SEM Blog: Website Marketing Blog

When marketing decisions are made for a website, more often then not, the decision made relies solely on either PPC or SEO. While these strategies are both very strong independently, using them together an be quite powerful and decrease the amount of time and money spent to get closer to your goal.

The biggest proponent of SEO is keywords. So why would you forgo utilizing the fastest possible keyword determining method when establishing your site? Of course you need to make sure that your site is full of your desired keywords, but by the time you start ranking for them effectively, they may not be the keywords that could bring you in the most traffic. By using a PPC campaign, you select your keywords and track which ones bring in the most traffic through advertisement. The ones that work are the ones you should then focus your SEO goals on and slowly transition out of your PPC campaign.

Don’t simply think of PPC as a solution for sites that can’t be SEO’d. First off, if you’re working with a site that you simply can’t SEO, redesign it or add a blog to it. You’re not going to support your site through just PPC either. But the power of a PPC campaign to send immediate traffic and determine the right keywords for your site is well worth the investment. You may even decide to keep your PPC campaign going if you can establish a proper ROI that justifies the use of the method.

The best tool that you can possibly use is Adwords for PPC. Google clearly dominates the search engine market, so to get the best results you’ll want to use them. Their keyword tool has a free function for anyone to use but those with an Adwords campaign are capable of using a much more powerful tool to find out what the best way to approach advertising a site would be. Don’t be stubborn and decide that you want to rank for keyword X, because sometimes, that can be just too competitive or perhaps not as well searched as you had originally thought it to be.

SEO is not a fast process, it takes time. PPC is a fast process, but it takes money. Combined together, you can save yourself time and money plus better your site before you invest to much effort in an avenue that’s just not worth it.

To the average person, SEO is like Voodoo. You have no idea how it works, it doesn’t always work, but you know a friend who knows a friend who got results from hiring an SEO firm/freelancer.

While this means that these people will clearly need your help to properly build and maintain an SEO based website, the reality of it is that they may drop you at any point if they can’t grasp exactly what you’re doing and how it benefits them. Put yourself in their shoes, unless they are the owner of that specific company, they’re going to need to answer to someone else as to exactly what is going on results wise in exchange for that (hopefully large) sum of money they’re paying you. Giving your client not only a detailed review of what you’ve done and are doing for them but also a reference point to where they can read and/or you can show them exactly why it’s important and the benefits attached to it will allow them to translate the message to whoever they may need to in a more broken down and palatable way.

Many people worry that this breeds the idea that your client would then in turn attempt this on their own, not true. The majority of beginner SEO individuals spend hours upon hours reading up online and becoming overwhelmed without actually producing the desired results. By providing them with just the necessary information, you guarantee that they’ll be able to translate what you’ve explained to them and even grasp it themselves, but that they’ll need a lot more info before they can make the jump to self sufficient, and besides, that’s a lot of work for them to take on for probably less pay. By making them sound smarter, you secure your job.

Make sure you take advantage of the information you’re providing them. Post it on your site and give it to all your clients. Reference it in any updates you may send them. Chances are, if its got info in it about SEO and it peaks their interest, they have a friend who they’ll pass it to who may just be your next client. While the site could definitely pick up some search engine traffic from these pages as well, the referral aspect will be the most powerful part.

Links! Links! Links!

It’s all you ever hear anyone say when they talk about off-site SEO/SEM. Many people have been successful with basing their entire plan on getting just text links, but the truth is you can benefit so much more from those links being in a review of your company, product, or general website. Especially if the review is written by a consumer.

You’re link becomes that much stronger when in an article with more of your keywords and more relevancy to your site. Considering a review is a direct look at your site, you really can’t get much better of a link than that.

Let’s examine this from a few different angles:

• Credibility Of Review Location

Pro: The website that reviewed you is reputable enough and credible enough that you’ve just solidified another result in the first page SERPs that points right over to you.

Con: Unfortunately some sites just pump out reviews to fill up content and don’t even spend time with the product. Many of these sites are filled with ads and can leave a bad taste in peoples mouths, making them avoid anything listed on that site in their future searches.

• Quality Of The Review

Pro: Good reviews help sell people. The more enthusiastic the person is who reviews your site, the more likely someone else is going to make a visit over. Reviews don’t have to be epically long or contain anything special, they just have to be genuine to the person who reads it and actually focuses on the key points the people want to read about.

Cons: One of the top sites in your niche just wrote a review about your site. Perfectly written, clear points, everything. Issue is, it wasn’t in your favor. No you’ve got a negative review out ranking your main site on your keywords and everyone’s going to click there first.

If you run into any of these negatives, you can easily take care of the situation by getting involved yourself. Nearly all sites that post a review also have a comment field, so take advantage of that area to answer any issues or differences of opinions you might have with the person writing the review. Just remember not to get too mouthy or you’ll hurt yourself even more than that review did.

The term "Hotlinking" may not be a familiar one to all of you, but you definitely know it’s meaning. Hotlinking is when someone uses a picture from your site directly off of your site, stealing bandwidth but at the same time redirecting spiders to the source image or users to the site of that picture when it is clicked on to view the image. Many people consider hotlinking to be in very poor taste as it can get you in a lot of trouble and often result in the link being removed and your site having a big gaping hole where your stolen picture was.

Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal referenced a conversation with Aaron Pratt, a member of the Google Groups Webmaster Help, in which Pratt said “anything linked to including images shows that people out there might like what you have, google then has to determine is the linking is real or make believe. :)”

The only real benefit that Baker was able to prove through all this information is that your image will gain more weight in the Google Image Searches if it is properly tagged. You won’t be getting any link juice or real due credit in any trackable form unless the image is actually clickable bringing you to its full sized form hosted on your site. As people who utilize hotlinking aren’t really in it to benefit anyone, they can easily strip away your beneficial information from the image code itself.

How do you stop this? Put a watermark on all of the pictures on your site. Make it so the visitors to the linked site realize where the image comes from, reducing the likelyhood that they’ll return to that site if they see all of your images elsewhere, and increasing the chance that they’ll visit your site organically.

Don’t invest too much time into hunting down hotlinking, as your time is better spent advertising your site then hunting down those that hurt it.