Search Engine Marketing Thoughts

Reasons to contract SEO to a 3rd party

By Jason Cartwright - Why hire a 3rd party search engine marketing specialist?

Search Engines can be used to reach your target audience when they are looking for your services and are in the best frame of mind to purchase. It is also a very cost-effective marketing technique with minimal wastage.

An effective Search Engine Marketing strategy combines both Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for natural or organic listings and pay-per-click or cost-per-click keyword buying on paid listing networks. The two approaches should be considered in tandem, for maximum effectiveness of a search engine marketing strategy designed to drive highly qualified quality traffic.

The decision has to be at some stage, whether to undertake this element in-house or bring in the expertise of a specialist company. It making this decision, you should consider that whilst limited understanding can certainly be picked up through guides and tutorials, to be truly effective, SEM requires dedicated technicians, knowledge and tools in the areas concerned. A good company will also use different teams for each discipline since different mindsets are needed to optimise a web site for natural listings and effectively refine a pay-per-click keyword buying campaign.

Let us look at the submissions process as another example of where in-depth knowledge and expertise will improve the effectiveness of the overall campaign. A small but crucial element of the overall process, web site submission looks simple on the outset but there are a number of potential hiccups.

Once your site is sent to a directory for review, it is the editors’ discretion deciding when and if it gets submitted. Influencing factors include the submission category, which must be seen as appropriate to you service rather than how you want o be seen. Each directory has its own style of layout, which must be considered and understood (e.g. compare Yahoo! to the Open Directory Project Dmoz.org). Submitting to the wrong category or your site not being deemed of sufficient quality can lead to your submission being rejected. Most directories do not provide a reason why it was rejected and there aren’t any money back guarantees. (See Yahoo Terms of Service agreement 1.2 & 2.2 http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/info/express/terms.html).

Another potential problem is that the site is accepted but the submission (description) is edited to something that isn’t optimised or doesn’t provide a true picture of the site. Getting a directory listing changed is extremely long and difficult process.

What about submission software?
There are numerous companies offering some form of automated submission software that with just a couple of clicks will submit you to thousands of search engines. Firstly, there aren’t really thousands of search engines, only a few primary ones whose databases feed others. Secondly, automated software can’t search through a directory (e.g. Yahoo! or DMOZ) and submit your site to a suitable category with an optimised title and description written for them.

If you are considering submitting using an in-house team member consider that to do this effectively they should have the following characteristics:

An understanding of search engine friendly design and how to integrate this with the usability of the site.
An understanding of how each of the search engines critique and rank a site.
An in-depth knowledge on how to improve a sites search engine visibility – this is only gained through continuous day-to-day researching and understand of the latest techniques and changes in site algorithms
An understanding of the difference between marketing copy and search engine friendly copy with an ability to incorporate the two.
The time and ability to perform effective link building.

The aspects highlighted here are just the tip of the iceberg designed to give an insight into the expertise and understanding needed for just one element. When looking at search engine marketing, consider how much you would pay for a decent search engine marketer and compare it with paying a developer or someone else within your organisation to learn the necessary skills needed to do it effectively. Would you be saving money in the long run or simply selling yourselves short? Depending on which figures you read, search engines generate up to 85% of all traffic and many bookmarked pages, word of mouth referrals and reciprocal links were initially found on a search engine. When you’re ill do you research what illness you might have and try to fix it or visit the doctor who has knowledge and equipment in hand. After all a little knowledge is dangerous.

posted by Jason Cartwright @ 1:50 AM