All posts by Lee Hutchinson

Search Engine Optimization

When Does Affordable SEO Become A Bad Deal?

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what to social Bookmark?Some of you are looking at the title up there and thinking “Huh? Affordable SEO is, pretty much by definition, a good deal…right?”

You could be forgiven for thinking that thought. It’s because you’re thinking from the perspective of someone who has already bought a service and you know what you got for your money. Sure, if it all works well and you more traffic and thus more sales and mor money in your pocket, it was obviously affordable. But what about before you buy?

Before you buy something, you don’t know if it’s affordable or not — you can only make educated guesses. Furthermore, before you buy something, you are constantly evaluating whether your money is best spent doing X or doing Y. You’re also constantly worried about whether the product or service you want will fit under your budget at all.

So, depending on your exact situation, it may be that ‘affordable’ means ‘I have the cash on hand to buy it without skipping dinner”. It might also mean ‘Of the three options I’m considering, it will give me the most return for my buck.’

So when is ‘affordable’ a bad thing to shoot for? Simple — when it’s going to be more destructive to your business than it is helpful. For example, if you have $350 to spend, you could hire seven different companies to implement seven different social bookmarking plans and get 7,000 backlinks for your money. Or, you could hire one company to use a variety of techniques and only get you 2,000 total backlinks.

If you don’t know SEO, you’ll jump at the chance to get more than three times as many backlinks for your money — but that ‘affordable SEO’ is a horrible deal because of the way Google dislikes repetitive backlinking strategies.

As another example, you might decide that you’re better off hiring a professional writer to write a few hundred really high-quality articles for you and turn them in to the best article directory on the Internet. In order to pay for that, you have to give up the same 2,000 backlinks from up above — the cost is the same. While the cost of $350 for a few hundred high-quality articles is a great deal in the context of articles, it’s crappy SEO — you’re better off with the 2,000 backlinks.

So in short, affordable SEO becomes a bad deal whenever you make the ‘affordable’ part more important than the ‘SEO’ part.

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Local Internet Marketing and Small Business SEO

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There are a lot of elements to search engine optimization — and no one has the time and resources to put them all into play at once. Particularly when you’re looking at doing small business SEO — helping a mom and pop store establish a web presence for itself — you have to pick and choose carefully which kinds of activities will have the best benefit on their business.

To that end, you have to choose at the outset what kind of strategy you’re going to use. Will you concentrate on driving traffic to their website and trying to make sales online? Or will you concentrate on driving traffic through their doors and trying to make sales face to face? The difference between those options is the difference between internet marketing and local internet marketing.

When you engage in internet marketing, you’re trying to make money online. When you engage in local internet marketing, you’re performing many of the same kinds of activities, but you’re attaching location-based keywords to the entire process. So you might still be building backlinks by creating web 2.0 properties and social bookmarks and whatnot, but instead of using “inexpensive board games” as your anchor text, you’ll use “board games Olympia WA”.

The location specificity immediately guarantees that you cut out 99.9% of competing pages, especially if you’re in a rural area or a small town. (If you’re in New York, you might need to get more specific, like “Gramercy Park board games” for example.) But more than just ranking easily due to lack of competition, local internet marketing has different-looking results in Google.

That’s because Google understands location names and immediately returns results specific to that location. If your business is listed in Google’s business directory, it’ll show up in the location-specific SERPs. If it’s got more backlinks/authority/juice than the other businesses in your area, it’ll show up on the top of the list and get more clicks.

More importantly, however, it will also show up on the top of the MAP results, showing people how to get to your front door and walk inside. That’s how you drive flesh and blood traffic from the internet, and it’s invaluable.

Search Engine Optimization

If You Have A Website, SEO Is Your Friend

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SEO
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It used to be, about a decade ago, that it was possible to use banner ads, word of mouth, and just a little luck to get all the traffic you needed to your website. SEO — that is, Search Engine Optimization, or more in-depth, ‘the practice of making your website look relevant and authoritative to the search engines’ — has changed all that. Where once you could rely on being cool, new, and different to make you stand out among the millions of websites on the Internet, today you need all of that plus a couple thousand man-hours of SEO work to even make a dent in the trillions of pages on the Web.

Of course, the thousands of man-hours don’t have to be your man-hours. If your site is really revolutionary and phenomenal, you might get a story published on the news, for example, at which point you’ll find that hundreds if not thousands of other people that are excited about your site will be happy to put in a half-hour each writing up blurbs and linking to your site. But given how rare that is, you’re better off playing the lottery.

Really, if you intent to ‘make it’ online, what you really need is a crew to do SEO for you. That means, generally, hiring an SEO company that knows what it’s doing and having their couple-dozen or couple-score of employees work their butts of making sure that your site climbs the rankings effectively.

It’s important to get a company — a sizable group of professionals — because that’s what it takes to do organic SEO correctly. No matter how skilled he is, an individual freelancer or even a full-time employee can’t possibly keep track of all of the information and details necessary to properly optimize for the search engines. There’s simply too much raw data.

A skilled, cohesive company, on the other hand, will have one guy to comment on blogs, one guy to post on forums, one guy to write killer articles, another guy to submit those articles to hundreds of quality article portals, a few guys to make a cool video about your product or service, another guy to distribute the video, and so on and so forth. At the end of the very long list there’s the guy who keeps track of where all of your links have been built and generates a report and sends it to you at the end of the month. That’s the power of a good SEO company.