The video that released the knowledge of this and other updates also mentioned changes to the way Google will deny value to link spammers and the unrolling of more a sophisticated link analysis system. Although the details Cutts provides on these link analyzers are not abundant, it would not be unwise to consider the Penguin 2.0 algorithm as heavily link-based. That said, let’s take a look at how to prep your link profile for the likelihood that the new algorithm will be connecting it to future rankings.

What Is a Link Profile?

Do you remember when Google rolled out its disavow tool that allowed site owners to submit harmful or spammy links to Google in an attempt to have Google not take them into consideration when assessing their sites? Google says “You should make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site” meaning that the type and quality of links that point to your site will be considered in assessing its PageRank and its relevancy. In this sense a link profile is the overall makeup of all the links that are pointing to your website and will be important in the update.

Since the disavow tool was released Google has compiled a lot of data on websites that others have deemed as spammy and that once were used to generate artificial rankings. It is likely that this data, along with Google’s new algorithm updates, will be used to further analyze the link profiles of websites to determine if they consist of spam.

To prepare your website for this possible change, it may be wise to take a preliminary look at your websites link profile to see if there are potentially spammy links that may eventually hurt its rankings. Use SEO software to create a list and make note of the sites that are potentially harmful or spammy. You may not necessarily need to use the disavow tool for all of the links you think are spammy, but you should try to start a trend of developing new, organic links to your site on a consistent basis.

What Kinds of Links Should I Build?

In terms of building new links and expanding your link profile, consider building links that are based on relationships with sites that are within or related to your industry. Look to buildlinks with websites that:

• Are trustworthy, ethical, and provide value to users
• Don’t sell links
• Cover similar or the same topics as your website
• Provide for a unique anchor text profile
• Are influential
• Have high PageRank or authority

A good link profile could also consist of having backlinks from a diverse network of websites. This could include links that come from guest blog posts, blog comments (sparingly),forum posts (sparingly),submitting your blog to RSS directories, strong internal linking, and most importantly getting links from great content as a result of social sharing. If you are confused as to how to build organic, white hat links talk to an SEO Consultant. As the web expands and people are finding information in more diverse places, your link profile should also reflect this and not be so one dimensional.

Establish Industry Relationships via Social Media

This one has always been difficult for many to understand. Social media gives influential people a platform to connect but also allows you to connect with them. Make it a point to try and establish a reputation with industry leaders by sharing your best content with them and connecting with them about their content. In terms of social sharing, a highly influential person who shares your content gives you the best chance of being looked at credibly in your community and by the search engines.

Remember, linkbuilding is not all about the links themselves, it’s about the content the link comes from that provides value to the end users. If providing a fantastic user experience is the first goal, then your content will have the best chance of attracting links the organic and natural way.

About the Author

Daniel E. Lofaso is an SEO Consultant and search engine marketer for Digital Elevator. He writes, blogs, and provides Internet marketing and consulting advice to clients nationally. Follow Daniel on Twitter, Google+, or his blog.

Related articles

• Matt Cutts: Google Penguin 2.0 Coming in ‘Next Few Weeks’
• Matt Cutts Talks SEO for Google: 9 Things You Should Expect This Summer

Focus on training. While skill development is a must, you might have ignored the most important aspect of your international SEO efforts: value. Why must your people act on your web strategies right away? What has time got to do with return of investments? And most importantly, what do these efforts bring them? Be an evangelist and not simply a trainer.

More manpower gets things done. Go back the situation in the first paragraph. How many employees do you have for each of the aforementioned countries? How much have you spent on them? How much do you intend to add,and what have they accomplished so far? In theory, more manpower means productivity but if you can’t be in the same place at the same time, do yourself a favor and streamline your manpower to those whose skills can contribute to as many as your SEO endeavors. Think about multi-skilled workers. You can save more from overhead costs and time this way, too.

The language barrier. Because you are aiming for regionalization, you might have designed your website using your host country’s native tongue. What you do not know is you have more leverage if you use a secondary language – something that most people can understand no matter where they are. In this case, English is first, the most dominant secondary language; second, the rising global language; and third, the most popular search language. Google, for instance, is now offering language selections in its country-specific websites.

Take that to the Philippines where the secondary language is English. Surprise yourself by discovering that Filipinos use English as their search term. You will be surprised that a lot more Filipinos will begin to visit your website because your site is in English. The same would also go with the other countries you are aiming at.

