Just received this question from Matt:

Kev, Is it good to pay for backlinks? Some say yes, some say no – I’m confused. help. Thx. Matt

Hi Matt,

First of all, I’ve written about the paid backlinks issue in two previous  posts: Why paid backlinks are a waste of money, and paid backlinks vs, backlinking services , so you may want to read these for a bit more background info.

The first thing I need to do is make it clear what I’m talking about when I refer to “paid backlinks” or “buying backlinks” – I’m referring to paying a webmaster / website owner for a DoFollow backlink on their website. For instance you may get to a directory, which sells inclusion to the directory including a DoFollow link to your website, for $x per month / per year.

What I’m not referring to is paying someone to do backlinking for you, or paying for membership to syndication networks such as traffic kaboom - investing money wisely into gaining quality backlinks is a good idea – investing money by simply paying webmasters to give you a link on their website, is not such a good idea.

What I’m also not referring to, is buying links on websites in order to refer traffic – it’s a perfectly good idea to invest in an ad on a website which is relevant for your products or services, which links people to your site – but if the advertiser is acting in accordance with Google’s rules, they will NoFollow the backlink, in other words visitors can follow the links, but code is used to stop the search engine bots from following them.

So if you’re asking is it good to pay for backlinks, in terms of looking for directories and other sites with paid inclusion, to get your backlinks that way – then no, it’s not good – as it’s against Google’s terms of service, anything that is against Google’s TOS is not worth doing – not so much because it will have a negative impact (although Google say that paid links “can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results”) but mainly because it’s a waste of money. I’m far less concerned about the potential that paid backlinks may hinder ranking, than I am that paid links are money down the drain, as Google is clever, they can see which sites are blatantly selling DoFollow links, and when they do, these sites that are doing the linking, lose the ability to pass anything of value (link juice) to the sites they’re linking to. This is what Google say about buying or selling backlinks:

So there you go, from the horses mouth.

Just to be clear, we’re talking about buying a link from a website, we’re not talking about the act of gaining backlinking, by article submitting, social bookmarking, quality blog commenting on high PR quality blogs that allow comment links to be DoFollow, content & video sydication programs such as  traffic kaboom - or hiring the services of a professional SEO company or consultant to outsource all of this.

If you’re using an SEO consultant (like me) or seo company, just make sure you ask them what they’re doing & that you can be confident that they’re not doing stuff like buying backlinks, or other ineffective or black hat (against Google TOS) stuff. I have had experience of so called SEO experts just investing the money you pay them into buying backlinks – at one time I was so busy doing SEO for other people, that I decided to hire someone else to take care of my own SEO, I spent a thousand pounds (nearly $2k at the time as the pound was stronger then), and to my dismay a few months later I found that all the guy had done, was to spend probably a quarter of what I paid him (if that) on buying backlinks – and it was £1k completely wasted, not one iota of improvement, and if not for the fact that I’m an SEO guy myself, I would probably have never known, so if it’s easy for me – a professional web marketing consultant – to get stung, then it’s not difficult to see why large numbers of business people have had their fingers burned!

SO anyway, there you go, in short:

 Is it good to pay for backlinks?

Nope!

SEO Cover Letter

Jack T just asked me this question:

Hi Kevin, thanks for the email tips – you work hard on them!! Nothing like the other emails I get from people where they’re just ads! Yours is real, and I can see you put a lot of effort in, so thank you!

Here’s the thing, I have been studying seo for a ages, I have created lots of websites and got them to page 1 google, some no1 pos’s, I’ve done some SEO work for friends of friends, etc, but I don’t earn enough with affiliate marketing and things, to pay the bills, maybe one day I will, but  I’d like to become an SEO person for a company. But if you’ve not done SEO for a company before, how would you approach someone? Can you help me out with a cover letter?

Thanks in advance

Jack T

Hello Jack, thanks for your email – and the kind words!

First of all – if all you’re looking for is some help with cover letters then see amazing cover letters, Guerilla Resumes  & Oneclick cover letters but if you’d like more insight about getting a job in SEO, then keep reading.

First of all let me say, that I think you’re making a great decision. If you like SEO, and you need a job for stability – then looking for an SEO job is a GREAT idea!!

Many people who are wanting to make money online (and I did this at first!!) are so keen to live the perceived web marketing lifestyle of getting up whenever, working from a laptop in a cafe, having complete freedom and watching the cash flow in.

