These are complicated times. In the past, a small business was all about personal relationships with people who came to your physical location. You had an aura of trust and dedication, while your clients and customers came to appreciate you and what you did for them. Now, the whole concept of a small business has been turned on its head. You can actually go your whole life without meeting any of your clients in person! This opens up some exciting new opportunities, but it also changes the rules of business.
The most important one is how to get new customers. Whether you are a new business owner or you have been in business for a while and are only now starting to build your business a website, there are certain principles that you should know. One of the most important things to realize is that word of mouth is not what it used to be. In the past, when you did something nice for your client, he told his friends and they would come to you. However, in a world of one-on-one interaction through websites, this still happens, but in a different way.
By the way, this doesn't mean that no one talks to each other anymore, or that you can't get new customers through positive word of mouth. Rather, this is to emphasize the new way that people attract new customers online, and that is through deep links. If you're unsure of what deep links are, don't worry. This will explain it.
Word of Mouth and Then of Link
Basically, the way this works is, you do a good job for a client. He is so impressed that he links to your website, telling his readers or customers to try you out. Now, you have a deep link that is bringing targeted traffic to your website. Those people are there for the express purpose of seeing if they want to sign up with you.
Hopefully you can see how this is important for your online success. If you have customers, and they link to your website, and then those customers link to you from their websites, you start to get an exponential growth curve. This is great for your business, and if you are doing a good job, a great thing for the people you're serving too. However, there's more to all this that you should know.
More Valuable Website
Search engines like Google and Yahoo have secret formulas that they use to calculate how websites are ranked on the search engine results pages after someone's searched for a term. If you have a website on "laser eye surgery", and you've got a ton of people linking to you, then when people search for laser eye surgery, they're more likely to see your site pop up. This is because those links help demonstrate that your website is more valuable than other websites on the same subject.
In order to truly maximize this knowledge, you should take advantage of a link building service. These basically help you build up your network of deep links so that you can get more traffic, both through optimization of your site for the sake of search engines, and from the people who follow those deep links to your website.