Generalization. If you are thinking that your SEO strategy in the US works everywhere, you are wrong. Just like variations in culture, principle, and political systems, SEO strategies need to be tailored per country. So taking your website to a specific country without research is not a good move. Know each country’s people, what they want, what their sentiments are, how they find what they need online, and what they perceive as “saleable” websites. You should also do your own research on what trends could make your website become more appealing for your audience in the specific countries.

All in all, what you really need for an international SEO program to be successful is reliability and validity. You cannot implement a strategy unless proven effective and sustaining. So, how might you do that? Invest time in comparative and in qualitative and quantitative research. If you prefer, you can travel and hold consultation with key contacts in the countries where you want to operate.

This will help you get to know your audience better, as well as make you come up with various strategies that will surely cater to their specific needs. Helpful websites that you can present the case in point are Amazon and Wikipedia. You can study how they cater to the people who live in different countries, as well as how they present their websites to these countries.

Related articles

• Don’t Limit Your SEO Strategy: Go International

That said, there are definitely certain things to keep in mind when working to leverage Google+ for SEO. Luckily, they aren’t difficult to understand or implement.

Here are the top 4 Google+ tips for your SEO campaign:

1. Put Up the +1 Button

First things first. You will want to start off by putting the +1 button up on your blog or site. This will be the first step in helping you to build your Google+ profile and following. You want to make it is as easy as possible for your site visitors to easily share your content on the Social Media sites that they are a part of.

If you’ve already begun other Social Media efforts, odds are you already have other Social Media buttons up on your site (if not, it’s a good idea to get them up there!). So, you just want to make sure to also include the +1 button. This will make it as easy as possible for your readers to share the information they find valuable from your site, and this will help to increase your presence, brand awareness, and traffic from the Google+ community. The +1′s also bring valuable SEO value to your site.

2. Establish Yourself as an Authority

Once you’ve added the +1 button to your site, making is as easy as possible for visitors to your site to share your content with the Google+ community, you want to start your own efforts to work to build yourself and your page up within that community. Most importantly, you will want to start by establishing yourself as an authority and a valuable resource to your circles. The best way to do that is to share helpful, relevant content, and to share it often.

Of course, you don’t only want to share your own content. As with other Social Media platforms, you want to diversify what you are sharing. You of course will want to share links to your own valuable content, but you should mix that with efforts of spreading the word on other helpful content and resource sites. The idea is to be a valuable resource in general, not to just send links to your own site all the time.

3. Build Your Circles Strategically

Just like with other Social Media platforms, the more followers you can achieve the better (as a very general rule). So, spend some time each day or week building out your circles. But keep in mind, when you are using Google+ as an SEO tool, these circles can be built out very strategically to help you with your SEO efforts. Segment your circles in ways that follow the rest of your SEO and/or blogging strategies. Segment them according to your different efforts or areas of your business. Keeping your circles segmented in a strategic way will make the sharing you do on Google+ much easier, and more beneficial to you.

4. Don’t Forget Normal Social Media Practices

Lastly, as with any other Social Media platform, you want to make sure not to forget the normal “rules” of successful Social Media strategies. Concentrate on providing value first. Be present, be active, be consistent. Comment on other posts. Share other users’ posts. Follow other people. The same general rules that apply to other Social Media platforms and efforts also apply to Google+, so don’t ignore those when you are doing your work on this platform. If you don’t know what these general “rules” are, or if you think that you yourself don’t have the expertise to find success in social media on your own, you may want to consider looking into an SEO company or SEO reseller program to help manage your SEO and Social Media, or at least to help you get started.

Nicole has been blogging about SEO and Social Media for years. She enjoys helping companies learn how to find more success with their SEO and Social Media efforts.

1. Always Add Images: Worried that customers are not commenting enough on your links and posts? Add some images: According to a Hubspot study in late 2012, simply including a photo on your Facebook post can increase the number of Likes you receive by 53 percent and boost comments by a whopping 104 percent – just for a photo. So when you get ready to post a promotion or just stay in contact with fans, find a good picture to go along with it. The rules for photos are similar to strong text SEO: Make the picture dynamic, interesting, and worthwhile.

Showcase your products in interesting locations, show what goes on behind the scenes at your business, and be creative! The latest Twitter Card updates also let companies include photos and other deep content on their Twitter feeds, if you are willing to invest more attention in your Twitter account. Another vital tip: Find an employee or friend who has photography skills to give your images impact and impress viewers.

