SEO Consultant Ireland

Here is a short checklist for creating your online marketing budget. Print it and try to set a figure next to each of the activity listed below:

Copywriting

• Web site copy
• Blog
• Press Releases
• Whitepaper
• Newsletter

Link Building

• Related Industry Directory
• Geographical Directory (your Local, or your  target market’s Local)
• Link exchange with related sites
• Blog commenting
• Forum participation

Branding

• Social Networking activity
• Company blog comments maintenance

Paid Advertising

• PPC
• Banners
• Link Purchases
• Blog or blog post sponsoring

As a general rule the best results are achieved if the budget is evenly spread between the marketing activity groups above. The tasks should be performed more or less in the sequence as listed above.

Each online marketing plan is specific to the companies activity on the web. It will contain clear goals and targets to be achieved. Make sure your online marketing budget is adequate to achieve your online marketing goals.

Link building is usually considered as a part of the search engine optimization. The reason for it is that the search engines value links pointing to a web site. The text used to generate a link is called the Anchor Text, and the search engines associate your site with the keywords used in the links pointing to your site.

For example if there is a link on some web site pointing to yours, and the text used to generate the link is the phrase ‘fresh yogurt’ the search engine will associate our site with that phrase. As a result when someone is searching for the term ‘fresh Yogurt’ the search engine will display your site.

This demonstrates the ‘Power of Links’ on the web today. You need to gain links towards your web site where the link is the search phrase you want to rank well for in the SERP pages.

There are different methods of link building:
1. SPAM – you can run tools that scan web sites, scrap email addresses and send emails to those emails requesting the recipients to link to you. This is a fairly automated process and in most countries 100% illegal.
2. Paid and Free Directory Listings – you can search for the directories on the web that will let you list your web site. Most of those are what is today known as Link Farms. Some are still valuable.
3. Link Exchange – is the common name for emailing the site owners and webmasters with a proposal to include a link to your site with a counter proposal that you will (or have already) linked to them.
4. Purchasing Links – A number of online marketing companies act as Link Brokers reselling the links from one web site to another. Most often between the clients of the same agency.
5. Social Bookmarking – is submitting links to the long list of the social bookmarking sites. This is extremely valuable technique if done right.
6. Blog Commenting – most of blogs let you leave comments that will also include a link back to your site if you place it. The NOFALLOW Tag is also a common practice telling the search engines NOT to give importance to those links.
7. Link Magnet – is generating the content on your own web site that is so good, interesting and relevant that people naturally link to it from their own web sites. This is also called sometimes Link Baiting that just proves my earlier these that the search engine optimization is like fishing!

Each of the link building approaches, with the exception of pure SPAM-ing, is extremely labour intensive and time consuming. Creativity is usually one of the most effective skills of a good and effective link builder. Understanding the local market also helps that much that outsourcing of link building to a cheaper countries in most cases does not give good results.

A single link from a blog article placed in the right moment (first comment) can generate literally thousands of direct visitors. Knowing what blogs to spend time on is the key of the link building success when it comes to blog commenting.

Like in professional sailing race where a number of skills are required to get to the top position. The difference is that Link Building is mostly like a single handed racing. There is usually just one ‘crew’, a opposed to the team like the one of the Green Dragon in the Volvo Ocean Race. This is why a link builder needs to be supper efficient since there are so many tasks to do and all of them are extremely time consuming.