Will, I’m doing alright on clients right now, but by this summer I know it’s going to dry up a bit, so I’m thinking about doing PPC or a link building campaign.  Which do you recommend?

- Jon

I’m not a huge fan of PPC.  While I know it works, and works quite well for some businesses, it’s overall a very short-sighted strategy.  If you have the budget, pay per click is an easy way to the front page for many terms.  Problem is, most small business owners don’t have the budget they need in order to get or stay near the top.  Plus, once that budget runs out, the ads immediately disappear and you are literally back to where you were when you wrote this email.

PPC is fairly easy to set up, it’s quick, and gets you traffic right away.  If you are a short-term thinker, this may be the way to go.  Just realize that there are no long term benefits – it’s money spent and gone.

Link building, on the other hand, is not fast.  Since some sites are not crawled for up to six weeks at a time, a link placed on one of those today may not influence your rankings for two months.  And even then, if you’re on page five for a result, and the search engine finds your link, and it influences the rankings, you may jump to page two or three – still no significant increase in traffic.

But link building has a long-time effect on your overall rankings.  If you were to build 300 links over the course of a month, you’ll see that effort come back to you in increased rankings over time for multiple keywords and keyphrases.

Obviously the rankings you achieve by starting a link building campaign depend on the keywords you choose.  Selecting some that have little competition, such as geotargeted phrases, are more likely to rank on page one quickly.

So it pretty much depends on your end goal.  If you want to put money into PPC every summer, and see no benefit from it during the other three seasons, then by all means do it.  But if you want to get to the top of the organic rankings, a steady push at link building is the way to go.

There are some great programs out there that help you automate some of this low level link building. But how do you know when automatically submitting links by the dozen is too much of a good thing?

In my opinion, you should definitely moderate the approach to using one of these services.  If you have a website that hasn’t really had any decent inbound links added in months (or years), then a sudden influx of links to your site is going to look unnatural and will probably raise a fmall flag at the search engines.  Just what you don’t want.

So start small.  Ten links this week, ten next week.  Twelve or fifteen the week after, and so on.  Take it slow, push down very gently on that gas pedal, and start moving forward in a somewhat unnoticeable manner.

Slow and steady wins the race.

I’d love to use your SEO techniques, but my website is controlled by corporate, there’s nothing I can do on it. I have no control over the site other than putting my name and hours of operation on there.

Yeah, that sucks.

There’s nothing worse than having a boss that breathes down your neck all day, making you feel little.  And that’s what these industries are doing, in my opinion; treating you like a little person that has no idea how to market their own business.

Many times these companies lock down their own employees so much that they’re afraid to even put anything on their website for fear of losing their affiliation with whatever it is.

Let’s take a guy I met recently – Wally Lionberger.  Wally’s website is a perfect example of a corporate website.  He has virtually no leverage when it comes to adding information or making his website stand apart from the next insurance guy.  He’s locked in to this website, and no more.  Or is he?

For sake of setting a foundation, Wally is an insurance agent for American Family.  He has a physical office.  American locks down his abilities to create any page outside of their corporate site.  He is not allowed to have a facebook page or twitter account related to AmFam.  His domain name, in case you didn’t notice, actually forwards to the amfam.com website.  So his domain doesn’t really even exist, according to Google.

So what can Wally, or anyone that has a coporate-type website do to rank locally and increase their online presence? Lots of things.

Dominate Local

Since Wally pretty much sells to the local Saint Louis area, it would make sense that he start locally.  His first step should be to get into Google Places, formerly Google Local Business Center – which he has done.  When adding your business, fill out as much information as you possibly can.  Use keywords related to your industry, list your email, hours, upload pictures and anything else you can cram in there.  Do the same at Yahoo! Local and Bing Local Listing Center.

Now add your information to sites like Yelp!, Mixx, Kudzu and CitySearch.  Always use your URL – not the URL of where your URL actually points to.  (In Wally’s case he should list his URL as http://www.WallyLionberger.com and not the crazy http://apps.amfam/blahblahblah URL that it actually forwards to).  This will give you more control over what you are offering – for instance if you decide to go work for another company, you’ll only have to worry about changing your pointer, not getting an entire new domain name.

Tip: Wondering what all to put on these websites?  Do a search for your industry and see who comes up.  Then see what those folks are doing and imitate that.  If you don’t see any of your local competitors, good for you!  Get your name up there and take that traffic!

Build Keyword Targeted Links

This is a big one.  There’s no rule saying that you can’t build links on other people’s websites that ultimately influence your overall ranking on the search engines.  There’s a saying in my industry- Content is King, Links are Queen. Since you can’t really control the content on your corporate website, you’ve got to come at it from a different angle and differentiate yourself from the other drones out there – and building links is the answer.

I’ve written plenty on how to get links from other sites via articles, directory submissions, etc so I’m not going to rehash that here.  But if there’s nothing else you can do on your website, this is the way to go.

Don’t have time to take on something like this?  You can still dominate the local market for your industry. Talk to me.

Paid Search

While I’m not a huge fan of paid search, it does have it’s place – and this is a great example of that.  Assuming American Family would let him, Wally could start a PPC campaign through Google AdWords or a service like AdzZoo and collect leads.  I don’t think AmFam would have a problem with this – since he’s ultimately sending the traffic to them anyway.

Create a Stealth LeadGen Site

Ok here’s probably the best tip of all – but it’s a little risky.

Since AmFam won’t let Wally have his own website that promotes their products, he needs to think outside the AmFam box and come up with other ways to get leads.

What’s to stop Wally, or you, or anyone, from building a very generic non-branded website that ranks well for insurance?  The site, say something like GetInsuredStLouis.com could, with a nice SEO campaign, rank well for all things Saint Louis and insurance related.  This generic site could then have a form that visitors could fill out for more information.  Those leads would dump to Wally’s InBox, and he could call them back with his insurance info.  He could even add weekly content with great insurance-related articles – thus pulling in those coveted long tail searchers.

