1. Don’t buy links (Google has clearly stated that this practice is bad)
2. Don’t think about link exchange (Google has come out on many occasions and disliked this approach)
3. Be enthusiastic meaning just think outside the box and approach your online marketing with an excited mindset to build your business online the right way using approved SEO tactics.

Some might argue that these websites are clearly savvy to have such high PageRank’s on their sites but that goes against the entire purpose of this magical green bar that sits in your tool bar. The green bar is supposed to reward you not be manipulated.

If your website looks like a hot mess and almost never converts but you are soooo excited because your PageRank just went up a notch why are you smiling? Do you have any sales to back that number up? Has that PR increased your overall branding? PageRank is ONE factor out of hundreds that determine rankings. Do you really want to focus your online marketing on one factor?

An interesting thread from Google:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48&hl=en#all

Some other interesting conversations regarding PageRank:

http://forums.seochat.com/google-page-rank-47/is-page-rank-important-97899.html

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-google-forum/95150-toolbar-pr-and-why-not-important.html

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021906.html

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/is-google-pagerank-no-longer-important-005790.php

Try increasing your PageRank by approach your website like a business and develop an online marketing strategy that will not only help you grow but help your brand grow as well.

Blog Posts

Try writing compelling blog posts that are so innovative that others truly want to link to the material. Write on a variety of topics that might plague your industry or allow it to flourish and push it through your community.

Build Your Community

All businesses really need to be able to build some sort of online community for their brand in order to have somewhere to push any of that compelling content through. If your community likes what you have to write they will over time start to push your content through their networks ultimately leading to more links and an increase in PageRank.

Relationships

Relationships can be tough to build sometimes depending on your industry but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. Reach out to the bloggers in your industry and see if you can give them some material on your business when new things happen so they can blog about it. This is how you will really build your brand and spread some really nice links allowing your PageRank to build through good solid marketing and branding practices.

Building a business online is not about a little number in your toolbar. Building a business is about growing a brand that has some substance to weather any storm for the long haul. It is not about short winded bursts of movement online but rather anchored in positions surrounded by heaping amounts of trust in your immediate community.

1. Online marketing is critical: Remember the days when it seemed like anyone who put up a website was met with nearly instant success? Those days are gone. Without a way to get the word out about your potent brand, you will have trouble succeeding online. Approaches like SEO, affiliate marketing, pay per click advertising, and social networking are just a few ways to market your online business.

2. Focus on communication: When you have clients, vendors, and media entities coming at you from every side, the successful online entrepreneur will need to have exemplary communication skills. This way you build a rapport with people that can contribute to your success, resolve issues before they become major problems, and establish yourself as a responsible player in the online market. Good communication skills will help you sell and negotiate while providing channels that will help your business satisfy customer needs.

3. Imagination is necessary for every successful online entrepreneur: You must find ways to distinguish your brand as better and preferable to a host of other brands out there. You can be like a lot of online startups and copy someone else’s ideas. That may work for a while, but eventually your brand will become stale without a constant infusion of creativity. Think outside the box: find out what you can do that your competitors are not doing and then set out to do it with excellence.

4. Know when to quit: Human resistance to failure can be a good thing, but it can be destructive as well. No one wants to waste lives in war, money on projects, or time in a lost cause. Knowing when to quit means that you see the writing on the wall and your online initiative will fail. Still, knowing when to quit infers knowing when not to quit. If you give up at the first sign of trouble, chances are that you will never succeed at anything. Perseverance is a good thing and those who struggle through adversity often meet with great rewards. Pay attention to your financials, your statistics and the trends in your market. If your enterprise has little chance of success, get out before you lose everything you have.

5. Organization: Your online business is not a hobby that soaks up your spare time: it is your life, your career, your profession, and your identity. As an online entrepreneur you need to develop self discipline to keep your bills organized, spending under control, and a system in place to manage inventory, money, employees, and logistics. Besides physical organization, you need a viable business plan that shows how your business is organized and how you plan on making money so you know what to focus on. Your business plan will also help you secure business financing when you need it.