This is a nice vision – and there are some who achieve this – most don’t however, what we have to keep in mind is that it’s a business, whether you’re affiliate marketing, consulting, whatever – it’s a business, it’ll take your time up, you’ll prpbably end up working way longer hours if working purely for yourself, and often you’ll earn little – all in the aim of one day achieving that amazing position of having lots of residual income, and not having to work much – problem is, far more people go broke (or nearly go broke and end up looking for a job) on the way to achieving this, and never get there.

So my advice to myself if I could go back in time 12 years or so, would be to work on the web marketing stuff in the background while holding down something stable, and putting away money so you have a buffer when you go for it. Be patient and go it alone only when you have some back up funds, and some residual income flowing, don’t be impatient and make the leap of faith, because often times it results in landing on your face! I’m speaking from experience, I have made that leap a number of times, and landed flat on my face, god only knows how I’m still so handsome!! . Just remember, that it’s difficult to jump from a wobbly platform, the more stable the ground you’re on, the higher you can jump – and the more unstable, the more likely a leap will end up in an injury…Even now, years on, I’m still suffering from making that leap too early on more than one occasion – the first time I did it, we had to sell our first house & downsize as a result (loved that house too!)…And the second time I took a leap like that, we nearly lost our home – with two young children… not great - luckily my wife is incredibly patient & tolerant! Don’t put too much stock in old wives tails like “you need to be brave” – you may as well say “you need to be stupid” , it’s a fine line – if you’re being brave, it probably means you’re overcoming fear to do it – fear is your friend, if you feel fearful of something, listen to that fear in the same way that a fear of falling to your death would prevent you from stepping of a cliff. Fear may be a sign that you’re not ready, financially or otherwise, to be running your own business or self employed, it may be you infinitely more wise subconscious portion of your intelligence telling you “you’re not stable, you have no back up funds, don’t do it!” What’s more, don’t forget how your decision in this area can impact upon others, if you have a partner, and / or children, there’s more than just yourself that will be effected if you decide to quit your job & go it alone prematurely.

If you enjoy SEO, then what better job could there be for you, than doing something you like doing in order to keep some stability while you keep working on your web marketing stuff? SEO tends to be fairly well paid, comparatively speaking. There’s a big bonus too, in that when you work for a company in SEO, they will usually pay for things, for instance premium memberships for sites like SEOMoz which gives you all of their tools, content syndication networks such as traffic kaboom, and some of these memberships & tools are multi-site, meaning your own sites can benefit from them also (you may want to make sure this is OK with your boss first, most don’t mind that you have your own stuff going on to make extra money, and as long as it doesn’t cost them any more money, and that you’re not doing it in your working day while you’re on there time, many firms will be fine with this, more so if it’s client-side, rather than agency-side where things tend to be more strict & there tends to be more of a hierarchy.) Not to mention stuff like training, attending seminars & so on.

I’ll get to the SEO cover letter shortly, first of all though:

Agency Side or Client Side SEO Job?

So if you know you want a job in SEO, the next question is, agency or client side? Client side is where you work for a company on their own SEO – Agency side is where you work for an SEO firm and do the SEO on their clients sites.

Client side tends to be more relaxed, easier, less hassle, less politics, and less of the stuff that many SEO and SEM people hate, like sales meetings, training sales staff, sitting in on sales meetings with clients, creating reports for clients, phoning clients & explaining their monthly reports, fire fighting when a client isn’t happy, and various other stuff that comes with working within a marketing agency.

Client side is usually not quite as well paid as agency side – but also client side can be a more stable position, if you get a job as the SEO person for a well established company, this is often a much more secure position than a position within an Search company or Agency, as many seo firms are not so well established, and it’s not uncommon to find when you check out the financial stability of web marketing firms, including some of the larger ones, that they’re in risky positions – and there does often tend to be a more “hire & fire” mentality with agencies, than there is with client side positions for established companies.

I’ve done agency side, as SEO manager for a UK agency, parts of it is nice, work with some nice people, team spirit, the money tends to be better than client side – but for me, there was a lot I didn’t enjoy, such as having to try to keep clients happy while the management wanted me to do more & more stuff which had nothing to do with SEO, politics within the company – of which there was lots, and this can come with the territory with marketing agencies.

Client side can be a very cushy number, it really depends on the company. There are people in client side SEO jobs who are under very little pressure, encouraged to do well rather than put under pressure, and in environments where it often doesn’t even feel like work. Of course, there are positions where people are put under extreme pressure and expected to do the unexpected & perform miracles – so just do your research and make sure that duriung the interview you see it that you’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you.