Now this may or may not be against your corporation rules – I suggest you do a little investigation prior to setting something like this up – but if you go for it, you could really rake in some nice leads.  Are you ballsy enough to do it?

Locked in a Box

Don’t let your corporation keep you locked in that box.  Thinking that you can’t do anything beyond the few crappy tools that they give you can be a big mistake.  Someone with the guts to push the envelope is going to get rewarded with more customers – is that you?

I’d love to hear your comments about these methods.  Don’t be a chicken and tell me what you think.

So you realize that there are things you can do to your website that will help increase your position in the overall search engine rankings – but let’s think a little bit bigger.  Ok, a lot bigger.  What can you do on other people’s websites that will influence what the search engines think about your site?  Anything?

Yes, lots.

The Queen of SEO

In the world of search engine optimization, there’s a saying that you’ll undoubtedly hear at every Internet marketing conference.

Content is king.  Links are queen.

It’s true.  Building great content is the first step to online domination and the second part to that is building links from other websites back to yours.

One Way Streets

The best sort of link is a one-way link.  That means that the link comes from another website and points to yours, but you aren’t reciprocating that link back to them.  It’s one way only.

To the search engines, each one-way link counts as a ‘vote’ for your website.  The more votes, the more likely you are to win, right?

Getting One Way Links

There are some pretty easy ways to get one-way backlinks.  These include article writing, directory submissions, buying links, and simply asking for links.

Going into each one of these will take a lot of writing, so I’ll link to each of these below and you can read at your leisure.

Link Building with Articles

One Way Links with Directory Submissions

One of the easiest ways to get links is by publishing articles.

Article Directories

All around the web, there are article directories, or repositories.  These websites, such as EzineArticles, provide thousands of webmasters, newsletter writers and content-grabbers with free content that they can republish on their websites (with some restrictions).  Writers submit their content to these sites, and are oft times these articles are republished across hundreds of websites yearly.

Article Anatomy

Each article you write should be between 450-600 words or so.  You can go over a bit, but I wouldn’t go much lower than the 450 mark.  The article should be about something related to your industry, of course.

The Summary

Each article should have a 2-3 sentence summary, and you should also go ahead think up some keywords that are related to the article content.

The Content

The article you are going to publish should contain what I like to call ‘generic content’; in other words, nothing special, ground-breaking or even terribly exciting.

The purpose of publishing this article is to help you build links, not show the world how great of a writer you are.  In fact, if you are a good writer, you may want to consider putting your writings on your own website in a blog format.  Remember, we are providing content to literally thousands of publishers, and our goal is more one-way links.  Quality content (in this case) is not the focus here.

The Byline

Herein lies the beauty of article publishing.  Get this right and you’ll be on your way to link heaven.  The byline is an area on each article website where you get to put a few sentences about yourself, your company, etc.  Most people get this wrong, because that’s just what they use it for.

Example: Will Hanke is an Internet marketer residing just south of St. Louis Missouri.  Get tips, ideas and SEO tricks from his blog at willhanke.com

Bad, bad, bad.  Sure, I got a link in there, but I’ve really missed the boat on what I could have done.

Think about this.  This article is going to go out on hundreds or thousands of other websites.  When the Googlebot (or any bot) spiders that site, they’ll see that one-way link to your site, and they’ll take that into consideration when they rank your website.  So if someone types in ‘willhanke.com’ in the Google search box, chances are I’ll be the first result.  But I really don’t care to rank for that, because no one is going to type that in.  What I’m after is terms like ‘St. Louis SEO’ or ‘Missouri SEO Services’.  These terms explain what I do, and a person typing those terms into Google is my target audience.  So let’s rewrite the article and keyword-target the byline.

Example Two: Will Hanke is an Internet marketer providing Missouri SEO Services.  If you are looking for a way to get your business to the top of the SERPS, Will can help you get there.

Now what I’ve done is provide a decent byline, that’s keyword targeted to my domain name.  When the Googlebot visits whatever website this link is on, I’m credited for another link to my site and I get the advantage of having the words “Missouri SEO Services” as the link.  So I’m essentially teaching the search engines that those words equal my domain.  If someone types that phrase into Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine, I want them to equate that phrase to willhanke.com.

Your Good Content

If you are a good writer, or have access to some original content that is industry related, I highly suggest you write posts on your own website.  Content is still king, and good content can make you an authority in your niche.  If this is your case, you’d be better off hiring a writer to write you some ‘ok’ articles as described above.

Finding Writers

I’ve found the majority or writers I employ on Craigslist.  There’s an entire section on there devoted to people looking for writing gigs.

When putting up a request for writers, ask for some sample work they’ve done.  Look it over and make sure they can writer better than the average high school senior. Usually one request on Craigslist nets me at least 25 decent submissions, which I then weed down and choose a few good ones.

Personally, I don’t pay a lot for these articles, either.  $10 or so bucks each is about my max.  Once again, I’m not after great content, just content that relates to my industry.

Distribution

Besides posting to EzineArticles, there are plenty of other article directories out there.  I suggest you post to EzineArticles first, as they are the predominant directory, and then filter your submissions out to the hundreds of others.

If you’re pressed for time, or just want someone else to do the work, you can always hire an article submission service.  Some of these will even have the articles written for you and will have them submitted to thousands of directories in a relatively short amount of time.

“just another wordpress” keyword

Since these bloggers haven’t modified the general description, chances are they aren’t real SEO savvy, and you could probably get in some nice one way links.  Just don’t outright spam them, at least leave a halfway interesting comment…