced such as a Christmas version, Halloween version etc.. It will keep your brand fresh and fans interested. Google do it everyday. It’s simple but it works.

Share The Brand Magic

On-Page SEO is the process of optimising the content of your website to ensure that you perfectly meet Google’s strict assessment criteria. This includes optimising your text, images, videos and links.

It is really important that you carry out On-Page SEO if you want to appear high in search results for your keywords.

Initial Rocket Building Activities

1. Determine Your Key Phrases

You need to know which keywords and phrases your potential customers are searching for. This is the most important stage of SEO and should be done thoroughly. Use Google Keyword Tool, Yoast Suggest Tool and your common sense to determine what these keywords might be. You can also use Alexa to see what key phrases your competitors are pulling visitors in with. You will need to consider your:

• Brand e.g. Taylor Bracewell
• Industry e.g. Solicitors
• Products & services e.g. Will Writing
• Geographical Areas e.g. Doncaster

You will also need to consider combinations and variations of those key phrases:

• Brand + Area = Taylor Bracewell Doncaster
• Service + Area = Will Writing Doncaster
• Industry + Area = Solicitors Doncaster

It helps to be specific. Long tale phrase (these are very targeted search terms) tend to be made by people who know exactly what they want. Theoretically speaking, these people should be easier to convert into customers if they land on your website.

2. Choose Your Pages & Site Structure

Once you have determined your most important and potentially profitable key phrases, you will need to choose the pages your website will need in order to represent them. For example, you may want to a main page to represent a product or service such as Will Writing. You may then want a series of sub-pages to represent Service + Areas such as Will Writing Doncaster, Will Writing Sheffield and Will Writing South Yorkshire. So part of your site structure would look like:

Will Writing
- Will Writing Doncaster
- Will Writing Sheffield
- Will Writing South Yorkshire

3. Optimise Your Meta Data

Meta data refers to the information which will appear in the Google Search results and is comprised of a Title and Description:

SEO Title

The SEO Title is the title that will appear in the search engine. It is important that this is right so people who have searched the keyword know our site is relevant to them.

To do this your focus keyword always goes at the front on the title and we put some of the best other keywords after. You must always end with the website/company name in capitals.

Meta Description

The meta description goes under the title and is used to give the searcher an idea about what your page is about and entice them to click through.

Remember to include your main keyword at least once and add a couple more good keywords you have found if there is space. You must always end with a call to action. Some examples are

Find out more >>

Browse and buy online today >>

4. Optimise your content

Content is key to on page SEO. The more relevant content you can have on a page the better. If you are serious about SEO then you need to make sure that each page contains 300 words as an absolute minimum. When writing your content it is important that your keywords appears plenty of times – the density for your most important keywords needs to be between 2 and 5%. It’s a fine line between google rich and spammy content so don’t over do it. Make sure your page is easy to read and your sentences aren’t too long.

5. Make sure you Keyword appears in your URL

Your main keyword must feature in the url as this makes the page more attractive to google.

6. Make sure your Keywords appears in your headings

Search Engines like you to have at least one heading in your text that includes your focus keyword. Although not a major ranking factor it does still help with optimising your page

7. Make sure your pictures are optimised for your keyword

All your pictures within your page need to be optimised too. To do this make sure that the main keyword appears in the alt, text and description. You can use a free plugin to help you do this SEO Friendly Images

8. Have a link to another website in each page

Relevant outbound links to quality, high ranking sites can actually help your own performance in the search engines so try to include on of these on you page.

9. Link Text

Google will give importance to anything that is clickable. It is therefore vital that you make all clickable content keywords. Don’t waste this opportunity with a link saying click here>>

Ongoing Marketing Activities

1. Review keywords and phrases regularly

Use Linkdex to track your keyword positions and Google Analytics to track the traffic coming back to your site. Check bounce rate, length of stay and number of pages viewed to see how effective the keyword choices are.

2. Add new pages and posts

The more relevant content you have on your site the better. Regularly adding new pages and posts will help to keep your website constantly updated which google will love.

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The best links come from within the main body of high ranking websites with a similar theme to your own. It really is a matter of quality over quantity so it’s better to have fewer, high quality links than lots from unrelated sites.

It is also important to remember you link to the right pages within your site. Don’t just link to the home page. Links to inner pages may be more beneficial if they are more relevant to where visitors have just come from.

Initial Rocket Building Activities

1. Get Listed on Search Engines

Add your site to all the major Search Engines: Google, Yahoo & Bing.

2. Get Listed on Free Directories

Add your site to all the major Directories: Dmoz, Yell & Yelp.

3. Secure A Guest Blog Spot

There will be popular blogging websites within your industry which have many of your potential customers regularly visiting them. You need to secure a regular guest blog spot on that website, so that you are seen as an authority on your subject and drive some of them back to your website. You could start by searching Google Blogs, Technorati or WordPress Showcase.

4. Get 300 Social Media Profiles

You can create a profile on up to 500 Social Media websites with links back to your website using Knowem. This is a paid for service but gives you a great leg up on the link ladder and will give you many social networks to explore and become involved with.

5. Add Link Building to Your Social Media Diary

Link building needs to become part of your Social Media Diary. You should aim to achieve a set number of high quality links on a weekly or monthly basis.