By the way – midway through writing this post, I left the laptop & drove to a local farm to buy some food for our hens (we keep hens & ducks, fresh eggs every morning, yum!) , and it’s Lambing season at the moment, so I asked the farmer how much sleep he got last night – he told me with a smile “went to bed at 5 AM, and was back up & working at 6.30 AM” – I nearly fainted from exhaustion at the mere suggestion of someone working physically all day, through until 5.30 AM and then having only one and a half hours sleep before starting again. I asked him how long this lasts, he said a couple of weeks. I asked what his working hours are outside lambing, and he said he starts working at about 7am, until it’s dark, but then at night he usually has things he needs to do also.

This really brings it home – there are jobs out there that are ridiculously hard, where you have to work physically, for long, long hours – not just farming, there are many jobs that are real hard work, us web marketing folk don’t know we’re born! We’re incredibly fortunate that we’ve somehow got ourselves into an area which involves just sitting at a computer, and where the pay can be way better than most physically exhausting jobs! OK we have to learn stuff, but so do people in physically demanding jobs. Just makes me appreciate how fortunate I am that I got into SEO and web marketing, instead of ending up in agriculture or one of hundreds of other jobs which involve real hard work!

So anyway, back on topic – have a think about what suits you better, agency side or client side, because the cover letter etc., will be different depending on which way you decide to go.

SEO Cover Letter

If you want some help with the cover letter, see amazing cover letters, Guerilla Resumes  & Oneclick cover letters - but the cover letter is not the be all and end all of getting the interview.  ANYONE can have a program like the above, and crank out a professional cover letter –  the cover letter is important, but in combination with the advice I’m giving you here, you have a lot more chance of landing your perfect SEO job.

Think of what you’re doing as creating a written sales pitch, you’re selling yourself as someone who can acheive the results that your prospective employee is looking to achieve, and  your cover letter is the entry into this pitch. So there’s some prep work that I’d recommend you do first, for much better results in terms of impressing a potential employer.

Examples / case studies & testimonials / references.

You need to put together some proof that you know what you’re doing & you can get results. If you already have a bunch of sites that you’ve worked on, either your own or for clients, then create a case study of each site, explain the search terms targeted, roughly the work that you did (but I wouldn’t go into infinite detail here, just breifly explain what was done), over what period of time, the starting & finishing rankings, traffic increases, and increases in sales / enquiries.

If you can get a few examples of sites you’ve worked on for clients – then this is great, because coupled with a testimonial from the client, it’s much stronger proof than an example of your own website.

If you haven’t done any work for any clients, and if you’re not desperate to get into an SEO position right this minute, then consider asking around, offer to work free or very cheap for friends, friends of friends etc, ask anyone you know who’s in business or has a family member or friend who’s in business – you may well find that someone with a small – medium business would be very happy indeed for you to work on their SEO free or cheap as an example to help your career.  Just make sure you focus on websites & search terms where you know that you can make a decent impact without too much time passing – if you can work on sites which are currently terrible for SEO, where you know you can make a big difference just with on-page changes alone, then these are the kinds of sites to work on, as you can get some good results for the client, get a glowing testimonial / reference, and dramatically strengthen your chances of landing a great job in SEO.

Put together the best case study or case studies possible, don’t make them to technical or full of jargon and waffle, just focus on the results you achieved, the before & after, and the testimonial / reference if applicable. Take care of presentation, make sure it’s not a dogs dinner, you want to put yourself forward as being professional & on the ball.

Then, find out who’s responsible for the position, who should you write to? Never write to “Dear Sir or Madam” – imagine if they receive 30 applications, and yours is addressed to the correct person, when the rest aren’t – not only will yours get more attention, yours will probably get to the decision maker first.

Before starting the cover letter, make sure you fully understand what the role is, for instance is it SEO only, is it an SEM position, is it “web marketing manager” to includer SEO, pay per click, display, affiliate management, web master, etc? Only apply if you think you’re right for the position – if you don’t think it’s right for you, for instance if it’s mainly PPC and you’re not that in to PPC, or if you don’t like the industry, or if it’s client side and you only want agency side, or agency side and you want client side – or if there’s anything that makes you think it’s not right for you, don’t waste your time on it, select those which appear to be the positions which suit you the most.

