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.

It is quite easy to spend you marketing euros in the offline world. You just go to any of the leading advertising agencies and let them create the advertising campaign and let them run it for you. They will create it, and purchase the media (for a better price that what you can since they buy in big volumes) and run the campaign. You as the Marketing Manager just sit back and enjoy. Actually you also get pampered with all kinds of gifts, etc.

If by a chance your product is purely online product, or is sold online only, you are going to get into the problems. Why? Because your advertising agency that you count on is running advertisements for clients in the offline world. And the conversion rate from the offline advertisement to the online shop is as we know quite low. So what should you be looking for then?

The Online Advertising Agency creates the campaigns, and purchases the advertising space (or sometimes just traffic) from the online resources – web sites. They are the people who will get your name and logo on Hotmail, Yahoo, and all national web sites of your interest. They will also find private blogs and blog networks, that have traffic relevant to your product and place your advertisements everywhere where people potentially interested in your product ‘Hang Out’ on the web. Forums, social networks, or anything else you can think of. And yes they will also do the search engine optimisation of your own web site to bring you the natural ‘organic’ traffic from the search engines. Of course they will also manage your pay per click search engine marketing.

Have you seen an Online Advertising Agency like this in Ireland? A one stop shop for:

Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Optimisation
Link Building
Social Networking campaigns (promoting you in LinkedIN or Facebook)
Corporate Blog Management

Is Ireland simply too small for such a Online Advertising Agency to exist?

An interesting question posted in the LinkedIN Answers by Tim Van Der Stek:

Is there money to be made by posting links of other websites on your own website? Do you need a middle man to accomplish something like this? How can you find out the going rates?

And my LinkedIn Answer:

Google will not like you really much if they find out that you are selling or renting links from your web site. So do not display the advertisement for such a service on your front page, since Google will not send you much traffic, and we all know that the vast majority of the web sites have the majority of their traffic directly from Google.

How to find the rates?

Rates depend on the traffic volume, traffic quality, geographical market, industry, or niche and if your traffic is from Google – what keywords is your web site found for.

The easiest way to find out what is the going rate is to ask a large number of similar sites to yours – in the same market, industry, and with the similar number of the Google PR and Alexa ranking – what would they charge to link to your site (or a fictitious site). Or even better, send them an email and say, I offer €XXX for the link to our site on your front page. From their responses you will quickly establish what would they agree to sell it for – and that is what the going price is.

The majority of this link trading is done by the third party companies, that try to do it all ‘under the radar’ for Google not to notice. Google on the other hand encourages the webmasters to report paid links. Unfortunately they do not offer any of their cash as a reward.

Other third parties like Google AdSense and Text Ads,… offer a far smaller revenue then the direct link sales.

For more of my LinkedIN Answers in the Internet Marketing visit: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanstojanovic.

Blogging is a way of building the inbound links. How?

You blog, about interesting topics (link bait). Then you put comments on related and relevant blogs with a link to your blog / articles. You submit your RSS feed to wherever you see fit, and you submit your blog to the blog search engines.

Outsourcing Blogging or not - you need a blogger who understands your (target) market and your niche. A local blogger will write in a local language, about local topics. That is far easier to read (especially in a blog) than a PR structured articles released by the professional PR agencies.

Blogging Costs - an hour or two a day to start with. That will give you a meaningful (measurable) results in a month or two. You need to decide what your targeted SEO result is. In a number of relevant visitors per day. Relevant meaning, that come from the search engines for the phrases you want them to come (relevant to your business). Scope depends of the size of the market. Google.ie is much smaller than Google.co.uk, that is much smaller than Google.com. Therefore it is most likely (depending on the industry or niche), that you will achieve much more in a smaller market with the same budget.