6. Understand yourself: As you get started as an online entrepreneur, make sure that this is something you want to do. Make sure you like the products and services you sell. If you don’t like what you are doing, chances are that you will fail. Set some goals that stoke your passion. Success as an entrepreneur of any type takes patience and enthusiasm that will not materialize if you hate what you are doing.

7. Stay informed: Business conditions evolve almost as rapidly as technology, so you need to stay informed about both. Since you are an entrepreneur, you cannot afford to lag behind trends or miss out on breakthrough products or techniques. Use Twitter and other mechanisms to follow prominent leaders in your field so you can stay abreast of the latest developments.

Your choice to become an online entrepreneur is commendable. Use these 7 simple tips for succeeding as an online entrepreneur to give you the best possible shot at success.

James Adams is currently a full time analyst and writer who edits and writes a blog about advertising and print media design for Setfire Media.

This is a great little Twitter video that explains just how easy it is to understand this amazing technology. Twitter marketing comes in many different shapes and sizes and you really need to fully understand it’s power. Are you a restaurant? build up your local followers and drop a special in your wall stream every single day. It doesn’t matter what your business model is there is a way to leverage the Twitter space for every business you just have to put your marketing thinking cap on to do it.

Let’s dissect why:

Keyword Research

When a person starts to conduct keyword research it is all about stepping into the shoes of your audience and really trying to anticipate what types of initial phrases they might be typing into the search engines in order to find you. You might be saying, that’s easy but the reality is you need to have a marketing drive in order to find ALL your keywords. Keyword research is not a technical step it is a step that requires you to have a tight grip on the English language and also industry buzz terms along with the ability to expand on those terms and phrases. The keyword research step is one of the most important so you need to make sure to get it 100% right. Does this mean that there are programmers that are savvy on the marketing side of the business model? Sure there are. All I am saying is that if you do not like the marketing side of business you should leave this step alone.

Writing

Not everyone is a writer and not everyone enjoys writing either. If you are one of those it will show in your work so you have to make sure you have a passion for this stuff. Writing is a very large component of marketing a business online. Putting together a nice writing piece that gets read and passed around requires some creativity. This type of creativity usually only exists in someone who truly appreciates the marketing and branding behind search engine marketing. You need to take a step back and find out if the person doing your writing really enjoys it? If they don’t than your writing might not be reaching its full potential online.

Search engine marketing is not completely technical. Implementing onsite optimization is a technical aspect but much of SEO & SEM efforts really stem from being a good solid marketer and being able to understand what your audience is going to respond to. Would you hire an IT manager to write your creative ads? I wouldn’t, I would hire someone with a marketing background not a technical background.

A Disconnect With Your Audience

Online business in today’s marketplace is all about having constant streams of communication with your online audience. If a potential customer cannot connect with you online they are not going to feel that warm and fuzzy feeling that is often generated in the social media community. Your audience wants someone to call on when they have a question in Facebook or Twitter. Every business in today’s online community should at the very least have a profile and a Facebook fan page set up so if your audience looks for you there your page will be visible.

Competition Pouncing

Leaving the social media window wide open is going to cause your competition to simply pounce on your audience like a cat and pull very valuable business away from you over time. Just because you have not ventured into the social media space yet does not mean that your competition has followed in the same footsteps. Do you want to make it even easier for your competitors to be taking business away from you?

Branding Loss

Social media allows brands to compete against each other with their actual branding power. It is the space and tool that allows businesses to really be able to brand themselves directly in front of their community without having to spend a great deal of budget on things like commercials and radio ads. If you have a creative bug and have not had the resources to really express it social media can give you that playing field to do it.

Social media is not something that is short winded. The reality is that when you put some time and effort into it you can really see some great results not only with new business but branding and traffic also. Don’t be scared of the social media space and just go ahead and put your marketing hat on and have some fun with it. You will be happy you did.

