When you’re a novice webmaster, sitting in your living room in your PJs and looking over the (probably nonexistent) traffic flow to your website, it’s hard to consider dropping a few hundred dollars on SEO services provided by an established SEO company. After all, you’ve done some research — you know how easy it is to write a backlink. You’ve seen the forums where they tell you a dozen easy ways to write a backlink to your site. You’re even on a mailing list where a charming lady from Western Washington State tells you a bunch of high-Page-Rank sites you can get backlinks from all by yourself and very easily.

Why do you need to spend that kind of money? After all, if you can understand how to get a backlink written, you can surely find some experienced Indian or Filipino gentleman to do it for you for a couple of bucks an hour. That’s real value, isn’t it?

Not really.

You see, there are several things that an SEO company will do for you that a freelancer cannot. It’s true that if what you want is backlinks written, a freelancer can do it cheaply — but if what you want is an organized backlinking campaign planned and executed, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone on ELance or Craiglist who can do that for any less than a real SEO company would charge.

Backlinking campaigns require several elements that simple backlink writing doesn’t. You need to have a long list of fully-researched keywords. You need some short, high-traffic, high-competition keywords that you’re willing to commit large amounts of effort to dominating, knowing that they’ll be the core of your traffic. You need dozens and dozens and dozens of low-traffic, low-competition, long-tail keywords that you can rank for easily and take advantage of the numbers game on, knowing that no one is terribly meaningful but the synergy they generate will be.

You need tracking — you need to know which backlinks are driving traffic that actually buys, so you can make more of those. You need to know which backlinks are driving tire-kicker traffic so that you can make less of those. Without that kind of value, your SEO money is just being tossed down a hole — and what kind of freelancer is going to be able to do all of that for you?

Whether it comes in the form of article marketing, custom blog creation, or social bookmarking, there’s a lot to be said about the power of organic SEO to drive traffic. But some webmasters don’t seem to get the fact that traffic doesn’t equal profitability. Ask anyone who’s gotten fifteen million hits on YouTube for a video that didn’t link anywhere or ask anyone for anything — you can get all of the hits you want, but without a solid endgame, all of your SEO efforts don’t mean a thing.

There are a lot of powerful SEO endgame strategies out there, but only one of them is so powerful that it’s been adopted almost universally by everyone from internet marketers to small businesses to major corporations: the power of targeted Email marketing.

Targeted Email marketing basically amounts to three things: you get someone to give you their Email address (and agree to let you send them Emails), you send them an Email with a strong call-to-action, and they click the link and (hopefully) buy stuff. It sounds so simple, but as with any aspect of trying to get someone to give you money, there are a lot of pitfalls.

The first pitfall is that word ‘targeted’. That means that you have to collect the emails of people who will be interested in your final offer. Anything else and you’ll get a 90% unsubscribe rate the first time you send out an email with an offer in it. Generally, you can successfully target by offering a free information packet about the same subject as your product in exchange for their Email address.

The second pitfall is that word ‘marketing’. People don’t like to be sold on stuff, and unless you’re Ron Popeil, you shouldn’t try to sell people something when you first ‘meet’ them. Arrange an autoresponder to send them information-filled emails for a few to several weeks, without asking anything of them. Only once they’re sure that what you’re sending them is worth reading should you pop the sales link.

Done right, targeted Email marketing not only builds sales, but it builds a solid list of satisfied customers that will look forward to your new offers — and who doesn’t want a crowd of people just waiting for another chance to give them money?

Forum posting. Custom blog creation. Article writing and distribution. Press release services. Let’s face it — there are a LOT of SEO services out there, so many that most webmasters couldn’t afford them all even if they wanted to. SEO companies will tell you — quite rightly — that it’s important to spread out your backlinks so that they come from a wide variety of sources, but it’s silly to try to get every single possible backlink variant going to your homepage.

In fact, there are a few simple ways to trim down the list to a dozen or so techniques that will fit your website best. It boils down to two questions: are you making money already, and what is your growth strategy?

