Backlinks - which is a link from another site back to yours - bring the life blood to your website: visitors.  Without backlinks you will have to rely on paid advertising and other sales techniques.   Google sees a backlink as an endoresment of your site, so without them you will struggle with your search rankings.

Before you dig in, think of backlinks as the result of or a reward for a good marketing strategy - not the start of one. 

If you'd prefer to get 'free' traffic to your site by virtual of healthy search rankings in Google, read on.

Google regularly makes changes the layout of the search results page.   Recently they announced a change to the way it displays Adwords ads which has an impact on all search results and continues the slow decline of organic search results visibility. 

It will have a big impact not just for Adwords advertisers but for your search engine optimisation strategy as well.

So you have a great website with lots of good information.  But how do you get people to see it? 

And specifically, the people you WANT to see it - the people that will buy from you or engage your services.

This post provides a whole bunch of ideas on how to get those all important visitors to your site, using off-line and online tactics.

People often cry "My website gets plenty of visitors, but they aren't doing anything!" By 'anything' they mean they aren't filling out that form, requesting a quote, buying something, subscribing to a blog or whatever other action is required.

This can be very frustrating, as after all that's why you spent all that time, effort and money to get the website looking like the thing of beauty that it (hopefully) is.

The process of turning a visitor (prospect or lead) into a sale (sign up, enquiry or purchase) is what is know as conversion. Your website could (actually, no – make that should) have multiple conversion goals to support different stages in the buying cycle.

And if it's not happening on your website, the question is "Why?" and that's what this post is all about. But first things first.....

Ok, you're looking at your Google Analytics, and the number of visits you get. But you know some of them aren't good candidates to buy from you and you want to clear them out of your view. So how do you remove them from the data you are looking at?

Analytics segments, come on down!

Google Analytics is one of the most common reporting tool used for small-medium and even some large websites.

It's very powerful, with a huge amount of information that can tell you how many visits your website gets, where they are coming from and what they are doing when they get there.

But what does it all mean?

You've heard the advice – Blog! Blog! Blog! We've even said it ourselves. Ok, let's say you know why – but how do you do it?

One of the biggest challenges for any website owner or marketers is how to get more people to do something on your website whether it is buy, sign-up, download, subscribe or enquire.

Competing for that all-important attention from impatient website visitors can be a real head scratcher.  Enter pop-ups.

Historically pop-ups have a reputation as an annoying distraction, interfering with the user experience. Although they do have a bad reputation, but there is evidence that they a) work and b) done properly you can avoid annoying existing or potential customers.

If your website is busily attracting new customers, that's fantastic - but did you know it can do even more to increase the profitability of your business?

This is something I talk about when I hear a very common statement from businesses that goes "Our website doesn't really contribute to sales - it all comes word of mouth".

Wait, you're kidding, right?

If you didn't already know, updating your website regularly is important.

But in case you have a sneaking sense of cynicism about whether it's worth all the effort, here's a summary of why it's really important...

Pictures paint a thousand words. And let's face it, a post can be pretty boring without something to make it a bit more interesting, or even better to illustrate a point.

But let's be honest, most of us who blog would prefer to use a free image than pay for one.

The original working title for this post was “Landing pages for long tail keywords and service pages – a little utilised SEO goldmine”.  I looked at it and thought to myself, what a bunch of jargon – no one will know what you are talking about!

So I changed it, but the gist is that a single concept you can apply to your website will improve your visibility in Google.  And as a result, you will get more visitors.

New Zealand is a nation of small and medium businesses - how does that affect how we use social media in our marketing?

Because we have limited budget, time and expertise it means we have to be sure our efforts will be worth it. So for those who want to utilise social media in their marketing - what is the best way to get the biggest bang out of a small buck?

How can you tell if you are doing everything you can get make your website as visible and attractive to Google as possible - in other words so it is 'search optimised'?

Don't just ask your web designer/developer.  A lot of them say yes without understanding anything about SEO.  And don't ask someone who has an interest in selling you SEO services!

So, how can you tell?

Networking - the life blood of small, local service businesses.  It can be hard to generate referrals for them but here is some good news – there are other ways you can support your fellow group members that are quite powerful without directly or regularly referring people or businesses to them.