3 Tips to Start Cultivating a Business Web Presence Today

Every marketer knows that building a web presence is a must - but not every marketer knows how to go about it. While a website is good foundation, there are a number of ways to cultivate a greater web presence that can help grow business.

Here are three simple tips that will help you expand your company's web presence and allow you to increase both the visibility and profitability of your online brand.

1. Optimize Your Site Properly

Most people are familiar with the idea of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but that alone is not enough to build a successful and effective web presence. Of course, it is one of the things that's necessary, so you shouldn't neglect it.

These days, Google isn't interested in rewarding content that's stuffed with keywords at the expense of readability. In fact, it will be heavily penalized. If you want your site to top the search results, write content that's engaging and relevant, and make sure any keywords flow naturally with the other text.

However, attracting new traffic to your site is not enough. If visitors simply read what you've written, shrug their shoulders, and move on, then you've failed. You need to take that traffic and turn it into leads - and then take those leads and convert them into sales.

How do you do this? By giving them a clear, strong message about what you can offer them. Don't bombard people with walls of text. Instead, tell them in one sentence what your business offers that your rivals can't. Use simple words and easy-to-understand concepts, and avoid overly technical terms. Web presence optimization companies like Web Presence Group suggest that using Schema mark-up is also an effective way to optimize your website for better SEO performance.

2. Use the Power of Social Media

Building a really solid web presence doesn't only mean promoting your business on the web itself. Some sources now suggest that more people use social media every day then use the web - and if you're not also using it, you're missing out on a huge potential market.

Your competitors won't be making that mistake, so getting involved in the world of social media is a must. There are many networks out there, but only a few have real power to help your business grow. These include:

• Facebook - the world's largest social network, with over one billion users around the world.
• Twitter - fast-moving and anarchic, this makes a great place to seed viral marketing campaigns.
• YouTube - for targeting young people, nothing beats a well-made video. Keep it short, though!
• LinkedIn - you can't advertise directly here, but it's perfect for building business contacts.
• Pinterest - creative and slightly more female centric, this image-focused platform offers highly effective advertising.

3. Develop Your Content Strategy

However great your business and what it offers may be, if your promotional strategy consists of nothing more than a few pages on your website, you're not likely to succeed. If you have a good product to sell, then take it to other outlets, too.

One of the best options is blogging. Many people who aren't likely to visit a dedicated website are interested in reading bite-sized chunks of information on a regular basis. Post something every day about an aspect of your business and you can get your message across without overwhelming them.

Press releases are also worth publishing, since getting one picked up by business news sources will effectively provide you with free advertising. You shouldn't keep too narrow a focus on your own business, though, as this can come across as spamming. To build a really popular web presence, make yourself known as an authority in your field. Publish short, interesting, unique pieces about your industry, or about some of the people who make your business great. Human interest stories are always popular!

3 Ways to Improve Your Company's Web Presence

While many marketing teams invest their time and resources in SEO and optimizing their company's presence in Google, it's common to overlook other non-SEO aspects of a web presence (that can actually contribute to better SEO results.)

If you're doing SEO or Internet marketing for a business or online brand, then it's important to embrace many forms of web presence optimization. Below we discuss five ways/channels/strategies to better improve your company's web presence.

Be Prolific on Social Media

A couple years ago, many businesses were hesitant to establish a presence on social media. Now, social platforms have become integral to marketing, advertising, and creating a voice on the web. In essence, managing a prolific social media presence is essential in web presence management for companies.

Consider every possible social media network out there (Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) Be prolific and establish a presence on every social network that seems even remotely relevant to the company. Even if you don't have the labor force or resources to keep a Pinterest account active, simply having a profile for your company will provide a link back to your site which can help with SEO.

However, having active and socially-popular social profiles can make your inbound marketing and SEO efforts more powerful. Not only do your social profile links have greater rank-juice, but the content you share on social media (i.e. a blog post from your website) can have greater potential to get more likes, tweets, pins, +1's, and other valuable social signals that define credible content.

Establish a Content Strategy

Parallel to the last point about sharing content on social media, another powerful form of inbound marketing (and a supplement to SEO) is content marketing.

The beauty behind crafting a content strategy is that you can exercise a high level of creativity.

First, define the type of content that your company is capable of creating. You can keep it traditional with articles and blog posts, or delve into richer media like video and graphics.

Next, define the topics of the content you want to convey. What problems, questions, solutions, or other subject matter do you want to cover in your content.

Lastly, produce and publish your content, and share it relentlessly via social media. For SEO, sometimes it's good cover topics that are semantically-relevant to your keyword targets. For instance, if you operate a computer repair company that provide virus removal services, an article or video on how to troubleshoot and remove basic computer viruses.

This educational approach helps to make your company more credible and trusted. It also helps in expanding your web presence optimization efforts.

Get Listed 

Especially important for local businesses, get listed on directories like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Bing, Google+ Local, and the many other online directories is very key to improve your company's web presence.

Many of these directories provide a link back to your site (good for SEO.) Additionally, many directory profile pages have the capacity to rank in Google and generate traffic to your business, especially Yelp pages and other powerful listings for local businesses/local SEO.

This is just a big picture perspective when it comes to optimizing and managing your company's web presence. There are number of more specific strategies worth exploring. But by investing your resources in these three channels, your company can better thrive on the web.