2. Crowdsource Your Marketing: Digital marketing contests are swiftly rising in popularity, for several reasons. First, they allow customers to participate in the creative process and show what they appreciate in entertainment and like most about your business. Second, they increase customer engagement by offering prizes for the best marketing content (video commercials work great!) and allowing fans to share their content with friends for more votes – which means free advertising for you!

It is still easy to use keywords in these crowdsourcing events, you are just making the event far more interactive. Set up a contest page on your own website with lots of social integration…or you can try to create a Facebook-based contest with its own upvoting and integration system, as long as you play by the Facebook contest rules.

3. Give A Little to Get a Lot: Social engagement increases when customers know they are getting value. Move away from pure promotions and announcements. Take a break from conversation topics – offer your social media fans and online customers some real information. Use a company blog or a post a link to a useful article. Teach viewers how to do something. Show them how to use your product or save money through your service. Educate them about current trends or opportunities.

People will automatically feel more appreciated when you give them real data instead of just asking for a sale in disguise. If you are at a loss for ideas on more meaty content, hold a brainstorming session, ask peers for their ideas, and think back to the useful information you have found posted online.

4. Expand Your Networks: Too many companies have well-developed SEO content but only post it on the Big Two – Facebook and Twitter (with some slight variation for foreign markets). It is time to move beyond the dual major networks and start appealing to a wider audience. Include posts on LinkedIn whenever possible. By all means, create a YouTube channel and start posting guides, commercials and interviews to give customers a way to visually experience your brand. Post images and information to Tumblr.

Instead of just using SEO keywords on your blog, creating pieces for external sites as well. Even BitTorrent is trying to position its as an aid to marketers these days, if you don’t mind sharing free content. Explore your opportunities and expand your networks. You can keep the same keywords and brand messages but distribute to a broader variety of networks to create far more impact.

Jason Bayless is a professional blogger that gives small business and entrepreneurs SEO advice. He writes for BestSEOCompanies.com, a nationally recognized comparison website of the best SEO companies in the United States.

Many companies underestimate the power of content and don’t really emphasize on content marketing which in real is one of the major factor to drive audience towards your company and products. Every piece of content created should have a marketing plan hidden in it to get a huge amount of traffic from all over the world. A good marketing plan must have a good content building strategy along with a good SEO strategy.

Below are some golden rules to follow for content building:

1.Set Goals: Always follow the SMART (Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Bound) rule before setting a goal for writing. If you don’t know what your destination is, you won’t know when and how to get there.

2.Know who you are: Know who you are, what your product is, what you mean to the audience and what all can you offer them. You should be very clear with your strength and weaknesses.

3.Know what your audience wants: Try to clearly understand what your customer, audience, partners, clients requirements are or what they want from you. A clear understanding can help you set a clear goal. Prioritize your top audiences and try to know what value you can provide them to solve their problem.

4.Know what you’ve got: Do a little research about market as well as about your clients. Gather as much as information as you can via slides, videos, pictures etc. and for every piece of content, mark its status as “In, Out or Update” before compiling all your content. This logic means that either your information is going to be used, or not used or will be updated before using it externally.

5.Slow down to Speed up: Content Marketing is much bigger than a normal blog post or words on a page. Content Building should be taken with a slower yet steady process creating a high quality content. One should spend a little time on the list before investing directly in writing. Content Marketing includes knowing your audience, setting goals, creating marketing strategies, etc. Start with a slower process while making a list and then start driving faster to generate compelling content for business.

6.Build your Content Foundation: To make a brand big, one should think of brand and messaging in a productive manner rather than normal messaging. Same goes for content marketing. Your content should be innovative to attract audience to read it and check it. Your brand architecture/content should include graphics, design and content. There is always a basic messaging framework that one should follow and not confuse the client as well as the whole audience.

7.Create Once, Use Many: When you invest a lot of time on creating a “Message House”, it enables you to create the foundation once and use it many times. This largely increases the ROI on all the content. You once create the foundation, and after that on the basis on audience and requirement, you can use it along with the campaigns as needed.

8.Avoid RAMs: Avoid RAMs (Random Act of Messaging) wherever and whenever possible. Don’t spam. The best way to do this is to ensure that the content marketing you’re doing is integrated with marketing and business.

9.Be you and Stay Fresh: Don’t copy your partners, customers or client. Build your own plan, your own brand and your own marketing strategy. A new plan is always a hit as compared to an old plan. Adapt new and interesting ideas with time. Stay updated with the latest trends, news, and data. Don’t get stuck to old data and techniques. Keep your content fresh to avoid your audience to yawn while reading it.

