Dean Evans & Web Marketing

So you want to cut your marketing budget. Cutting the budget often means spending less money on marketing. Let’s look at SEO, Search Engine Optimization, as an inexpensive way to increase the worth of every dollar.

You don’t pay for SEO. You may pay someone to optimize your site, but no amount of money will automatically launch you high into the organic search results in any search engine. There are a number of best practices to adhere to that will help your site to naturally rise in search engine results.

Links
Make sure you link to appropriate and helpful content when you link off your site. If you link to a partner site, ask your partner site to link back to you (reciprocal linking). Be sure none of the links on your site are broken. Both external and internal links should take the user to the specified website or webpage. Also, name your links with keywords (i.e. NOT “click here,” but “Read more about getting better mileage”)

Keywords
Do your research! Why use “car sales” if you can use “hybrid car sales?” You need to know what specific keywords are most often searched and most applicable to your specific niche. Make sure that you, or your SEO provider knows what keywords are working and can help you apply the right keywords to your website.

Content
Write good content that includes keywords, related terms, links to sources and valuable, relevant information. Not only will this help you optimize your site, but when consumers find you, they will appreciate your helpfulness and begin to trust you.
If you do choose to outsource your optimization, or just get help optimizing your site, make sure that your source has some proof of their ability. It’s easy to pretend to be an expert at SEO; look for companies that can provide some real data and point to success stories. Transparency in the process is always a good sign as well.

A pitfall to avoid is canned content. If you pay for SEO, make sure you’re getting CUSTOM content. This will help you to rank well in your specific niche and create a better relationship with users.

Tags: online marketing, search engine optimization, SEO

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Web Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.