Link building is essential to good rankings in the search engines. The number and quality of other web sites that link to yours builds your link popularity, and that affects your rankings. Especially in Google. While reciprocal links (you link to me and I link back to you) are excellent to have, one-way links are even more powerful. One excellent way to get such links is through article marketing.

Webmasters are always in need of good, relevant content for their web sites. If you have well-written articles about your area of expertise in one of the several article repositories on the web, your articles will be found, picked up, and reprinted on other web sites. The price those webmasters pay for using your article is that they have to include your own “About The Author” blurb at the end of the article. A blurb in which you just happen to include a link to your web site.

There’s no reason you can’t include such articles on your own web site, of course. But the links from other related web sites are what you’re really after here. We can submit your articles to a number of online article repositories, or you can do that yourself, of course.

Article Quality is Critical

It’s essential that your articles not be commercials for you; they need to be useful and informative, with information that readers will find valuable. There are two very selfish reasons for this. First, article that tout your products or services are least likely to be picked up for inclusion on anyone else’s web site. And second, a great article with lots of informative content is more likely to entice a reader to click on your link at the bottom and visit your web site.

Not all of us are capable of writing compelling articles that can both inform and entertain, but don’t let that stop you. We work with some excellent copywriters who can “ghost write” articles for you. The ideas, of course, have to be yours, but the words can be crafted by someone who specializes in that. Some of the copywriters we’re familiar with and can recommend include Anne Lazo of Eagle Soars Marketing, Scott Stadler of Words By Design, Toni Sydor of The Write Direction, and Naoma Welk of Welk Ink.

After spending time and money on an SEO campaign, you need to know how it’s working for you. If you’re a client of ours, we can easily tell you how your rankings are doing in the search engines. But that’s only a small part of it. The real measure of SEO success is in whether you’re getting more customers and increased revenue.

You really need to track conversions: phone calls, information requests, and sales. Your SEO consultant typically can’t do that for you — you need to track that stuff yourself.

John O’Connor, owner of Shade Tree Garage in Morristown, NJ, a client of ours, maintains a yellow legal pad at his appointment desk. Every new caller gets added to a list on that pad, and they’re asked “How did you learn about us?”. That gives him a very clear idea of how his Yellow Pages ad is doing, how successful his newspaper advertising is, and how well his SEO campaign is doing.

By the way, John reports that he’s getting one new paying customer a day from his web site.

From the CMO Survey, a poll of 581 U.S. marketing executives conducted in February, 2009 by the Duke University Fuqua School of Business in conjunction with the American Marketing Association and its findings are quite interesting.

Marketing spending is expected to grow by only 0.5 percent over the next 12 months, with a 7 percent decrease in traditional advertising and 10 percent increases in both Internet marketing and new product introductions. Business-to-consumer marketers will make the most significant shifts to the Internet, for both product and service advertising. [Emphasis added]

Google’s influence on the web is so powerful that we tend to forget that there are other search engines. The forefather of modern search, Yahoo! still serves around 20% of all internet search queries. This pales in comparison to Google’s close to 70% majority but is spread over a different demographic making it an intriguing prospect for certain types of web properties.

Search Marketing Standard explains that often Yahoo! is more attractive to women, and some research shows that Yahoo! searches sometimes convert to sales better than Google searches. So don’t ignore Yahoo! in your monitoring of results and in your SEO. Read the article at Search Marketing Standard for some tips on how optimizing for Yahoo! may be different from optimizing for Google, especially with respect to meta tags (it pays more attention to these than Google), page structure, alt tags and heading tags, and external links (only closely related links really count for much).

Marketing has grown very sophisticated, and search marketing, both paid search and organic SEO, should be only one component of your marketing plan. William Flaiz of Search Engine Watch describes the “marketing funnel” which leads consumers from awareness of a product or service through buying that product or service to the desired end result of loyalty to brand loyalty.

Attract
Attraction is the sweet spot of search marketing. Whether organic SEO like we do at Rank Magic or paid search, getting people to your web site is what search is all about.Optimize
Once we’ve gotten strong listings in the search engines, users had better find what they’re looking for on the page we sent them to.