10.Try the cow and create a real conversation tunnel: Think different and try something different. Don’t mess around with the content but make it look different and innovative. ‘Content is King’. Be the king and do whatever it takes. Make info-graphics. Be creative. And on other side, make a tunnel for some real and healthy conversation with the client about the company and products.

• Consumers and businesses are using more specific search terms than ever before
• Search is becoming more personalized to where people live and their search history
• Businesses are specifically targeting local B2B and B2C opportunities
• Opportunity to build up a local reputation and loyal customer base, allowing small, local businesses to compete with larger companies and popular brands

As is the case in all areas of business, it is likely that you work every day to seek out the best competitive edge you can.

One way in which small businesses, as well as local SEO agencies, consultants, and freelancers can help to boost their local rankings is to use Schema mark-up.

What is Schema?

SEO can often feel like it is ‘them against us,’ with webmasters and SEO professionals constantly fighting against the search engines to attain the best ranking. Schema turns this on its head, and is a way to point search engines to important, location based content on your site. This is seen as so ground breaking within the industry because, aside from Google Webmaster Tools and other similar resources, the advice from search engines is often ambiguous and difficult to decipher.

The website Schema.org works in a collaboration agreement with the search engines. Schema tells the search giants the code that highlights important information, and they treat it as such.

With that in mind, local business should soon be thriving like never before.

Local Firms Slow to Get on Board

At least, that is what would happen in an ideal world. The reality could not be more different. While small business owners might talk about maintaining their site and having an SEO plan, the truth is that many are a long way behind where they should be.

Despite there being various studies pointing to the importance of having a website and an SEO strategy, an article from the respected TechCrunch website last year indicated that, in the US alone, only 25% of small, local businesses have a website.

Not only should these businesses have a website, they ought to use Schema in order to realise their local SEO potential. If your business doesn’t have a website, or it isn’t seeing the local results you want to, then it could be beneficial for you, too. Local SEO agencies and freelancers can also use it to get results for their client quickly.

What Should Local SEO Focus On?

A local SEO strategy should focus on several areas, with two large factors that you can deal with directly on your website.

• Physical location of a business
• Testimonials from customers

These should all happen within a traditional SEO strategy, and you should not treat them as the be all and end all of what you do. If this represents all that you do, and don’t pursue a listing on business directories, such as Google+ Local and Yelp, your strategy will not succeed.

How can you use Schema as an SEO tool to bring attention to these on your website?

Your Business’ Location

The clue is very much in the title when it comes to this element of local SEO. If you aren’t telling the search engines where you are, you aren’t going to rank on anyone’s personalized search rankings.

When you try out Schema for yourself, you will discover all of the different elements you can put into place, although we have demonstrated some below.

We use div tags to display the Schema code, and none of the code itself appears live on your site.

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/SEOAgency”>
<span itemprop=”name”>BrightLocal</span>
<div itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>223 Regent Street</span>
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>London</span>,
<span itemprop=”postalCode”>W1B 2QD</span>
</div>
Phone: <span itemprop=”telephone”>020 3322 2474</span>
<a href=”http://googlemapsurl.com” itemprop=”maps”>Copy the URL of your Map location here</a>
</div>

As you can see, this includes many of the things a potential customer might search for. In this case, an SEO Agency in London will have a better chance of ranking well locally. If you would do anything differently based on the example above, what would it be?

We’ll give our suggestion at the end.

You can also include the payment types you accept, among other things, so someone searching for “businesses that accept American Express,” for example, will see you in their local search results if you have applied that code.

Customer Reviews

If your business has a review on Google+ Local or another business directory, this will directly influence how people view you. Featuring a testimonial on your own website is also a basic marketing tool that almost everyone does. We hope you’re in the position of only getting positive reviews, and that you can use this to further highlight them. Consider that SearchEngineLand estimates that in excess of 70% of consumers would trust an online review to the same extent as a personal recommendation and you start to get an idea of the power a positive testimonial can have.

Much like with the location, using Schema code will highlight your testimonials to search engines. This is what you should do.

<div itemprop=”review” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Review”>
<span itemprop=”name”>Superb service</span> -
by <span itemprop=”author”>Joe Bloggs</span>,
<meta itemprop=”datePublished” content=”2011-03-25″>March 25, 2011
<div itemprop=”reviewRating” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Rating”>
<meta itemprop=”worstRating” content = “1″/>
<span itemprop=”ratingValue”>5</span>/
<span itemprop=”bestRating”>5</span>stars
</div>

<span itemprop=”description”>The SEO services I received vastly improved my rankings and enabled me to attract a higher number of relevant visitors to my site, meaning my conversions improved markedly and my revenues and profits increased.</span>

</div>

Top Tip: As well as following this practice, when you list your business on directories, aim to have a link back to your testimonials page rather than your home page; customers who find you on a business directory will see what you’re about quicker, and the backlink will mean that page is indexed quicker and ranks higher.

