One of the things we all struggle with is building relevant links to our sites. “Relevant” being a link from a page that’s actually related to the site content, and “building” as opposed to “paid,” which has become a no-no in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Assuming you are a professional marketer with search as one of your many responsibilities, we certainly understand the need to outsource. But since you can’t throw money at this problem any more, and it goes without saying that you have better things to do than spam site owners asking for reciprocal links, what now?

PR is a great way to get links. For us, links outweigh ink in terms of the benefit. A story gets interest for a day, but press releases with links to your content stay out there forever. Because we’re active in social marketing, we’ve watched very carefully as online press releases have become, for some, the preferred way of getting news. A Google Alert takes a minute to set up, and you immediately get updates on any new web content relevant to your interest. Take that and add optimized press releases, and you have a much more energized public for your public relations. (You may also may be keeping your competitors more informed than you would like.) However, public companies have fiduciary responsibilities that sometimes get in the way of aggressive marketing with PR…so PR is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Taking the next flight into cyberspace, why not look into promoting your site, your product, your expertise with articles? The intent of the article submission sites is to provide non-copyrighted articles for use by publishers doing newsletters, blogs and periodicals, so they prefer that the article be for a general audience, and not self-promotional. But you can easily explain the benefits of using your product or write a brief educational piece (400-600 words) that gets people thinking. In the “resource block,” you can place a short bio and a link to your site. When someone picks up the article and includes this resource block, you get another link.

As an experiment, I wrote a couple of articles in November and submitted them. Within 30 days, I found that we had 42 new links to the site, picked up by Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Now, we have 51 links from those articles. Considering that investing an afternoon in writing and publishing increased our link total by about 11%, article submission is definitely my new best friend when it comes to getting links. I control the content of the page, and I control the keyword phrase used to link to the site. The only thing I don’t control is where and when the article runs, but one did get picked up by a national search marketing newsletter. I found that one by searching on my name…because they didn’t include the link. Running a Google Alert on your name is a great way to see where the article gets picked up.

As you would expect from a marketing company working on our direction for the future, we have been homing in on our differentiation. Surprisingly, there are a lot of search marketing companies which don’t have much real marketing experience. Because it’s web marketing, companies tend to skew young, to have a hip, wired, energetic company. However, a company full of marketing newbies may not be a good fit if you need a business partner entrusted with bottom line performance. It isn’t hard to do PPC, and any web person can add tags to a site, but real agency- and client-side marketing management experience is hard to come by. Since we happen to have a lot of that (and some of us have some gray hair to go along with it), it’s an important part of our identity. And, we’ve realized that a lot of our joy in doing our jobs comes from helping our clients understand how web marketing works, so we are focusing our future on education, strategy and reporting.

From this most recent study from eMarketer, it looks like marketing executives are really coming up to speed on two important issues: marketing basics (any economic downturn spurs both a drive toward “back to basics” in budgeting and an emphasis on measurement and then reporting on ROI) and, surprisingly, search engine optimization. From our viewpoint, SEO is the foundation of modern marketing, especially if you are marketing to businesses…it’s nice to see our client-side marketing peers mention it as both a trend and as an almost fundamental emphasis.

Dear Webmaster or Supported Personnel,

As our research suggests, you are doing the specimens e.g. Search engine Optimization, PPC, link building, Content Development & Web-Promotional activities. This really hurts us! As so many individuals have not clearly about the root to which we concern if you will outsource campaigns of any theme, we will definitely put our rhythm right giving 100% effort-making activities. How to draw the attention of the Search engines in major SERPS with targeted traffic as well as quality prospects to their sites – without paying a single penny to Google, Yahoo or MSN like search engines. I know that it’s your business and you want to achieve the key objective incorporated with the initiation of your website. But I have the solution for you to wipe out such worries that are tormenting you on your way to achieve the necessary business success. From one of my daily emails from service providers in India.

I was talking today with an agency friend about a client who always wants the cheapest solution. It’s an unsophisticated client, so it’s not likely she can educate them about how to evaluate the offer, trying to understand what QUALITY is being offered at that low price. I suggested they try the cheap solution for a few months, see what the real cost turns out to be, and then measure the cost per lead or cost per acquisition. One of the great things about web marketing is that you can measure everything…that is, everything that comes in to your site. You can’t measure the damage from people who dismiss you without visiting because your content doesn’t look professional, or if there are errors in the content on your pages. Part of your job as a marketer concerned with reputation management should be the quality of prospective SEO firms.

I don’t know how many people are using offshore SEO vendors, or how many agencies are outsourcing to them, but as a recovering English major, I don’t understand how a person can justify the risk of having their web content developed by a vendor which is not a marketing firm, does not have American writers, and who does not know the technology, the competition, the market or the customer. The sample text above is the worst written email pitching professional services I have ever received, but not ONE of these Indian companies has ever sent an email soliciting my SEO business without a syntactical or other grammatical error. That is the concern that has put my rhythm right, tormenting me on the way to achieving the necessary business success. Well, actually, it gives me some security, that there are some jobs that really can’t be outsourced. In terms of your reputation and that first impression, quality doesn’t cost, it pays.

There is a reason they call me Susan the Meticulous. I’m going with the notion it’s a compliment. I say yes, that’s me, and I have the shoes to match.