In your cover letter, address the person who’s responsible for the position, give a bit of background, sell yourself, not just in terms of your abilities but in terms of how you get on with people and work well both individually and as part of a team, explain that you believe you’re a perfect match for the position and why, and that you have enclosed some proof of your abilities in the form of recent case studies, and references (or testimonials, same thing). End by saying something along the lines of “I would very much welcome the opportunity to meet you, and to find out if I am a good fit for the company culturally, to ensure a long and mutually successful relationship between my self and the company.” or words to that effect – don’t use these exact words, write how you would right, but in other words you’re saying that you know you’re the right person to achieve the results they want achieving,  this isn’t in question – but what you’re eager to discover, is will you fit well in the company, will you enjoy the environment, get on well with the people, will they get on with you.

This makes it very easy for the employer, they can see by the proof you’ve shown that you can do what they need you to, you’ve also shown that you’ve done your research and you know what the position entails, and you’ve shown that you’re not jumping at any opportunity because you need the job, but you’re looking for a long term move, so you want to make sure that you’re a good fit for the company.

Do the above, send along with the case study or studies, and a well developed CV – and you should find a VERY good conversion rate from letter to interview.

If you don’t have a good CV, then write one – or find someone to help you to write one (I’m not a CV expert)  - but, if you do as I’ve suggested above, the CV will be a lot less important, in fact some employers will look with interest at your cover letter, case studies & references & will just briefly scan the CV with little interest, as they’re already sold that if they like you when they meet you, then you’re the person for the job.

Don’t forget, when someone is employing, they have a real challenge to find the right person. I know from experience, it’s not easy – you  have to sift through some junk – and by junk, I mean that people will send CV’s with no cover letter, a cover letter with spelling errors or silly statements which make me throw the whole thing in the bin without even reading the CV! I’ve had CV’s which don’t have their phone number on, and no phone number on the cover letter so how can I call them to offer them an interview? I’ve had typo’s all over CV’s, CV’s with dirty marks on them, covering letters sent to “Dear Sir!” when my name was even on the job ad… so beleive me, when you put in the effort to send something of quality to a potential along the lines of what I’ve suggested above, you will get their attention.

Next step – the  job interview

If you do the above well, you’ll get some interviews, or send me a hat and I’ll eat it!

This is the important bit, you need to make sure it’s the right company for you.  Don’t go in there completely focused on you being right for the company, and on answering their questions – it’s a two way thing, and you need to make sure that the company is right for you.

When you’re offered the interview, ask is it a two step interview or one step. If it’s only one step, insist that the interview includes being introduced with everyone that you would be working with (if it’s 2 interviews this will usually happen at the second interview). If they question you about this, reply that you’re looking for a position that you’ll be happy in for at least the next five years, and you’re not going to make a decision about whether the company is right for you without meeting the people you’ll be working with. If they’re funny about that, move on to the next potential employer – because if they don’t see the value in making sure it’s a perfect fit, then the chances are it’s not going to be a great company to work within.

Be yourself, don’t try to act differently, if you’re a character – be a character, if you’re funny – be funny, obviously don’t go over the top,  but the important thing is that they like you. We like people when we know they are who they are, when we sense someone is being fake,  acting for the interview, it’s just not the same. If you’re yourself and they don’t like you – good, you just saved yourself an uncomfortable period of employment! What’s more, if you’re more relaxed and yourself, the employer is likely to be also, so you’ll get a better feel for who they really are too. And of course the more relaxed and normal you are, the less difficult it’ll be, so you will find that you’re not dreading interviews as much as you may have in the past.

Ask questions – make sure you know exactly what the job is, is it SEO only, is it SEO & PPC, if it’s PPC what programs? (just adwords, or other PPC also?) Will you be part of a team, or the sole SEO guy or web marketing manager. (if it’s agency side, more than likely you’ll be part of a team unless it’s a web dev firm branching out into SEO, in which case just be careful as that can be a tough gig, with sales people selling stuff that you may find difficult to deliver!). Are you taking over from someone, why did they leave. What are their goals,  etc etc, write lists of questions, not just lip service though – you want to find out, is this going to be a nice place to work, and will you enjoy the job.

ASK ABOUT MONEY. Some careers advisers say not to do this – complete balls – you’re not going working there to pass the time, you’re doing it in return for money, so talk about it. Don’t make it the first thing you mention, but make sure it’s discussed. Find out if there’s a bonus scheme, or any form of incentive.  Make sure you talk long term, employers usually hope that you’ll be with them a few years, they don’t want people in & then out in a few months, so ask about things like pensions, things which put forth the impression that you would be hoping to stick around (even if actually you hope to only be working for a year before you can go it alone, if that’s what you want to do).