A Final Point About Google+

While you cannot use Schema for optimizing blog posts, you should ensure that you are using your Google+ account to mark yourself as the author of your writing. This will help to build a stronger ‘total package’ in terms of your search rankings and increase your chances of appearing on page one of local results.

Where to Get Help

There is a number of resources available in addition to the Schema website itself. Try the 51 Blocks website or Google’s own Webmaster Tools, which will run a check of your code for errors.

Schema is not going to solve all of the challenges your business faces online, but it will make you a much stronger proposition and increase your chances of local SEO success. Experiment and implement it as soon as possible, and you will quickly start to see results.

Robert is an online content writer with a specific interest in online marketing and local SEO techniques, including the use of various code and platforms in order to improve results.

It is vital for you to first establish whether your site has been hit by Google Panda or Google Penguin. The Penguin algorithm was launched around the 24th April 2012 so traffic drops near this date indicate that Penguin is responsible. You will also notice that the keywords you have used the most in your exact match anchor text are the ones penalized the hardest. The easiest way to see your backlink profile is to use www.majesticseo.com to analyse your links. The summary page will show you the anchor text volumes for each keyword.

Back-Links

Prior to Google launching the Penguin algorithm, you could use up to 70% exact match keyword density and rank well, overnight this dropped to 5%. You need to reduce the volume of keyword rich anchor text links. Replace them with Brand links, URL based links and ‘junk’ links. Your company or website are good examples of what to use for Brand links. Keep your links looking natural by using different URL variations;

• http://www.xyzcompany.com
• http://www.xyzcompany.com/
• http://xyzcompany.com
• http://xyzcompany.com/
• www.xyzcompany.com
• www.xyzcompany.com/
• xyzcompany.com
• xyzcompany.com/

Different Class C IP addresses will give your back-links more weight than ever. Links from topic related sites are much more valuable to you then they used to be. Link from trusted sites with Google PR. Link from pages that have links pointing to them are more authoritative than unlinked to pages. Links on pages that themselves have established back-links are the best links to get.

Link Networks

You should avoid automated link networks because Google doesn’t like site owners using them and sooner or later you will be penalized for using them.

On-Page SEO

The maximum on-page keyword density you should aim for to keep The ideal keyword density to comply with Google Panda is around 2%. Add an external link within your page content to an authority .gov or .edu site because Google likes to see external authority links.

Website Content

The content on your site needs to be unique to you, well written and of only the highest quality. Contextual linking is the process of creating links from words within your content, either to more of your own content, or to external content. It is considered a good practice for page quality.

Using Graphics

A video will help to increase the time spent on your page, and photo’s should be used to break up large blocks of text. All images on your pages should have alt text that describes the image using a variety of keywords and phrases for each image. Make sure that you use a spelling checker to test all your content and that it makes sense to you. Google can determine the ‘reading age’ for different text and can establish if a professor or a schoolboy wrote your content. When you are writing new content aim to write at least 500 words for each page because this amount of content has been shown to be advantageous for good search engine rankings.

Google, Bing and Yahoo like content that real people like, so write your content so that your readers enjoy consuming what you write. Google will reward you when they can see real visitors engaging with your site. You can write ‘natural’ sounding content using different words with the same meaning because Google uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) to associate related terms within your content.

Best Use of Metatags

Unique meta data tags should be on each individual page of your website. You will be penalized in SERP’s if more than one page has the same metadata. should contain unique data, if you have duplicates edit them because you will be penalized in the search results. The meta description tag is usually used in search engine results below your page heading. For this reason you should structure it to get a better click through, not for keyword spamming.

User Engagement

Website load speed is an important metric for good Google rankings. Check your websites load speed using YSlow in Firefox because if your pages take time to load you won’t rank very high. The volume of visitors that don’t like your website content when they arrive and instantly hit the back button represent your bounce rate. This needs to be as low as possible, but a maximum of 55%.

Page Views and Time on Site

Increasing the average page views per visitor will improve your SERP’s rankings because Google uses average page views as an indicator of site content quality. Google uses the ‘average time on site’ metric to measure the quality and relevance of your content. The longer a visitors remains on your site, the better your content is considered to be.