Analyze
Once we’ve gotten people to your site and they’ve either completed a transaction or taken whatever action you want them to, you need to analyze your data, whether from site logs or other analytical tools.

Retain
It’s cheaper to keep a customer than acquire a new one.

Search is Only the Beginning
Gone are the days of thinking that all you need to do is to drive customers to your web site. Examine the entire marketing funnel, not just the search component, to maximize your marketing dollars.

Writing an article that is topically related to your business and submitting it to article directories like ezinearticles.com, findarticles.com and buzzle.com has the potential to pay off big.

Imagine the effect of getting a link from the Los Angeles or New York Times. There isn’t a sure-fire formula for achieving this, but providing quality articles and adding your link in the resources box of the article will allow search engines to find and index you faster. If the content is interesting and newsworthy, the journalists may start calling. Even if they don’t, other web site owners may reprint your article on their web sites … along with the link to your site.

Read much more in this good article at Entrepreneur Magazine’s web site.

Marketing Sherpa has issued the results of a new study of Internet marketing. Their Internet Marketing Benchmark Guide is summarized in their online excerpt. Some key findings:

• “The big marketing debate over SEO has never been whether or not to do it. It’s self-evident that you’d want your site to appear near the top of free rankings for keywords important to your brand. Instead, the debate has always been whether to outsource or handle SEO in-house.”
• “In short, if you hire an expert for SEO, you tend to get significantly better results.”
• 28% of large firms were not adequately optimized for keywords central to their business. “The lesson? No matter how famous your brand, you may be able to get better rankings and traffic (not to mention brand perception among prospects) if you test outsourcing SEO to an expert.”
• Experienced search marketers are focusing doing the best possible job with the most important keywords for their brands – better to do an extremely good job of “optimization with fewer search terms than doing a slightly more slapdash job with more terms.”
• They asked 3,053 marketers to rank the top two marketing tactics in terms of return on investment (ROI). The results are in the chart above.

Search engine research is now a routine part of everyone’s shopping behavior, a surprising number of advertisers and advertising agencies have failed to consider that in their advertising campaigns.

If you have an effective ad on TV, consumers will go to the search engines in droves to find out more about your product. If you haven’t optimized your web sites for the search terms they come away from your TV ad with, they can’t find you or your product.

AT&T spent millions of dollars to introduce their new mobile product m-life in Super Bowl ads four years ago. Those are about the most expensive ad dollars you can spend. According to researchers, consumers flocked online to find out more about m-life. But since AT&T hadn’t optimized for any search terms related to the ads, and hadn’t provided a memorable web address in their ads, consumers remained clueless about the concept. AT&T was nowhere.

<Read more at RISMEdia>

MarketingSherpa did a study of conversion rates. Conversion Rate is the proportion of web sites visitors who order a product on an e-commerce site or complete some other desired action on other sites, such as filling out an inquiry form. Comparing organic search (SEO campaigns) against paid search (PPC campaigns), they found the following:

• SEO had higher overall conversion rates than paid search (4.2% versus 3.6%)
• For e-commerce purchase campaigns, SEO had higher conversion rates (4.1%) than paid search (3.8%)
• Looking at delayed e-commerce/service purchase campaigns, SEO also had higher conversion rates (6.3%) than PPC (4.2%)

In a related study by WebSideStory covering the October-December holiday buying season in 2005, the overall search engine conversion rate for business to consumer (B2C) web sites was 2.3%. That was more than twice the conversion rates of banner ads, affiliate marketing links, shopping search engines and other referring links (0.96%).

Industry research shows that most e-commerce sites are not well optimized for organic search engine rankings. A 2005 study by OneupWeb revealed that 83% of Internet Retailer Magazine’s top 100 websites fail to use basic search engine optimization principles to gain high rankings.

The study went on to show that of the well-optimized web sites, 89% were found on the first three pages of the search engine results for their respective keyword queries, and 52% appeared on the first page.

By contrast, only 4% of the non-optimized pages did as well. The implication is pretty clear.