So there you go – this is my advice on getting an SEO job, including the cover letter – I really hope this helps you Jack, and anyone else reading who has a similar question.

Thanks

Kev

I’ve just received the following question:

Hi Kev, 

I have been reading your blog with interest, a lot of very good information – but can you just tell me really simply without too much technical stuff, how to get listed on Google?

Thanks

James

My answer:

Hi James, thanks for the question.

By “how to get listed on Google” it seems you’re asking how to actually get a website indexed on Google. Getting listed, also known as getting indexed, on Google & the other search engines, is really simple – it’s the easy part, once you’re on google the more tricky part is how to get found on Google, i.e being on there is one thing – but not much good if you’re on page 24, most of the buying traffic stays on page one, so once you’re on there, you need to then think about how to get higher on Google, and the other search engines.

So to answer the question about how to get listed – the fast track way to do it, is to get links on pages that are already on the Google index, so that when the Google bot crawls that page, it will follow the link to your site & then index your website – and you’re then listed / indexed. See the Google page about submitting your site to Google , you’ll see that there’s a way via the subit URL link, or via webmaster tools, to request a crawl – but I find the easiest way to do it is to just gather some backlinks, social bookmarkeing, directory backlinks etc – and this is in effect hitting two birds with one stone, because gaining some backlinks is the way to start gaining some Google link juice.

By doing a bit of backlinking, you should find you can get your website listed on Google within a few days – but that’s just the start, once the site is indexed you need to ensure that the site is found on Google – which means getting it found higher on Google for specific search terms.

Don’t skip keyword research, this is an incredibly important part of search engine optimisation, many website owners are focusing on completely the wrong search terms, either they’re far to competitive so there’s no chance they’ll rank on page one for the term within the near future. The other problem is terms which are not buying keywords, so they’ll bring traffic – but not buying traffic, which means low conversion rates, and another issue is targeting terms which bring little or no traffic. What you need to figure out is, which search terms are relevant, buying keywords, which will bring people who’re close to purchasing, which are not too competitive to expect to rank on page one for within the near future, and which will bring some traffic. Keyword research isn’t easy, but it needs doing, if you don’t do your KW research, you’re going in blind without any idea of whether or not your efforts are going to be for nothing.

Once you have your search term data, it’s about having unique content which includes the main search terms – don’t use old-hat keyword spamming tactics though, stuffing the keyword into the content all over the place, just write generally about the search term & the target phrase and related terms will naturally occur. Make sure you do your on-page SEO, page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, internal linking etc., I’ve written other posts about the various elements of optimization, so I won’t go into detail here. Just remember to include your main search term for each page of content as soon as possible in the page title, make sure it’s in the description, and in important area’s of the content, image alt tags, header 1, header 2 tags, internal link anchor text, etc (If this all sounds like rocket science, it’s really not, it’s actually ridiculously simple stuff, just do a bit of reading around my blog, and search Google, you’ll soon get to grips with it).

Once you have got to grips with on-page optimisation, the most important thing is content – unique content. Just write stuff, or have stuff written, and make it as relevant, as informative & high quality as possible, and if you stick to this you cannot help but build a valuable website – and as long as you’re following general SEO principles, it will naturally get higher in the Google rankings, as Googles algorithms are all about allowing the cream to rise and the crap to sink, so if you’re focusing on ensuring your website is the cream – as well as following basic optimisation principles, the big G will see that your website is quality, and you’ll find that you have great rankings & traffic.

This is the opposite way to the approach many website owners take, most people try to get away with doing as little as possible when it comes to content creation, and pay very little attention to the quality of the content they’re creating, and focus on cheats & loopholes to try to trick Google into mistaking crap for cream & allowing it to rise. Sometimes this works for a bit, and then Google’s systems get even more intuitive, and these kinds of sites end up plummeting into obscurity over time.

So there’s your answer, how to get listed on Google – and how to get found higher on Google once your website is indexed.

So you’ve got your website, and you now need targeted traffic to create enquiries & sales – so you’re wondering how much SEO is going to cost you?

You have a couple of main options: Do it yourself, or hire an SEO firm or consultant.

Obviously the cheapest option is to do your own search engine optimisation – and it’s not really rocket science, yes there are things you need to learn, and it’s time consuming – but if you don’t have the budget to pay for SEO, then doing it yourself is a perfectly reasonable option.

