May 6, 2011

Beyond SEO to Higher Website Visibility - Link Building Strategy

Being Found in the search engines involves multiple disciplines. 

  1. First one must have a well-designed website with properly-written content and rich visuals. 
  2. Second your websites needs to have SEO (described below). 
  3. Third, your website needs meaningful inbound links from relevant sources. This is the most elusive part, but the part that today is the key to trumping competition. These inbound links can come from Social Media assets, but also other online sources.  

SEO for a website means it is keyword-rich and avoids coding technologies that displease or confuse search engine spiders (i.e. flash, some javascript, frames, all text as text and not images depicting text, etc.). An SEO – savvy website will have keywords both in (a) the text the user reads, in the titles, and in the content designed, not for the user but (b) for the search engine spider to read – in the Metatags and in the Alt tags (those describing a photo).

Promise Productions has always been very careful to communicate and not to hype SEO as doing something beyond its powers. In our online marketing industry, we repeatedly see two fatal mistakes business owners sometimes make regarding promoting their website. (1) One is to think of SEO as a one-time event versus an ongoing process, (2) the other is to think that having the SEO described in the paragraph above is enough to rank in the top spots.

It is no longer enough that your website itself is optimized for the keywords you want to rank high for because today’s marketplace is simply too competitive with other websites doing the same. SEO can only provide a website developed according to the current best practices so your website is pleasing to search engines and not displeasing in any known way. SEO can never guarantee rank because rank is determined by multiple, changing factors, including the SEO of all competitor’s websites.


Thus an Online Visibility Marketing program is needed, focused on inbound links. That phrase is key to distinguish, becomes often 3rd party SEO firms will claim to offer a few pieces of that. Often 3rd party Social Media marketing firms will claim to offer pieces of that. Does social media marketing involve this? Yes in the way we approach it, but social media has many focuses, and in the pursuit of high organic ranking for a key term, it is not social media marketing in general, but strategic backlink building that best accomplishes this purpose. 

To summarize, SEO attempts to overlap into this area, but not very well, Social Media Marketing defiantly overlaps this but is too broad. Thus the services proposed below are Search Marketing services using both social media methods and other proven methods to develop backlinks.

Search Marketing for the purposes of backlinks, is very distinct from SEO in that it uses assets outside of the website to make relevant links back to the website – spotlighting it in the eyes of the search engines. Social Media is used for many purposes other than increasing the visibility of a company’s website, but for our purposes here I am only speaking to how to use Social Media to most effectively raise the visibility higher in search engine results so it is found by more business prospects.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of "scary stuff" in the advertised SEO world because the less-scrululpous will "sell you" what you want to hear (quick, high results, at a nice price). Sadly, these people are not marketing strategists, they are selling a canned, automated process, designed to scam quick cash and leave the scene before it all backfires on the customer.

They don't want to take the time to really understand your business and generate truly quality content. They don't want to implement the tedious procedures to CRAFT quality links that will matter for years to come. They are search engine "speed" that ends up destroying the client.

Not wanting to do the real work that real results require, they take "shortcuts" that try to mimic the things search engines look for long enough to make off with the client's money. So unfortunately, there are many methods that will work FOR A BRIEF TIME, and you will enjoy #1 ranking for a week or so, but then BACKFIRE badly and you drop down hundreds of places in rank or get blacklisted altogether. These questionable short-term methods are all too common, even in larger SEO companies, because people are lured by the desire for immediate results (like steroids) and demand it regardless of the consequences.

While immediate gratification is an understandable desire, the horror stories around third party SEO companies abound, who often take advantage of these very "quick" demonstrated results to get large fees and then are no longer under contract when the real shit hits the fan for the client's rankings. Anything too good to be true, often is and true results that stand the test of time (and the tweaks in Google's algorithms) are always from (and this is the key to it all) legitimate content linked from legitimate sources.

Promise Productions offers the high-level online marketing strategies employed by recognized Fortune-50 companies and makes them available to medium-szed businesses for millions in profits. Call a marketing strategist today at 877-858-0071.

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