All of the above listed SEO elements is important for your ranking success. A weakness in any one of them will affect your sites search performance, so address each one in turn and improve everything you can to make your site a quality website.

Featured images:

•  License: Image author owned

Dave Holland is the managing Director of DeehoSEO, a leading UK search engine optimisation consultancy. You can keep up to date with all of Google’s updates and algorithm changes here

Google has the overwhelming market share of the search engine market, followed by Bing and Yahoo, to represent all the searches any marketer would want to worry about.  There are two ways to drive traffic from search engines: organic, and paid.  If you still need convincing, take a look at this online marketing article on why to budget for SEM.

Organic (Non-Paid) Search Traffic

The entire premise behind search engines is to provide relevant online resources to users looking for information.  When people search for something, Google (or Bing) tries to present the user with the most useful information as possible.  Organic search engine optimization (commonly known as SEO), is the process of establishing your website as a useful resource.  The more useful your website is, the more traffic you will “earn” without needing to pay for it.

Advantages:

-          It’s free!  Well, sort of.  Search engines don’t charge to have your website come up in results. However, it takes a lot of time and effort to develop the most relevant web presence. And in this business, time is money. Of course, you can hire an SEO firm to do it for you, which is an investment much easier to measure.

-          It’s trustworthy. People trust organic results a lot more than paid advertising. They are much more likely to click on organic listings than on a paid ad.

Disadvantages:

-          Lack of Control: there are a lot of factors and elements that are out of your control when dealing with organic results. What your competition does, your past history, and Google’s constantly evolving result preferences are all out of your control.

-          Unknown Factors: Google is fairly secretive about what they use a formula for “relevant” sites. While we do know some general “best practices” Google likes to see, it’s not 100% clear what will drive your page to the top.

-          Long-Term Investment: They say slow and steady wins the race. You might not see much progress for days, weeks, or months.  Becoming the most relevant website for a search, especially a competitive search, can take a long time.  Be prepared to invest time and money without seeing results some time down the road.

Paid Search Traffic

Paid traffic can take many forms including ads on search engines, ads within context, social media ads, etc. For the purposes of this article, I am speaking on ads within search engine results (for a more related comparison). This type of traffic often takes the form of pay-per-click, where by clients only pay for visitors who have clicked on their ad. The other form is pay-per-thousand (CPM) which cost is based impressions, or how many people view your ad.

Advantages:

-          Cost Control: with the payment set up, you can set budgets and limit how much you spend on a daily basis to ensure you’re not going over budget. Similarly you can manage each keyword’s bid to help target higher returning keywords.

-          Targeting: there is a plethora of targeting options in paid search. Everything from location to placement to network targeting. You can control who is seeing your ads making every dollar you spend more efficient.

-          Direct ROI: There is tons of data behind paid search. Setting up goals and conversions (especially for ecommerce sites) can help you directly link your marketing dollars to returns.

-          Instant: Need traffic today?  As soon as you set up your campaigns, you’ll get the placements you pay for.

Disadvantages:

-          Complexity of managing campaigns: There are a lot of settings, targeting, and optimization strategies that can be used for profitable campaigns. Organizing and strategizing these can take a lot of time and expertise.

-          Competition:  increased competition in this market has driven costs up, more so in certain markets.  Higher competition also means that those companies with big budgets and man power tend have the dominant positions.

The Future of The Search Environment

Search continues to become more and more complex as time goes on.  Paid search campaign shave introduced special shopping results, location extensions, and click-to-call capabilities, just to name a few.  Organic results now feature local businesses, images, news, and even location adjustments.  What you can be sure of is that the landscape is constantly changing, so a real commitment to user experience and targeting is vital in developing a search engine marketing campaign of any kind.

About the Author:

Mike LaLonde has been in the online marketing industry for over 10 years.  Starting by running his own websites, he eventually moved on to helping other entrepreneurs operate online businesses.  With his primarily focus on PPC services, SEO consulting, and web analytics consulting, Mike takes a quantitative approach to his marketing activities. He works as a digital marketing specialist at Londes Digital Marketing, in Rochester NY.

More often than not, there’s little money left for online marketing, however the great thing about websites and SEO is that there doesn’t have to be.

A lot of the marketing that you can achieve online is cheap, if not free. All it takes is a little bit of time and little bit of knowhow. So here are some low budget tips to get your small business, big online.

Link building

One of the first steps in improving your SEO is to get some links going to and from your website. This will show the search engines that other sites think your content is worth linking to, and therefore will rank you more highly.