Are You Making Money Already?
If you’re already seeing money coming in, then you have something of an idea about the conversion rate of your traffic. This is important, because different traffic sources have different conversion rates, and you need to know how to maximize the traffic that converts best for your site. Unfortunately, this is a process that requires testing and is unique to each site, so you’ll have to do the work on your own to figure out which link types to cut out — or have a talented SEO company do it for you.

What is your Growth Strategy?
Backlinks generally come in one of two broad types: links that drive traffic, and links that drive rankings. Some, like a well-written article submitted to a popular article directory, can do both. By and large, however, you have a choice between immediate traffic at the expense of long-term ranking power, or surviving on minimal traffic for quite some time until the rankings kick in and the organic traffic starts to flood. The design of your business should dictate which you shoot for, and you should communicate your choice with your SEO service.

In either case, if you’re not already seeing good business, it’s probably a good idea to pair your SEO efforts with a talented PPC management outfit, just to get the traffic flowing up front. The PPC costs might cut into your profits, but without them, you wouldn’t have any profits to cut into, so it’s a win/win.

Most of the world has heard it by now, but just in case you haven’t, Google has changed the rules once again. The infamous Google algorithm that determines page rank and position for searches has been changed, dramatically. This time the search giant knocked out link farms completely, invalidating any link that comes from a site with either no content or duplicate content, including, it appears, RSS summaries on news sites. Those links can still give you traffic, but they won’t count towards your positioning when potential customers are searching for your products or services.

On the flip side, Google has obviously decided that on-site content development is what they want to see for sites to be awarded those top spots on Page One. Blog posting, once considered a casual pastime, has now become an essential element of any internet marketing campaign. If you plan on getting any kind of significant organic traffic from search you will need to start writing or hire someone to do it for you. In the three months since the Google Panda announcement websites have been literally disappearing from the top twenty pages of Google’s search results.

For the time being, other search giants like Yahoo and Bing are playing by the old rules and you can see the disparity in the rankings. Seeing a top ten in two columns and a Page 30 in another might seem hopeful to some, but not when the Page 30 is the search engine that controls a 90% global market share. When it comes to search engine marketing, what Google does is what the industry standard is. The smaller players may win back some ground over this, but not enough to be significant.

Organic SEO companies have always used link building as one of their staple elements in any campaign, but they don’t all do it the same way. Here at Webwise Media, we’ve always focused on content rich links, site development, and article writing and distribution to high-PR directories. The exact details of the Google algorithm remain secret, but we know from tracking our analytics that none of our sites have lost any ground. That tells us and our clients that we’re doing something right. What would we recommend for you? Let’s start with some blog posting.

Open another window and go to your home page or landing page. What do you see? Is it enough to capture your attention if you’re visiting for the first time? Put yourself in the place of a person who has never been to your site before and has no idea how to navigate to the sign-up or purchase page. Would they find it naturally or simply click off after a few minutes? If your average time on site for a new visitor is less than one minute, you are a good candidate for a web presenter.

A web presenter is an animate image in the form of a man or woman who tells you what the site is all about and directs you to where you need to go. The average script for a web presenter is longer than one minute, so most of your new visitors will stay at least long enough to listen to what you have to say. Some business owners use an image of themselves; others choose an attractive female or male avatar. The choice is yours, but we generally recommend the fictional character and a professional voice. A lot of research goes into creating these things and we have statistics to back up what works.

Is a web presenter an organic SEO tool? In some ways it is. As far as we know, time on site isn’t a variable in Google’s search algorithm, but an interesting presentation could cause a potential customer to bookmark your page, and bookmarks are in the algorithm. They are quality links that were created voluntarily by a party not looking for a return link posting. If the person who creates them is on a social network, those bookmarks become even more powerful, garnering additional links and direct traffic for the originators “friends” or “followers”. This process is called social bookmarking and it is most definitely an organic SEO tool.

Obviously, the more time someone spends on your website, the more likely they are to make a purchase, unless of course your products or services are sub-par or over-priced. The web presenter will keep them onsite; the quality and affordability of your offering will do the rest. It helps if you also have the web presenter explain to the visitor what they need to do to make a purchase. That’s how you increase your conversion rate.

