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Yelp.com is a popular business review website enjoying tremendous growth. Quantcast.com, which tracks website popularity, has found that Yelp.com’s traffic has doubled in the period between October 2008 and March 2009. With such rapid growth in popularity, it’s obvious that Yelp.com that can be beneficial for the promotion of your business now and in the future. Here’s how you go about using Yelp.com to your advantage:

Step One: Get listed. Begin by registering on Yelp.com and searching Yelp’s directory for your business listing. If a listing exists, use the “claim this listing” link to create your official business profile. If your business doesn’t have a listing, then it’s time to create one.

Step Two: Get your Yelp on. Yelp to your heart’s content by reviewing your favorite grocery store, favorite hang out, etc. It’s important to spend some time Yelping so you can get a sense of the Yelp community. You should also read reviews that others have left for your favorite local establishments just to give you an idea of what Yelp is all about.

Step Three: Get reviewed. After getting listed, a lot of business owners are tempted to email their close friends and business partners and ask them for a friendly Yelp review. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with this - in fact, I highly recommend it - Yelp.com has a system for deleting these types of reviews if you’re not careful.

Yelp.com’s software automatically deletes reviews that appear “spammy”, which is to say that users with only one review to their name generally have their reviews deleted after a few weeks have passed. So when you ask your friends and relatives to register on Yelp and leave a review, ask them to use Yelp in a natural manner. Ask them to take the time to leave half a dozen reviews on Yelp over the course of a week or two before reviewing your business - this will help to make sure their reviews aren’t deleted.

Step Four: Build a good profile. Many business owners are too busy to take the time to create a good, interesting, and informative Yelp.com profile, yet that’s exactly what they should do to be successful. Simply providing your business hours and listing off your products won’t do.

Step Five: Be active in the community. Your business profile allows you to recommend 5 other businesses. While it’s most logical to recommend the businesses of your own acquaintances, it’s actually a better practice to use your recommendations wisely and recognize other active Yelpers who would might reciprocate with a link or a good review.

Step Six: Encourage your customers to review you. Make sure to tell all your customers that your business is listed on Yelp and that you would appreciate a review. Customers that really like your service will often jump at the chance to sing your praises. Place a sign on your door, a note in your menu, or a blurb in your next customer newsletter.

Step Seven: Use the network. Take advantage of Yelp.com’s social network by building and maintaining a network of friends. Build relationships with other business owners and help each other out by exchanging good reviews and becoming each other’s fan. Not only will you maintain a good profile, but you’ll also be using networking at its best.

Getting on the Yelp.com bandwagon now while it’s steadily growing can lead to more customers (and more business) for years to come. Participate, get those positive reviews, and grow your business with Yelp!

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Getting started online is now easier than ever. When I began doing business online I quickly developed an understanding of html and web design. The process of creating new web pages and promoting the code to a live server was complicated at first but got easier with time. Once I was online however, I quickly figured out that having a good design sense wasn’t enough to give me top rankings.

So I did what most people do, I began my quest for information about search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, and applied as much as I could. I spent thousands of additional dollars rebuilding my website and countless hours tweaking, updated, and changing things until I was well positioned for higher rankings.

Once I redesigned my website and applied the on page optimization techniques from reading dozens of web pages, blogs, and websites, I had a pretty good understanding of what I did wrong and how I could impact my search rankings. With the design tweaks I had made and a little extra effort, I was able to boost my position by about 40 spots. I was so impressed that I got hooked on learning more.

The happy ending to my story is that I eventually got to where I needed to be on most of the major search engines. However, it took much longer than I had expected or ever truly wanted it to. The good news is that I learned a great deal about search engine optimization throughout the process and want to share some of the most powerful techniques Ive learned which should save you tons of time and expense.

The most valuable lesson I learned about doing business on the web, from all my research, was that the most important aspect is choosing the right niche for your site. As a factor of segmentation, you also need to choose the right keywords to optimize for. Depending on the level of competition for that keyword or keyword phrase, the promise of top rankings might be easy, or for the most competitive keywords, extremely difficult.

One of the best pieces of advice I was given by a developer I worked with, when it comes to SEO, is to keep you website basic. That means no fancy stuff. I know everyone wants to create unbelievable functionality but the reality is that keeping it simple is better for your website visitors and search spiders that crawl your site.

A really great thing you can do after your site is designed is focus on building in bound links. In bound links can be explained as links from other websites that point to your site. The value here is that Google in particular evaluates the sites linking to you and uses this information to rank your site in search results.

In internet marketing, there are tons of professed gurus who can show you the latest techniques for number one rankings. Based on my more than ten years of marketing experience and search engine optimization efforts, Id rather keep things simple.

The good news is that although these techniques take time, they work. No more searching for the silver bullet ” keep things simple. Additionally, be sure to research software or services that can help you along the way. Don’t be afraid to get help and persist until you achieve your goal. It worked for me and it can work for you too.