Images are an essential inclusion in your website, blog post, or social media. They can help you get more shares and interactions on articles and social media and create a visually-attractive user experience on your website. However, did you know it’s illegal to use some images you find online in your business? There are laws prohibiting you from grabbing any image you see online.
In this article, we’ll share how to find stock images you are legally allowed to use and share a few of our favourite free stock photo websites.
You’re going to create a semi-fictional character and use it to attract the right people who will buy from your company. Yep! One of the best ways to help your company attract more clients or customers is to know precisely who you want to attract in the first place. The more you know about them, the better you can position your marketing to effectively engage them. That’s where creating buyer personas come in.
We teamed up with a widely recognized and trusted manufacturing company in the lower mainland, to redesign and develop a fresh new website.
A comprehensive understanding of their values and goals aided us to thoughtfully design a new, fully responsive site, completely transforming the look while giving it a fresh modern feel, boosting traffic both organically and from their Google Ads campaigns too.
Link building is the process of getting external sites to link back to your site. The more of these links you have from high-quality sites the more this positively impacts your position in the search engine results pages.
Here at Out-Smarts, we often get asked to assess company websites from a search engine perspective, to ascertain why their page isn’t appearing higher on Google. One reason is that they don’t have enough backlinks to their website or they have the wrong kind of backlinks – links from other websites tracking back to their site.
Despite Google’s algorithm changes, links are still valuable online, the more your website has the better its ranking will be but you have to be really careful how you go about building links. Link building can be extremely time consuming, can seem like a fruitless task and if you do it wrong can be damaging.
Here are 9 ways that you can build links back to your site:
Link Building Techniques
1. Social Networks– use your social networking presence to link back to your site or blog posts. This will drive traffic to your site and traffic is one of Google’s rank factors (double whammy!). The links to your website in your social bios and about sections are really important to so make sure you’ve included those and updated them to https.
2. Directories and Citation Sites – beware the directories – there are gazillions of websites that simply list the URL’s of other websites (rather like the Yellow pages but online). Submit a link to your site only on directories that have a good page rank, are relevant to your target audience and locality but avoid the ones that ask for payment or reciprolinks and absolutely ignore sites that simply link farms – linking in those does more damage than good.
3. List Your Business on Google My Business and Bing Local – these are really high-value citation sites, if you are not listed on Google My Business, get on it!
4. Content – make sure that the content on your website or blog is great, it should answer the questions your buyers ask when researching and evaluating a purchase. The higher quality your content is the more likely people will find it and link back to it. Link to other key players in your industry, your suppliers and sources as this gives you a reason to reach out and ask for a link and to tag them on social to encourage shares (and traffic!).
5. Widgets – add widgets that allow visitors to easily share your content on the network of their choice. These links are not high value from an SEO perspective but they do drive traffic (which is important for SEO).
6. Relationships – ask partners, clients and organisations you are a member of to place a link on their site back to yours but only on sites that are relevant and appropriate within your area or industry. If you are already a member of an association make sure that your listing in these directories includes a link to your website.
6. Advertising – consider advertising online: Google Ads can be a valuable way to drive traffic to your site.
7. Influencer marketing – many influencers are happy to link back to your site, although many of them will charge you for it. It’s worth considering though as this can help you in a number of ways including extending your reach to there audience.
8. Outreach– make a list of sites that have a high domain authority or page rank and reach out to them asking for a link – you can do this by email or phone. One we got recently offered us a lifetime subscription to their software which caught our eye and made their communication stand out from others.
9. Blog Comments – we had written this technique off ages ago but a recent blog post from Neil Patel has us revisiting this. If you use blog commenting though you have to think your comments through and make sure they are valuable and related to the post so that it isn’t perceived as spam and deleted.
As the Facebook population grows, more and more businesses are using Facebook Pages to promote their business in this forum and to reach out and connect with fans there.Your Facebook page may be the first contact a prospect has with you and it is important to stand out from the crowd. One way to do this is by customizing your Facebook page to include tabs that go beyond the basic “Wall” and “Info” tabs in the vanilla page set up. Once you have created these new tabs you can customize each page. Here’s how:
Customize Your Facebook Page
First thing you need to do is add the Facebook Mark Up Language to your Page. To do this, Facebook search “FBML” find the FMBL application and click to add it to your site.
Once you have added this, go to your Page and click edit. Under “Applications” you will see FBML. Click to edit to add a new tab.
The box title shows “FBML”, edit this to show the title you want to appear on the tab on your page. Click to save. The new tab will now appear on your Facebook page.
To edit and add content to the page click to edit your page again and click to edit on the pertinent FBML application you just created. Finally, add the code you want to appear on the page.
The easiest way to generate the code is to use a CMS editor. I used WordPress to generate the code for the connect tab content I created on the Out-Smarts Page.
To add images to your new tab page, upload them to WordPress and use the hyperlink functionality if you want to link the image to an external page (exactly like you would if you were uploading and linking an image to a blog post).
Once you are happy with the content, copy and paste the HTML code into your FBML window. To find this click on applications then edit as before.
Click to complete and save. Go back to your Facebook page and voila, you will have a new tab there and if you click on the tab the content you created in WordPress will appear there.
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