If you decide that you don’t have the time or inclination to do it yourself, then again you have a couple of options, with varying costs.

You can decide to hire an SEO company or agency to setup & manage your optimization campaign, hire a freelancer to design & run your search engine optimization campaign, or design your own campaign & hire different individuals or companies to handle the various aspects.

How Much Does SEO Cost? Time to smash Mr. Piggy?

In terms of costs, the most expensive option would usually be to hire an SEO agency or large optimization firm, hiring a smaller search marketing company is usually cheaper, and seeking out a freelance SEO consultant can be cheaper still – and if you find a great freelance consultant you can get a great deal more value for your money, in my humble opinion – for the simple reason that companies & agencies are paying sales staff, account managers, and all the overheads associated with running a company, premesis, business rates etc., whereas with a freelance all of the money you’re paying is going into the time of the freelancer.

Running the campaign yourself and hiring different people to handle the different elements, is also a valid option, and can be the cheapest in terms of costs, but at the same time it can be hit & miss in terms of finding people to do a good job. For example, you could find someone to do keyword research for you, someone to do content & article writing,  someone to sort out your on-page SEO, someone to do directory submissions, profile backlinks, Angela’s backlinking packages, etc. There are an abundance of freelancers available via various freelancer sites, and often they’re in India, the Philippines, or other countries where the currency conversion rate & cost of living etc means that website owners in the US & UK etc can get great value for money. The problem with this is that just like with managing your own property development yourself, there can be a lot of hassle involved in managing various people handling different aspects of a campaign, so although it can work out well in terms of cost – you may lose a fair amount of hair in the process!

In initially got into SEO because in the late 90′s when I started my first online business, I couldn’t afford the cost to hire a company, or a freelancer, I was running the business on a shoestring – so I decided to teach myself. I discovered that I found it challenging & enjoyable – but having said that, when I first started it was easier, far less competition online, when Google came along there was no backlinking factor, it was all about onpage, the keywords tab etc -it’s definitely got more difficult over the years.  I didn’t really plan on becoming an SEO consultant, it was just word of mouth, family & friends were asking me to help them get traffic to their site, I started to get some good word of mouth & it grew from there.  So, investing some time & effort into learning to market your own websites may well take you further than you thought & end up with you doing it for a living, who knows – that’s what happened with me, and I wasn’t planning on it.

Thanks for reading,  my How Much Does SEO Cost post, I hope it’s helped.

There are many people out there who have been into internet marketing for years, many who make some money online but have never quite managed to turn it into a full time income. If this describes you, and you know lots about web marketing but you’ve never quite managed to find the right vehicle to make the web your full time income – how about becoming a full time, or part time web marketing assistant, as a job?

The web is fast becoming mainstream, so whereas in the past only the larger companies were investing in online marketing, now the majority of businesses are doing so. This has created a fantastic opportunity for large numbers of people all over the world, who have invested thousands over the years in learning about online marketing, and who can now cash in on this skill & knowledge by doing web marketing for a living.

Web Marketing Assistant job description

In a nutshell, it involves managing all website marketing activities for your employer, usually it’ll involve various disciplines, SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate marketing, display advertising, content creation, general web master work. It depends on the size of the company, but usually if the job is being described as web marketing assistant, it’s usually a single position rather than a team position – if it’s a larger company with a web marketing team, the title is usually slightly different.

This is a GREAT gig for web marketers who supplement their income with online marketing but would like to make it their full time job –   it’s EASY, it’s fairly well paid, it comes with autonomy, and as most people within the company will have no clue about web marketing, usually, you probably won’t have some boss breathing down your neck & telling you what to do – all they’ll want you to do is make sure that the web marketing is looked after, as they won’t know what to do, it’s hard for them to tell you what to do….

Obviously it’s a job, so you’ll have management etc – but if you get in with a company that is a pain to work for, try to stick it out for a year or so for the CV, then move on.

Web marketing assistant is a client-side position, so you’d be working directly for the company you’re doing the work for, not agency-side, which is where you work for a marketing agency working on clients sites. Agency-side work is generally a lot more competitive, more difficult to get into, it can be particularly well paid, but there’s often a lot of other “crap” you need to do, such as sales related stuff, dealing with clients, conference calls, explaining reports and so on (I know, I did a stint as SEO manager for a UK web marketing agency) and it’s generally more stressful and less fun than a client side marketing assistant position.