The Internet is a haven of scam artists and predators, and some gurus would have you believe that the plethora of SEO companies out there are nearing the top of the list. They’ll assure you that you can do it all yourself, and that these ‘experts’ are only there to rip you off and keep you from reaching your full potential.

Unfortunately, they are either lying, or they are just plain wrong. It is in their interest to lie, after all — by preventing you from getting a good start in your online business, they keep the competition to a dull roar. The truth is that hiring a group to do your SEO services has several powerful advantages, and your chances of getting scammed are very minimal.

That’s not to say that every job will end up perfect — there are always disasters, misunderstandings, and so forth — but by and large, the SEO industry is just about as honest as they come. Provided, of course, you’re working with an established company that has a reputation to maintain and not some fly-by-night fresh startup that could fold tomorrow — or, God forbid, a bunch of freelancers you pulled off of ODesk.

You see, SEO companies today are like the people who went to sell shovels to Gold Rush miners. They didn’t ever hit it big, but they gave other people the tools to succeed, and in doing so, they got by. What they did have, however, was a product that was dependable, functional, and useful. That’s the definition of modern-day SEO services.

They’re dependable because you can count on a good SEO company to get you ranking for keywords. Maybe not the highest-competition, maybe not the longest tail, but you can depend on them to get organic traffic flowing to your site.

They’re functional because they allow you to function, by taking the workload of SEO off of your hands. Without SEO companies, every webmaster in the world would be working 80 hour weeks just to tread water in terms of rankings.

They’re useful because without them, you won’t attain a reasonable level of organic traffic, and that means you have to get your traffic from someplace that will cost money for a long time to come.

All of the major search engines offer the option of registering your business with their local directory. It makes sense if you’re running a business where your location matters, like a retail store with a physical address, but if you’re a virtual service that does business anywhere it may not do you any good. We make that determination on a case by case basis, including local internet marketing when it will help our client. For those instances when it is not needed, we concentrate on national and international markets.

The term “local internet marketing” is fairly broad. It can be used to describe local directory submissions, registrations with programs like Google Maps, or posting on electronic bulletin boards that have a local following. We do all of the above and more for our clients that want to build a local presence. We also include geo-specific keywords in our organic SEO efforts. If you’re a retail store that sells pet supplies in Los Angeles, we don’t just target the keyword “pet supply”, we incorporate various derivatives of “Los Angeles pet supplies”.

Internet marketing is all about understanding what your potential customers will be searching for on the web. When they want to buy your products or services, what keywords are they putting into the search box? If they enter “pet supplies” they’ll get three or four pages of national chains before they start to hit the local guys like you. There’s no way for small businesses to compete with that, so we offer small business SEO that we use to target keywords you have a shot to be on Page One for, like “dog leashes in Los Angeles”. Our clients get better numbers when we do things like that.

Each business is different. Your niche market and the mediums we need to focus on to reach that market determines how we will structure your organic SEO and internet marketing campaigns. We’ve been in business since the internet first went live, so we know what it takes to be successful. Local internet marketing is one strategy, but definitely not our only one. We have dozens more in our arsenal and we’ll pull out all of them if necessary to get you to the top of search engine Page One.

Most internet marketing strategies have two sets of myths attached to them. The first is the most common – over-inflation of statistics. That’s where hundreds become thousands and thousands becomes tens of thousands. The second is disparity – putting things in a negative light and saying they don’t work. Both have been applied to article writing and distribution. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Claims of massive traffic flow from one article mass submitted are no truer than those that declare article marketing is a huge waste of time. If it was, why do we get such great results from it?

A few months back, Google made some changes in their algorithm that made publishing duplicate content either on your website or in multiple article directories an obsolete practice. If you want quality links now, you’ll have to write original articles and content pages and link them manually to internal pages on your website. This is the way we have always done it, so the change didn’t affect our clients. In fact, we’d been expecting the change for some time. It was necessary to improve the quality of information on the web. Far too much garbage content has been published in recent years.