It’s A Building Process

Building up a brand or a business online is a lot like building a cake. Each month you put down a new layer of search engine marketing efforts and overtime you build your power to your website naturally. When someone tells you that SEO takes time this is what they are talking about. The search engines look at how you interact with the online space and how you market yourself which is why it is important to really utilize all the available resources online every single month. Each month you distribute new fresh marketing material online which compounds the previous month’s efforts ultimately building a new layer each and driving much needed search power to your website.

There Is No Magical Switch

Search engine optimization is the process of creating an inbound marketing campaign for your website so you are visible in front of your audience where ever they go. This is not an easy process especially if you are in a saturated market so it will take some time to really stand out. If the industry leaders have been occupying the first page results for many years what makes you think you are going to bump them out of the way so easily? The process of stacking and building each month is what ultimately allows the search engines to view the natural growth you are trying to achieve. This is what the search engines want to see. If SEO was instant what would happen to pay per click advertising?

SEO is the process that allows online businesses to be competitive in their space. You can’t try and manipulate anything to speed up the process you just have to go through with the motions required to marketing a business online.

Local search marketing has taken on drastic changes over the recent years and this just shows you that it is not done. For years it was all about just having a Google Maps listing. Ever since Foursquare came on the scene and offered the technology where others can let the world know where they are and what they are doing by hitting a button on their cell phone the local web marketing instantly changed overnight. Many local businesses are still trying to figure out whether they even need a Google listing never mind taking advantage of this new local marketing technology that has sort of just landed in our lap. It doesn’t matter whether you own or run a small local dry cleaning business or a large car dealership you need to be visible everywhere including the cell phone. The majority of all new cell phones dropping on the heads of society are smart phones giving people the opportunity to really search on the go, and they do.

People use these location technologies to check-in almost everywhere they go on a daily basis. More and more location power users are forming and it is something that is not going to slow down anytime soon. Look at Twitter, when they first launched people where not sure what to make of it but now it is just an industry standard marketing communication tool used by a rather large business and consumer audience. To power the Facebook Places FB has partners with Foursqaure, Gowalla, Booyah and Yelp to fill their database of not only users but also check-in locations. You will now have the opportunity to check in and push the material directly to your Facebook wall.

Search engine marketing is constantly changing and evolving and it is up to you to keep yourself educated on these important changes that flood the headlines. If you own or operate any local business take the time to look into these new emerging local marketing tools.

Scenario: You are sitting on the couch, a commercial comes on for a new dish detergent and you say to yourself “I need to get that” but you don’t think about it too much. Then you are reading the Sunday paper and a coupon for that same detergent appears and later on you are at the store and you remember both instances where you saw the detergent and the brand. Boom! Touch points made that sale.

The internet works a lot like this.

In website marketing touch points are also very important. Your audience needs to see you in multiple locations in order for things to work how they should. When a person sees your brand or product in multiple locations you instantly start building your brand online and increase your trust factor. The more touch points the more they think about you when it comes time to buying what you offer or when the need arises. It is not about conducting one email campaign from a list you bought, it is about building up numerous communication vehicles that will allow your audience to see you in multiple locations online.

Examples of touch points:

Newsletters: You send out a weekly or monthly newsletter. They might not open it but they might see who it came from and that sticks in their head for future appearances.

Pay Per Click: Perhaps you have a small PPC budget and you have a few ads that appear in search results. This is another touch point even if your audience does not click on it.

Organic Listing: Perhaps your audience receives a newsletter and they see a PPC ad and all of a sudden they bump into one of your organic listings in search. They have now been hit with three of your touch points greatly increasing your odds of creating an action or a conversion from that specific website visitor.

Social Media: Think about that potential client now bumping into a Twitter posting or a Facebook post. You have now given them 4 different branding touch points online for them to remember you by, good job.

Touch points instill confidence in your audience and allow them to look at you as a brand rather than just a website trying to peddle a product or a service. Touch points have many advantages and can generate a variety of different actions from your audience on and offline audience.