Many people in this position are on a cushy number, tucked away somewhere at a desk, listening to their Ipod, drinking coffee, chilling out & doing  the kinds of marketing stuff they could do with their eyes shut – doing exactly what they’d be doing anyway if they weren’t working – but getting paid for it.

So if you love web marketing but you’ve not found a way to make much money from it yet – this could be for you, especially if you’re broke, as many web marketers are!

If you’re wondering how you’re going to pay the bills, this is a million times better than flipping burgers, far better money, far less stressful, much easier work, and you’ll love it if you love WM.

Give it some thought, and search for web marketing assistant jobs locally.

So your website is ready, and now SEO is needed in order to start the flow of targeted search engine traffic. But, is SEO the logical next step – the answer is no, don’t jump the gun or you may waste time & effort.

Before you start doing SEO or paying someone to start doing it for you, what you need to do, or to get someone to do, is keyword research, then figure out which search terms you need to focus on for maximum results – then start SEO activities.

Many people get thuings back to front, they build a website, start working on SEO or investing in search engine optimisation services, then when they see they’re not getting much of a return, at some point they’ll realize that they need to go back to the drawing board & conduct keyword research first.

So without a doubt, SEO is needed – but it’s only worth doing once you know which search terms you need to focus on.

If you’re looking for a description of SEO, you’re not alone – many clients I speak to, including some very successful business people, are not quite sure what SEO is, and what it involves.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation (or optimization if you’re in the states).

In short, SEO means optimising a website to be able to rank higher on in the organic search engine results positions (SERPS for short) for your important search terms.

If you’ve heard the term “SEM” and wonder how SEO & SEM are different – SEM is the acronym for Search Engine Marketing,  and encompasses both SEO & PPC (pay per click marketing). For more info about PPC see my recent post PPC Vs SEO.

SEO is for ranking in the organic search engine results positions – not the paid search, pay per click marketing is different and you can find more about it in my PPC vs SEO post that I’ve just mentioned.

There are two parts to search engine optimization – onpage & offpage.

On page optimization means tweaking the pages of your website, to make it relevant for your important search terms. Page titles, meta description, header tags, alt image tags, internal linking anchor text etc (I will explain all of these in other posts, this is just a brief description for now).

Off page optimization is about improving the search engine’s opinion of your website, by gaining links to your website from other websites, known as “backlinks” – again, I won’t go into detail in this SEO description, but the general idea is that you want links to your site, from as high quality, well established sites as possible – and the “anchor text” which means the text used in the hyper link, should be a search term, so instead of “click here” you would use the search term that you want to rank for.

Some quick SEO tips:

1: Do search term research – or you could be wasting your time trying to rank your website for terms which bring no traffic, or which are far too competitive for you to expect to rank for in the near future.

2: Aim for page one – most buying visitors do not browse beyond page one of the search results.

3: Focus on buying search terms, not research search terms. Think about the search terms your clients are likely to search if they’re looking to buy, they will often be different terms than they would use if they were looking for info. It’s fine to rank for info terms too, but buying terms are where the money is.

4: Target your home page at your most important 2-3 search terms, and then sub pages should focus on one main search term each don’t try to target dozens of search terms with one page.

5: Page titles are very important, make sure your page titles are different for each page, keep the page title short & make the most important search term for each page, the first phrase in the page title.

6: Install the SEO quake toolbar into your browser, so you can easily research the competition.

7: When figuring out which search terms to focus on, search for the term in quotation marks “like this” , to see how many competing pages there are, if there are under a hundred thousand results then that’s an indication that it may be a lesser competitive term, if there are millions of results for the term, then it’s probably going to be a tough search term.

8: Once you’ve done the above, research page one using SEO quake plugin, or another tool, to check out how competitive the other sites are on page one, so you can see if you think you’ll be able to out-rank any of the sites currently on page one. If they’re all very well established sites with thosands of backlinks & masses of indexed pages, and a long website history, then it’s going to be tough, and you may want to look at focusing on a lesser competitive search term to begin with.

9: If you use PPC marketing and you have conversion tracking running (and if you don’t, then how do you know if you’re getting a return?) then use your PPC keyword data to figure out which search terms to focus on.

10: Write lots of unique content, search engines love fresh, unique content.

I hope you found this short SEO description informative – best of luck with your plans, and don’t forget to come back soon to see my other SEO & web marketing posts.

I’ve been asked quite a few times about the SEO vs PPC. First of all, to the uninitiated, I’ll explain the difference. If you already know the difference between SEO & PPC then you can skip this bit.

