Marketing Tip 1: Connect Your Website to Your Social Media Sites!

Here's a quick marketing tip for your business website – one that will also help you connect better with your customers.

As part of getting to know our ClassJuggler clients better, we check out your business websites. While doing this, we've noticed that, while many of you have social media sites (Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, Google+, etc.) for your business, some of you do not mention or link to your social media sites on your website.

You're missing a grand marketing opportunity!

Your social sites are a great way to connect to your students and parents. So, make sure they know about your Facebook or YouTube or Twitter or Instagram sites; tell them from your website — the place they will likely use first to find your business online.

Actions to take:

• Put links to your social sites simply in the text of your website's Home page or About page.
• Even better, put icons that show up on every page, such as in your header or footer — or both! Here's an example from the ClassJuggler site.

Marketing Tip 2: Boost Your Website Position in Search Page Results

Want to get your website to climb up in search results? Try these strategies:

• Optimize your content for search engines – Use language on your website that supports what your target customers are looking for. For example, if you think your prospects are likely residents of Fairfield, Ohio who are looking for a dance school for their young child, make sure that your website copy includes phrases similar to "dance schools for children in Fairfield Ohio." Sites like Google and Bing can use this info to link their site visitors to your school. Don't forget "invisible" HTML content, such as page titles and page descriptions; they should also support your target customer's search efforts.
  
  
• Establish a strong "backlink" strategy – Seek links from respected websites that connect to your site. Important: purchased backlink services are a risky strategy, so stick with legitimate backlinks, such as encouraging business partners and customers to link to your site, getting on your town's business listings sites (chamber of commerce, for instance), or writing articles that get published on reputable sites.
  
  
• Do social media – As noted in above in, "Connect Your Website to Your Social Media Sites!," having your business represented on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. and linked back to your website, makes your business more relevant, and is an easy way to create quality of backlinks to your site. Blogging does this too!
  
  
• Have an active website – A site that never changes appears stagnant (and thus unimportant) to Google. Consider adding pages to your site that naturally need a regular update, such as a calendar/events page, a blog page, or a class schedule page.
  
  

If you have considered hiring an S.E.O (search engine optimization) expert to help you with your rankings, be extra cautious. Some less scrupulous vendors try to "game" the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo), trying to beat the search engine's algorithms with poor quality or "unnatural links." Modern search engines are smart enough to catch such tactics and can often backfire when the search engine penalizes your website, giving you even lower rankings.