There are those in our industry who claim to be organic SEO “experts” because they’ve been able to use auto-submitters to build links at a rapid pace for their clients. These charlatans are now running for cover as Google invalidates all of their work and client sites disappear from search pages. It’s evidence that short cuts simply do not work. Articles that were written by legitimate writers and submitted to reputable sites are still good for the back links they produce. Those other auto-generated, scrambled, spun, and kindergarten-level bodies of text aren’t worth anything and won’t be seen by searchers any time soon. Web surfers will now get quality when they search, as they should.

One article on a product or service will bring you on average about fifty page views. Writing about current events could get you several hundred. If you have an anchor text link in the body, expect about a 2% click-through rate. Those aren’t big numbers, so you need to write hundreds of articles to see a recognizable change in your traffic volume. That will come with time. The link juice comes immediately. Every article counts, as long as it’s original, quality, and submitted to a legitimate directory.

That press release looked great when you proofed it. It had lots of flowery language and seemed to get to the point with those cool quotes. It was nice to see your name on something that was gong to be seen by thousands of people, wasn’t it? Your press release service told you to expect a huge influx of new traffic once they released it, but that was days ago and nothing is coming in. What happened? It appears that you may have been deceived into expected better results than you got. Don’t worry. You’re not alone, and you probably paid a reduced price for that press release. It could be worse.

There are press release services out there that are nothing more than hack writers submitting to free sites that don’t get you any recognition at all. If no one sees your press release, how are you going to get traffic back to your website? Most of those free sites are bulletin boards that get no traffic. When it comes to PR, you get what you pay for. If you want to see an increase in visitors, you need to get your press release out on a major newswire. That’s what we do for our clients.

The other factor in press release response rate is the subject. Use one to promote an upcoming sale and you’ll get a better customer response than releasing a statement about an employee being promoted. The marketing philosophy of your new CFO might be of interest to investors, but your customers don’t care about it. They want to know about products and services and when they can buy them for less. Nothing gets better results than an invitation to save money. It’s one of the best local internet marketing strategies there is. We use it all the time.

Who wrote that press release that you got lousy results with? If you’re trying to reach an American market, the use of colloquial English is important if you’re going to connect. Forced or foreign sounding words and phrases will turn the reader right off. You can hire a service in India or the Philippines to do your writing for you, but expect the results that come with those low prices. We use US writers and established distribution channels for our press releases. If you had hired us to write the one you’re wondering about right now, you wouldn’t be questioning what went wrong. You’d be answering customer inquiries and filling orders instead.

Take a look at an average search page and you’ll see listings at the top of the page that are highlighted. They usually have a heading that reads “sponsored listings” or something along those lines. Those are known in the SEO industry as first page placement and we can buy them for you. In other words, you can be on Google Page One tomorrow if you sign up for our services today. Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it? You’re probably wondering if you can just do that yourself and cut out the marketing company. After all, getting to Page One is the goal, isn’t it?

If you want to do it on your own, you can of course, but you’ll end up paying a lot more for that first page placement than you should. That’s not because we get a better price as a marketing company, though we do know how to target less expensive keywords, but because you do not want to continue to pay for that spot. We buy it for our clients when we first begin our marketing efforts, but then we use organic SEO to earn that spot permanently for them. Once there naturally, you’ll never have to pay for it again.

The savvy internet user knows that first page placements are sponsored listings and views them in basically the same way they look at the sponsored ads box in the sidebar. Conditioning has taught them to ignore the shaded and boxed areas and jump right to the top organic listing on the page. For many years, that behavior prevented small business SEO from working as effectively as other mediums. It was too easy to buy those organic spots with massive link building campaigns, not the case anymore.

Today, organic SEO is a strategy that, done properly, can eventually bring anyone to the top of Page One for their industry keywords. It takes quality content creation and selective link building, and for the first time search engines are rewarding substance before quantity. Due to recent changes, the playing field has been leveled and many companies are starting from scratch. If you’re in that position, and you probably are, take advantage of our services and we’ll get you onto Page One, first by buying a spot and then by earning one that will last.