Even though there have been significant changes in how google presents search results there really hasn’t been a huge change in what google uses to put you on the top of the results.

Google has certainly moved to favoring local business in it’s search results. This alone has made it easier to get better rankings for sites whose primary purpose is to promote a local business.  This means that if you search for Gourmet Coffee Shops your going to find results that are first local and second ranking well with google.  It appears that the further you are from the location of the business the lower the page is going to rank.  This is not to say that your not going to rank well in other data centers it is just going to be easier to get the local results.

So how do you get ranked well in Google? The basic strategy is still the same.  Google looks at each site as a popularity contest and uses a variety of things to determine how popular your site is compared to others.  One of this is sure volume of backlinks and key words that are linked to your site.  Other factors are the content of your site, quality of the content, the frequency of change in your content.  The more and better content you have on your site the more your going to rank, the more people that visit your site the better your going to rank, the more of googles tools you use the better your going to rank.

One still tried and true method of getting links is pumping out articles to the many article sites that are out there.  This can be time consuming writing and posting articles but the work is worth the effort.  The better your content in your articles the more likely your content will be approved and posted with of course a link or two leading to your site.

Using Social Network sites is a great way to get links.  Setting up a Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and other like accounts and putting up links to your site is another way to not only get links coming in but also a stream of traffic.

So while google has changed many things in how it presents search results, the way to get to the top of those results is still the same.. CONTENT, LINKS, CONTENT, LINKS… master them and you will see your results improve.

Online business has relied on search engine optimization (SEO) since the arrival of the internet. This is a way of making sure that a website can be found by customers using search engines like google.  It has long been the best way to reach people that are looking for your business and are in a buying mood, so it cannot be over-stressed as an important starting point.

But for today’s customers, SEO alone is simply not enough. Social networks are the connections people have with each other, not just with products.  A good business has to develop a tight community, which is where a social network manager is essential.

Successful social networks have three major components:

• Contact, or how people find the network
• Content, or something that they like enough to stay a while, and
• Community, where they build relationships with other people like them.

Together, these are the “Three Cs” of a successful social media strategy.

SEO still matters because it is a powerful point of Contact for customers who are looking for products, ideas, and other people like them. The best SEO is never a substitute for good Content, however, so there has to be something more than just a list of keywords that catches a search engine like google.  That skill is still very important.

Building Community around the Content is where a successful social network manager comes into the picture. There are many tools available to build a Community, and many choices that can be made based on the people and products that are involved.  It may make sense to build the Community on twitter or facebook, for example, which are excellent tools, or it might make sense to use something else.  A business may choose to develop Community on its own blog, especially if Content is very important.  There may even be an existing Community that it is best to just tap into as a contributor or expert, rather than build a new one.

These choices are not difficult, but they do require some skill to navigate. That’s where a social network manager comes into the picture.  There are many social media sites that have their own quirks and advantages.  Knowing their way around facebook or how to time twitter “tweets” are some of the skills that take time to develop.

The most important part of any social media campaign for a business is having a strategy in place. The “Three Cs” work best when they work together with a consistent message and image.  Without a careful plan that takes into account the relative strength of websites like facebook and twitter, many people often let their tactics create the strategy, rather than the other way around.  That’s always a mistake!

Getting it to work well is more than just a matter of message, however.  The goal is to “close the loop” and have your online Community reach out to friends of theirs as a new point of Contact.   That’s when an online social network really begins to grow and blossom into a highly successful presence on the web.

A good social network manager has the knowledge and skills to understand the relationship between the “Three Cs” and create an online Community effectively. It’s not a substitute for SEO, but a powerful addition to it.  It’s how you turn one-time customers into loyal fans who rely on your business in their daily lives.  Hiring a social network manager who can do this is the best thing a small business can do on the web today.

Written By Erik Hare a Social Network Manager you can read more from Erik Hare at http://erikhare.wordpress.com/

Submitting articles to article directories can get you a lot of targeted traffic, there are many online resources that you can use to increase the traffic to your site. Here are a few of them that I have found to be effective and how to use it.

Yahoo Answers

This is the place where people get answers to questions.   If you find a question related to your niche, post a useful but incomplete answer. This entices the readers to follow your link to your website or blog for the full scoop.  The other thing you can do is go in and create a niche question.  Then find the answer and close the question.  There are many ways to use Yahoo Answers to get links and some traffic.

DIGG.com

This site is ranked number 124 in Alexa as of this writing. Which means it has a lot of traffic. Digg is a Social Bookmarking site.   If you post a article and it lands on the first page of DIGG, your server can crash from the tidal wave of traffic.  Problem is how do you get enough people to digg your article.  Again you can if you work it right create DIGGs to your article, site or what ever with either software or by creating a number of accounts.  Be careful how you use DIGG cause they are very watchful of spam attempts.

Squidoo.com

Having your article on the first page of Squidoo has two positive effects. You get lots of traffic.  You also can get plenty of Google Love from them as well.  Essentially Squidoo Lenses are nothing but information pages that users create.  Create some with your keywords and then a lense with information along with links to your site and you can increase your sites presence on the net.  For my coffee site I currently have 5 lenses pointing at it and all of them show up as backlinks in Google Webmaster.  A powerful source of link juice.