There are plenty of ways to build links to other sites, some are more worthwhile than others, and some are a lot cheaper than others. The links that you pursue will depend on the industry that you’re in, but it’s important to choose them carefully as excessive or irrelevant links could do more harm than good.

Blogs

Getting an incoming link from a blog with good traffic and a good page ranking is a great place to start. And although it is possible to find blogs that will link to you for free, you’ll mostly have to pay a small amount for the privilege.

This could either involve writing a guest blog to be posted on the site, or paying the blogger to include your link in an article. Try to ensure that any article your link is in is relevant and well written in order to get maximum results.

Forums

For a long time, websites have tried to get extra links by posting them in relevant discussion forums. This has worked well in the past, but due to the forthcoming changes in Google’s algorithms, links from forums will be of much reduced value, so it’s not worth spending as much time in this area.

Directories

Getting your website listed in local directories is great for link building. However watch out for some free directories as the search engines don’t value them highly and a link could actually be damaging.

Try to ensure you are only listed in trusted directories by checking their page rank and which other websites are listed by them.

Some of the larger directories may charge for inclusion or for an enhanced listing. This can be great for SEO as long as the directory is trusted and is likely to get lots of traffic.

Related businesses

As link building is good for everyone, you can try to approach other websites directly to see if they’ll include your URL on their site.

Contact businesses that are in related, but not competing, fields and offer them a reciprocal link on your site. The worst that they can say is no!

On-site

One of the cheapest ways to improve your ranking is to work on your on-site SEO.

Take full advantage of all META and TITLE tags by populating them with relevant keywords and phrases. Avoid any duplicate content as search engines don’t like it.

You can also make the most of your actual URL by ensuring that each page has a unique and targeted address. Try not to use generic names like ‘home’ as it doesn’t tell the search engines anything about your site.

No matter how big or small your business or your budget is, there are always steps you can take to boost your SEO and get more people clicking through to your site.

Once you’ve got to a certain level, visitor number should start to grow organically and hopefully, this will translate into bigger profits for you.

Picture credits: Wikipedia 1 & 2

About the author: Tom Shurville manages Distinctly Digital, the SEO company offering services in Hertfordshire. Tom takes responsibility for business development, client communication and planning tailor made SEO campaigns.

First, the reasons to use content marketing: Risk mitigation, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing and Lead Scoring.

About this 4, I would consider risk mitigation to be the least important, both for marketers and for buyers. The risk is reduced with information, that’s true, but information doesn’t always come from whitepapers. Especially for a B2B product, where you need to actually talk to a sales person, jump into a Gotomeeting session with this sales guy and a techie (sales engineer) and review the product with full detail. I’m talking about B2B software products here, for example for a document capture software tool you need to actually review all the features, the ease of use (usability, learnability) and of course talk about the pricing, asking for discounts etc. That’s not something you get in a white paper, or even in a demo video. For these types of questions or requirements, which we all have when buying an Enterprise class software product, we need first hand advice and first person support, and the risk gets only reduced in that way.

Security sells, but Risk mitigation is now the main point for content marketing. Lead Generation is. Ask Wikipedia about it’s traffic. And after the generation comes the tracking (scoring) so you actually have information of which of your leads are actually hitting in the prices page of your product. And you keep them interested in your product and your brand sending them more and more relevant content (newsletters, social media shares etc.). So lead generation, scoring and nurturing. Not security, risks or anything like that. It’s Leads all the way.

About the numbers of how companies are using Content Marketing: Social Media appears first, and it makes sense because good content has to do with its ability of being viral. Article posting comes just second, and this is key for SEO tactics. At the end of the day people use social to share and stay in touch with friends, but Google is the purchasing engine. And that is why Adwords has been such a huge success, during the social experience users are more concerned into relaxing, chilling and can be influenced by branding or get to know about an infographic, a cool picture about Nike or Coca-Cola, so more of a not so aggressive strategy needs to be put in place. However, in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Request Page, so the actual page where you get the Google results after doing your query), it’s all about the conversion, getting the hot lead and making the f%!?ing sale.

In-person events comes way to high in my opinion. Often the only relevant thing about in-person events is the summary you post on your blog when you attend one, or actually the summaries in the blog posts of your audience linking to your blog/page if you’re the speaker. So it’s more about the follow-up than the actual in-person happening (we’re talking about online marketing right?).