It is a safe (workplace!*) characterization. I do tend toward research and cross-checks. I perk up when I get an afternoon of View–>Source for a zillion websites to get a sense of how our client’s competitors are coding in support of their organic SEO. I jump with delight when I can get a whole year of client HitsLink data, and it if it includes conversion tracking, well, start thinking tranquilizer dart. And, yes, I always set the keyword research setting to return 1000 results.

I have, however, stumbled around the block enough times to respect some limits, one of those being we can optimize a website, at least on the first round, for a very finite set of terms. We’re talking somewhere between the legal driving age and the age you get dropped from your parent’s health insurance. Inevitably we’ve carefully pruned a list of a few thousand terms to a list of a couple hundred, and now the task is to choose which are the top 10% to optimize.

Usually there’s not a year’s worth of data (sigh) about terms that have worked for the client. OK, usually there is not a day’s worth of data about what terms have worked for the client. We’ve got data about search volumes and numbers of competing pages, but we all have to admit that data has imperfections.

So here’s my question. Other than using some variation of the ratio of search volume to competing pages, what comes to your mind reading this – how would you go about ranking a list of 200 great terms so you can take the top 20 for optimization? No matter your perspective – marketer, SEO expert, any other interested party…I am curious what first comes to your mind.

Because no one knows better than someone who adores manually comparing lists for overlap and gaps that sometimes the best choices have little to do with anything listed in columns and rows. Rather, they come from listening to what strategies seem interesting to folks like you, folks who might make it this far in to an entry in an SEO blog.

So let me know. And until then, I’ll be sorting and pivoting among columns and rows, earbuds tuned to the ambient wood flute and yoga bells channel, looking for clues.

*Please do not go looking for those shoes in my closet. My image would be so blown. I can only imagine the new nickname.

I enjoyed reading the recent post by Gord Hotchkiss, titled, “Will Agencies Get Search: Don’t Hold Your Breath.â€Â� He’s right about several things:
1) Companies (advertisers) are allocating a fraction of their small online budgets for Search…because they should be investing in Search. Everybody says so.
2) It IS better now than it was even a few years ago.
3) And – he really nailed this one – agencies don’t “get� Search because they see Search as small.

Search does not lend itself to high-falutin’ campaigns or creative graphics. It’s not sexy. And even though pay-per-click (PPC) Search is advertising (right up an agency’s alley), it is not glamorous. The creatives don’t find Search stimulating. There’s nothing there for a copywriter to sink his teeth into, and the art directors aren’t even invited.

There is money in it for an agency, though. A percentage of media spend. As more advertisers dictate that budgets (however small) be allocated to Search, the agencies will “get� Search. As long as Search means PPC.

What agencies won’t ever get is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the killer app for advertisers – not so much for agencies.

SEO, even less glamorous than PPC, requires lots of research and patience. Not fun. You do get to do a little bit of brainstorming, but then it’s more research and patience. It’s all about implementing, waiting, measuring, and then tweaking and waiting some more. The lion’s share of SEO work for a site is done upfront, and the results take longer than PPC. Then, you follow up with more of those tweaks I mentioned. That’s not profitable for the agency.

SEO requires access to the company website. Not always an easy task. And company websites are almost never accessible to an agency. Typically, the agency’s client (probably a marketing or advertising manager) has to wait – sometimes weeks – for the “owners� of the site (probably the IT folks) to make recommended SEO changes. Then they can start the waiting and watching stage, only to wait weeks for the next set of tweaks to be put into place by the site owners. Very tedious. And, not something an agency can charge for.

But SEO is effective. And profitable…for the client. Amazingly so. Often, when SEO starts working, clients can reduce PPC budgets substantially and still increase Search traffic to the site. Incremental traffic starts coming in “for free.� So much for the agency’s percent of media spend, I’m afraid.

I understand how an agency makes its money. I’ve worked for – and with – some great agencies. But they aren’t going to get SEO because they can’t see how it improves their bottom line. It’s not fun. It’s not sexy. It’s a lot of hard work.

But SEO really is sexy. It’s a little bit technology. A little bit marketing. A little bit sales. And a whole lot CREATIVE. It’s a giant jigsaw puzzle, and when the final pieces fall in place and the metrics start their upward climb, it’s a beautiful picture. Clients see the results and, sure enough, funnel more budget to Search. Next thing you know, they’ll be allocating some of their Search budget to Advertising.

Once your site is optimized, there are all these important keyword terms embedded in your content, but only the search engines know how they fit into the information architecture of your site. Unless you have unique content, they won’t begin to PREFER your site until other people link to it…preferably using the very keyword phrases you have worked so hard to integrate. Links are equally important to getting good rankings from your SEO efforts on content and architecture.

Articles disseminated across the web are a great way to plant these seeds. On a regular basis, write short articles (600-1000 words), put them on your site, and then offer them up for people to use as content on their blogs, in newsletters, etc. Sites that specialize in this include ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com, articlesfactory.com, contentdesk.com and ideamarketers.com. When people reproduce your content, they pick up the links, and often will link to the article on your site.

The very best mentions are on pages with relevant content on authority sites, because these links are seen as most significant. We recently participated in an online survey from Business.com on B2B search marketing, and were quoted in the resulting white paper. Of course you can buy links from a big vertical search engine, but by helping them gather good data and providing a thoughtful little snippet, we have fresh new links to our site:

In this case, we didn’t get a keyword phrase as the link, which would have been more beneficial, but they also are distributing this white paper to all their advertisers, so the prominent mention at the top of the section on B2B SEO is even more valuable…prospects can click right through to the site.