Gone are the days of using your web site as your sole Internet marketing tool. Instead, small businesses are creating what’s known as a Web presence to funnel people into their web site from all different directions.
A Web presence is a group of online resources that can individually drive traffic to our web site. Some of these resources include networking sites like myspace.com as well as blogs, press releases, and e-news tellers (an electronic magazine or newsletter).
Each time you create a different resource, like a blog or e-news teller, you’re expanding your web and by including a link from each of your resources directly to your web site. You’re funnelling all traffic directly to the center of your site.
Funnelling traffic to your web site is only the beginning. You will also want to direct your customers to other parts of your Web presence. You might refer to your blog in your MySpace page or ask people to sign tip for your monthly e-news teller from inside your blog.
The point is to keep people engaged with your valuable content. This will help you build credibility with your readers and create lifelong customers! Here is how the ultimate Web presence should look like.
Besides the advantage of creating more opportunities for people to find you, creating a Web presence is also an extremely powerful tool for winning the search-engine game.
Many of the resources you create, such as a blog, press release, or article, are actually Web pages themselves, and each can compete for search-engine placement. It’s no longer uncommon to do a search on google.com and find many of the results to be blogs, press releases, or videos. Sometimes all created by the same person or business.
When you have a Web presence, you’re not just competing to come up first on a search engine. Instead, you’re looking to dominate all 10 results with content about your business. Not only is your content moving up the search engine rankings.
But you’re also squeezing competitors out of those precious top 10 search results. A large part of having a Web presence is delivering content about your subject matter that your users will find valuable. No matter what business you’re in, you have information that’s worth its weight in gold to the general public.