6. Add Share Buttons To Your Website

You need to make it easy for people to share your content. You can get social sharing buttons from AddThis, ShareThis or if you have a WordPress website then there are some great plugins such as Sexy Bookmarks.

7. Develop a Relationship with Local Press

Newspapers are struggling and as a result, can’t afford to pay journalists like they used to. Your local press especially will appreciate any content you can send them for them to publish in their papers an on their website. You need to find an angle that interests them and supply them with regular content. Keep them sweet.

8. Review Your Links with Majestic SEO

Register for a free account with Majestic SEO which will allow you to review your link building efforts

Ongoing  Marketing Activities

1. Get Links From Your Contacts

Develop a strategy to gain back links to your website from your suppliers, customers and business contacts – For example, you could write testimonials for each supplier. That way they can use it on their website (great for them) and ask to include a link back to your site in return (great for you).

2. Get Valuable Links From Forums

Getting involved with forums can prove highly profitable for your business. This is because the link to your website is appearing right in the middle of a discussion, where people are looking for your product or service.

3. Produce Great Content

The bottom line is that you need to regularly produce great content on your website, and there really are no shortcuts to achieving this. If you produce great content that’s worth sharing then you will naturally encourage the highest quality links to your website.

4. Submit Content To Social Networks

By sharing your content with Social Media networks, you will gain great quality links in the heart of an interested community. WordPress allows you to automagically submit your content to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter each time you add a blog article. You could also encourage your customer, staff and suppliers to share your content across their Social Networks using your sharing buttons.

5. Write Your Guest Blog Spots

Submit your content to your guest blog. Make sure it is unique, exciting and fits in with their tone.

6. Write the Right Stuff

You need to write the type of content on your website which is more likely to be shared. Here are some ideas which work:

• Anything which is super helpful. Useful guides or 101 lists work well
• Anything funny or cute relating to kids. Could you get involved with local primary schools in any way?
• Anything controversial. It might annoy some people but will attract more comments and will more likely be shared.
• Anything which mentions people specifically. If you held an event which you photographed and listed the people who were there, then they would naturally be interested in sharing it within their own social network.

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Images which you own are a valuable asset to your business and they need to be shared…..everywhere!

If you invest in generating unique images you can make your website & literature look fantastic and genuine. There are also many places to share them across the web, each with the capacity to drive more visitors back to your website. Here’s how to get the most out of your images.

Initial Rocket Building Activities

1. Get great quality, unique images for your business

Whether these are photos of your premises, your products or of services you offer you need to make sure you have plenty of images. Even if they’re not as slick as the stock photography you can get, they will look believable which is more valuable.

2. Get to Grips with Google Images

There are lots of different parts of Google that you need to dominate. As well as the main Google search there is also Google Images. Having your pictures appearing on here is a fantastic way to help increase the traffic to your website. They appear here by being optimised correctly.

3. Fill your website with loads of great images

Using images on your website is vitally important. By doing this you create a more media rich experience which helps to keep the interest of your browsers and ultimately improve conversion rates. The images you use should be as large as possible, although on WordPress you do have a 20MB file size limit, and open in lightboxes. To avoid slowing your site down because of large images you should use the Lazy Load Plugin 

4. Optimise the titles and alt tags of all your images

Add keywords to the titles and alt tags of your images. You can either do this manually, if you want to be really specific, or alternatively use the SEO Friendly Images plugin and let it do the job for you.

5. Create an image sitemap so that Google can easily find them

It is really important that you create an image sitemap for your website. This is is an index for your images which makes it super easy for Google to find them. You can do this using the Google XML Sitemap for Images

6. Set up Flickr and Picasa accounts and share ALL your images there

Flickr and Picasa are content communities. Adding your images to them is effectively like displaying your pictures in a gallery. It makes the images available to a wider audience and will also help you to generate links back to your site.

7. Go Large

It’s worth adding large images to your website and image sitemap. This is because people can just search for large images which they often do so that they could print them. Make sure you include large version of all your important images somehwre on your website, either in a gallery or via a link. Google considers an image to be large if they have resolutions bigger than 1024 x 768 pixels.

Ongoing Marketing Activities

1. Continuously add new photos to your website and on Flickr & Picasa

The more great images you have the better! Keep continuously adding them everywhere remembering to optimise them.

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FreeAgent is a wonderfully simple but very powerful, cloud-based accounting package. It allows you to send stunning estimates & invoices to impress your customers, as well as sending them neat thank you messages when they’ve paid you. It also allows you to strengthen your relationship with suppliers by never missing payments again,  because suppliers are potential referrers too.

Also, if you’re a small business, it will help you to look bigger than you are and impress larger clients. And I guarantee it will free up your time, allowing you to spend it on more valuable tasks.

Initial Rocket Building Activities

• Sign up for a  FreeAgent Account and get a 10% discount for life
  
• Create a great invoice layout designed to impress clients

Ongoing Marketing Activities

• Send estimates and invoices to your clients to constantly impress them.
• Whenever you get paid on time, ring your supplier and ask to speak to the accounts department to thank them personally. This will ensure that you always get paid on time but it also helps you to stand out with your supplier.

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