All posts by Buddy Owens

Directory Submissions

Directory Submission and Social Bookmarking: Cheap And Easy SEO

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social bookmarkingThere are a lot of ways to get your SEO on, and they range from the expensive and complex (custom blog creation, web 2.0 property linkrings) to the cheap and easy (directory submission, social bookmarking). Today, we’re going to take a look at that second category: cheap and easy SEO that anyone can wrap their minds around.

Directory Submission
The Internet is full of directories of all kinds. There are website directories, article directories, graphical directories, and many more. If you have the material to submit to a directory (and you can pass whatever rules it’s set to prevent just anyone from slapping stuff up on it’s portal), you’ve got an instant backlink just waiting to be taken advantage of.

Of course, it helps if the material is actually relevant to your website, and it helps even more if the directory uses dofollow links, but still, that’s not all that hard to accomplish. Granted, one single backlink from one single directory isn’t going to amount to much unless it’s one of the biggest directories of it’s type — and those big directories tend to have the strictest rules on what they’ll allow on their site. So you need either the expertise to navigate those rules or a massive list of lesser directories and a few hours to sit around and submit to all of them.

Social Bookmarking
social bookmarking signSocial bookmarking is what you do on all those popular sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and their ilk. It’s a quick and easy process in which you open an account and then turn in some bookmarks to your various web pages. Voila! Instant backlink, and just maybe someone will come across your bookmark and follow it on it’s own merit.

It’s not quite that easy, though, because not all social bookmarking sites use dofollow links, so you have to know which ones are worth submitting to. Also, if you drop even a small hint on your social profile on those bookmarking sites, the search engines will be able to tell that you opened the account and they’ll discount the value of those links down to nearly zero. There’s also the issue that social bookmarking sites take an ongoing investment if you intend to get any long-term traffic from them.

In the end, even the cheap and easy SEO is best done by the experts, it seems.

Internet Marketing, Sponsored Placement

Why DIY PPC Management is DTF

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If you’re not familiar with the TLAs — that’s Three Letter Acronyms — ‘Why DIY PPC Management is DTF’ means “Why do it yourself pay per click management is doomed to fail.” In even plainer language, what that says is that if you’re trying to use pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords and you don’t have expert help, you’re basically throwing money down a hole from which it will never return.

Don’t get me wrong – if you do have a solid PPC manager on your side, the instant and permanent first page placement that the “sponsored link” of Adwords gives you is one of the most valuable tools a startup web business can possibly have. With a webpage that converts well and the right PPC keywords under your belt, the profits come rolling in. The PPC management company will watch over your campaigns, seeing what keywords are scoring big and which are losers, continually adjusting your list and your bids so that you stay on top of the game.

And that’s the first big drawback of do-it-yourself PPC management: it takes a lot of time to do right. Pay-per-click requires a mountain of setup, and unlike traditional banner or classified ads, it doesn’t stop once you’re done with the setup. Bids on keywords change constantly, and some keywords can drop out of use quite suddenly with subtle changes in the marketplace. If you have enough time to do your own PPC management correctly, you can be virtually guaranteed that you’re neglecting some other part of your business in the process.

The second drawback is the sheer amount of data to be sorted through. For example, a good list of PPC keywords can be literally three or four hundred items long, and every one of those keywords has several attributes attached to it: searches per day, competing bids, conversions per click, and other numerical attributes as well as some qualitative aspects such as whether or not the phrase has “buying words” in it. The amount of expertise required to correctly interpret the mountain of information involved is extensive to say the least.

In short, if you want to get into the realm of pay-per-click advertising, get a good PPC management team on your side, or suffer the consequences.