A Few Good Tips
* Links matter, but highly relevant links matter more. Don’t look at links as short-term traffic boosters. Take the time to earn a good link to a useful site, just as you’d invest time to get a personal referral in real life. “The best way to get a link is to earn it,” Laycock said. Ultimately, good Web content will attract good links and will be rewarded by the search engines.
* Don’t assume you can’t afford to hire an outside firm to carry much of the load for your search marketing. True, big brands spend in the millions for SEM services, but there are good small firms that will take on clients that spend thousands, said Matt McGee, project manager for One World Telecom and author of the SmallBusinessSEM.com blog.
* Remember that outsourced SEM is a partnership and take responsibility for forging a good one. Ask questions before you hire a firm and evaluate the answers you get for their sales-pitch content. Also, assess your own comfort level with risk; some SEM firms employ tactics that, if detected, can earn your site a penalty from the search engines. You may not want to pay the financial (or ethical) price for those techniques.
* The search world doesn’t stop with the big engines these days. If your market is geographically limited, local search engines and online directories can pay off in conversions, if not direct traffic. The major engines all have local directories and often list those results above the general search rankings. Other third-party directory sites (Merchant Circle, Yelp) pop up every day, some with features such as customer reviews. It’s a big job to make sure you’re listed correctly on all these sites. But it needs to be done; there’s no telling which site could hit big a year from now.
Next: Back to Part 1