I may be biased, but in my opinion it’s still all about SEO, which is not dead or even close to it. Except SEO now has gone more sophisticated, as the sentence “content is king” keeps making more and more sense everyday. In the old days, link farms or side-bar links would get you really far, but now you have to work your butt off to get thoughtful posts in order to stay relevant, and have users like your content and share it with passion, as Google gets more “socially biased” in it’s algorithm. I’m also biased towards startups. Enterprise organizations can pour millions into Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads etc. I’m not getting there, online marketing should be about being extremely cost effective, not just branding for later off-line conversions, that’s not where I see the present or future of marketing.

So back to the infographic. Blog posts come a distant sixth place. They actually also come in first spot, only with brackets. That shows something. Sixth place is too week for the single most important content distributor. The single most important place for product reviews, personal opinions, getting close and emotional with thought leaders in really personal blogs. There’s nothing more powerful in the marketing world than your friends advice to visit somewhere, buy some tennis shoes or get the latest smartphone. And niche blogs with authorities of a certain field really act like your best friends’ advice. And the blog is the center of the sharing experience (sharethis, the old tweetmeme buttons etc.). Blogs only 9% above than print magazines.. are you kidding me? When was the last time you bought a magazine? How many times have you been in the web asking for info, may it be over a blog or a vertical forum, or even Yahoo answers? But print content? Are you seriously kidding me with all the iPads, Kindles, Nooks etc. out there.. That’s not even content marketing, that’s prehistorical marketing.

I also find microsites to be way too low. This is not opinion, this numbers are fact based, but they are quite surprising on how slow the adoption still is for online content marketing.

Ebooks come last. Now here we talk about one of the greatest marketing tools available. A while ago I talked to a Silicon Valley company that does Records Management and Document Management, all Enterprise Software related products. So they published a Book, available in digital format through Amazon. Yes, it is 300 pages long, full of descriptions, important data, pictures to explain how to do things. Tons of work, but they get leads on a daily basis. Really qualified leads that see their value as experts and get more questions, and need services. That’s something similar to these PCB design glossary, where users get definitions in a field related to PCB design services, and they get the branding and may think “hum, I don’t get this, shouldn’t I ask for advice? oh wait, this contact button right here should help”.

Data-driven content marketing (I guess this category is all about infographics) is also really low. Infographics are hot, way hotter than regular long blog posts like this one. But they require tons of work too, and a graphic designer to add the coolness. And they push thoughtful posts like this one, where the Marketo guys actually got a free link at the top of this post. Just for being relevant, cool, fresh design. What’s the next interesting trend in your particular market that can be shown with data?

So let’s keep going with the infographic. Companies with less than 10 workers use an average of 6 content marketing tactics. My guess: corporate blog, social media, newsletter?, case studies, webinars and article posting. White papers videos and microsites should also come near in this category, maybe videos over webinars, for example (it’s so easy to capture a screen video over a Mac with Quicktime and show some cool features that your software does).

And about the social media platforms (image above this line), it’s not surprising that Linkedin, with a huge distance from Twitter and Facebook in terms of millions of users comes at a close third place. Linkedin is like Google, is where the money is. Google has as many users as Facebook, but their less time (consuming less resources) and inclined to buy. Something with Linkedin, this time with less users, but much better qualified to purchase anything (workers with income, some of them real top executives with astonishing purchasing power). So with less users, and I’m sure less campaign ads but more expensive ones, Linkedin is up there at the top. I’m surprised Twitter is above Facebook, but great influencers are in this more “hipster techie” social network.

The challenges, product good content (quality) and producing enough content (quantity). Makes sense, good quality and good quantity requires lots of effort, resources, images to buy on stockxchange or imageshutter and the likes, data to get from Forrester or Gartner (or your own research). So yes, big work. We talked about that before talking about an eBook. Great effort, but after it is done and publish, you get a stream of leads flowing into your website/business.

So is the budget growing?

Of course it is. This is a cool vs old (content vs traditional) infographic, right? So a little more than 1 out of 2 marketers want to increase investment on content marketing. This number would be much bigger over SMBs or startups in my opinion. The startups I know do get way  more content marketing expenditure on average than the larger companies, as they are early adopters.

And that connects directly with the last piece, content marketing investment depending on company size. Of course it’s larger on smaller companies, again, late adopters are usually the larger firms, that have the bigger surf boards and it is harder for them to catch the next wave coming up, as they’re not heading the right direction and it takes them a lot to move their boat.

And that concludes our analysis. More thoughts on Startups, Marketing, Technology etc. in my personal Blog, written from the heart of Silicon Valley.