WordPress.com
Blogger.com

Both WordPress.com and Blogger.com have been around for a long time. Both sites receive a lot of visitors each day and thus it makes sense to post some useful there.  Just make sure your profile in WordPress.com contain a link back to your site and bingo you have link juice coming from two powerful domains.

Myspace.com

Facebook.com

Twitter.com

These are three of the largest social networking sites online. Even you just focus your attention on one of them, you can get tons of link juice to your site. Make sure to set up a good profile that links back to your site. Users of MySpace and Facebooks frown upon promotional materials and so post only useful content and let your profile do the work of driving them to your site.  In some of them you can create groups, use your key words and make groups and let others join as well.  Twitter is a different beast.  You get a profile where you can put a link and if your careful you can put in other links as well.  Twitter will ban your account for two many links so always nice to re-tweet things and send out lots of non-sense posts to cover your links.

Traffic exchanges

Few traffic exchange online are really worth the effort actually. But there are still a few that works very well. One of them is of course TrafficSwarm. I have not used this yet, but have heard good things about getting your site put into a part of an article.

Hubpages

This is another site that hosts a lot of useful content. Much like Squidoo if you get into the top pages you get serious link juice and traffic to your site.

Ezine publishers

Thre are many ezine publishers that are looking for good and unique content. All you need to do is search ‘ezine directory’ in Google and you can find many sites that list the ezine publishers looking for content.   Put in unique content about your niche and you can get a link or two in as a resource. Just make sure you submit unique content.

Coffee-n-Caffeine website.  This is a gourmet coffee website with lots of age.  Earlier in 2009 I started looking more closely at the site and determined my ranking for various coffee keywords, the traffic for the various high value keywords and my SERP for those terms.  It was not surprising from the amount of traffic and what various server stats were telling me was that I was doing well for specific but not the general terms.

• I began looking at what others were saying about various forms of backlinking strategies that were supposed to work.  I took one and finding that I already ranked FAIR for flavored coffee and finding that I was competitive and offered a wide selection (along with data that said I sold more of that than anything else) I wanted to push myself up.

• I used some of the linking strategies that were the easiest.  Blog comments, profile links, Article submissions to blog sites, Social Bookmarking and saw my position rise.  As a result significantly as are sales.  In a period of unprecidented economic turmoil my traffic is up, sales are up 45% over last year.  Clearly good links from High PR sites either profiles, articles, and social bookmarking has a significant impact on my site.  Will it work for yours?  Depends on how agressive your competition is.  There are ways to find out what your competition is doing but that is another story.

Thomassnosports.com – About Sept 2009 I was visiting a local Arctic Cat dealership doing some computer repairs.  While there I found they actually had a website and were already doing some good business with it.  I said how about if I can increase your SERP to the first page of google for Arctic Cat Parts and Arctic Cat Used ATV as they were not even in the top 100 in google.  As I have known them and I explained what I had done to my coffee site he was interested.  I made him a deal. I put you in the top 10 for Arctic Cat Parts and Arctic Cat Used Atv and you pay me a $200 bonus.  Having nothing to loose and everything to gain he took me up on my offer.  I went back a month ago and reported to him that he was sitting comfortable in postion 35 for each of the terms.  He had to look… there he was.  I was back again in the middle of Nov 2009 and told him he was sitting comfortably in postion #18 and that by christmas I expected to be getting that bonus.

• What I did was basically spin a 2 articles out there, send out some videos, create a few profiles, and use social bookmarking.  In particular I have been using social bookmarking on the site as I wanted to see what it does.  Clearly it has an effect as over the last month that is all that has been done with the site and it rose from 35 to 18 for two terms.

Basic Experiments Results are that I have come to a couple conclusions.  First links, no matter where they come from so long as they are good PR (even low Pr are good as it looks more natural) have an effect. Tossing out Videos, Articles, Creating Profiles on diverse sites, all with links to your site will have an effect of getting you either into the top ten or very close.  Then comes the difficult part.  Finding links that push you into the top of the first page. but that is another experiment.

Now all of this is going to change as Google changes its search methods and that could make things change as to what kinds of links give you better juice.  I am still convinced that a link for a relevant source is much better than one from an unrelated source and has more juice, at the same time it is clear that to some extent google likes links to your site no matter where they some.

Sparky

First is to create graphics and things that people can use as comments or layouts on their page.  In the graphic and other elements you use to make it easy for people to use your site to get comments, you put in things that bring people to your site.

Creating comment Graphics is much easier and it can also show off your product or services.  I run a site called You Sexy Thang which sells sexy clothing for men and women.  Part of the site is obviously pictures of the various products, so I have taken some of the pictures added some text and then saved them in a different location on my site so that they are seperate from the product pictures.  Then create a page with the code that people need and Bingo ready made comments with links to my site.

This creates several things that will benefit your site. First it brings people into your site when people click on the image to look for reply comments and while there maybe buy something.  Second, It also creates inbound links with proper tags that eventually the SE’s will find and thus it adds one-way links to your site which should increase your PR and SERP.

This is a fun and interesting way to promote your site and your products.

Sparky