Organic Google Search Results

The organic search results are the results on the left under the block of three paid results which you’ll usually see first (unless their are no ads for the search term, which is unusual):

Organic results are the free results, and results are shown in accordance with Google’s search results algorithm which is designed to allow the best, most valuable & most relevant content for any given search term, to rise to the top.

Paid Google Search Results, AKA Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, PPC

The paid results, PPC (Pay Per Click), are the results you see at the top of each page, and on the right hand side:

You get your website into the paid search results with Google Adwords, and the results are ordered by the adwords algorithm which takes a number of things into account including bid amount, click through rates & quality score (which aims to rank the quality and relevance of the landing page).

So there you go, if you weren’t sure of the difference, hopefully this simple explanation has helped.

SEO vs PPC

So which should you focus on, which is best, SEO or PPC, which would win in a fight??

I’m kind of biased because although I do have quite a bit of experience with PPC, organic SEO is my forte’ & my passion – so I’m inclined to say that SEO is best, but the truth is that it’s a case of “horses for courses”, i.e. it just depends.

The first thing I will say about PPC, is that many, many businesses are pouring good money down the drain with it! PPC is a fantastic tool if used right, if used wrong it’s a quick way to lose all your money & see zero return, and from my experience, most businesses use it wrong. But I’ll get to that shortly.

In terms of which is best, it really depends on your business, and your website.

I’ll back up a little bit first and talk about website function. All business websites should be thought of (in my opinion) not as “websites” but as business tools. All business websites are tools, but they need to do different things for different businesses. If you’re selling online, then your website is an online selling tool – if you’re not selling online but you’re generating enquiries online, then your website is an enquiry generation tool. If you’re booking appointments for your sales team with your website, then your website is an appintment booking tool, if you’re building an email marketing list with your website, then it’s a list building tool (and you then use broadcasts to your list to convert to sales / signups / sales / enquiries) , if you’re doing a number of different things with your site, then your website is a Swiss army knife

One of the mistakes that many (most) businesses make (and not only small businesses) is that they do not properly identify what kind of a tool their website needs to be, and then when it comes to marketing they apply the wrong kinds of marketing strategies, and the website marketing is doomed from the outset.

So what kind of a tool does your website need to be?

If you’re a traditional offline business, and you do not sell products or services online, then your website is either going to be an enquiry generation tool or an list building tool. If you sell products or services online, then your website is a direct sales tool.

It’s all about being able to track conversion. The better you’re able to track the conversion & the return on investment, the more practical it becomes to be able to safely invest in PPC marketing. You can track conversion very easily with direct sales websites, Ecommerce websites – but it’s not so easy to track conversion & returns with enquiry generation & list building websites, so it’s harder to ensure that you’re making a profit from PPC with these kinds of websites.

Direct sales tools work great with PPC – they work well with organic SEO too – but the great thing about PPC is that you can generate sales straight away (if you do it right.) The reason direct sales tools are great to use with PPC, is that as you’re paying for the traffic you need to be able to measure the return, and with direct online sales you can measure the return very effectively, as long as you have conversion tracking set up (which is a must), then you can see straight away what return you’re making from SEO, and if you’re not making a profit you can tweak accordingly, and test & measure until you’re seeing great results. SEO is great for direct selling websites also, and you can set up conversion tracking with Google anayltics so you can see which search terms are bringing a return via organic search. But organic search can take some time, so if you have some budget for PPC, I’d advise that you start with PPC to get some traffic going, and then use the data you generate from PPC (i.e which search terms are bringing the best returns) to then begin your organic SEO campaign to generate organic traffic for the search terms which are bringing the most profit.

Enquiry generation & list building websites can be tricky when it comes to PPC, for the reason that the website isn’t directly converting the sale, so you can’t work out a direct return. It could be that you think PPC is generating sales, but actually your sales are coming from other marketing avenues & you would do better  cutting the PPC & investing into the other area which is actually bringing the sales (i.e. SEO or offline marketing methods).

Lets say that you have an average profit per sale (of a product or service) of $100, for example. If you’re selling online, it’s very easy to  see that if you have an average sales conversion rate of 1%, and you’re paying $0.50 per click, you’re paying $50 to make $100.  So with online sales you can carefully track conversions, and drop any terms which are costing too much or which aren’t converting. Even if you’re not making any return, at leas you know this & you can act accordingly.

But when you’re not selling online, it’s harder to work out your exact conversion rate, as the sale is converted via a process which can’t be tracked online. Well actually, it can be, there are some tools available now which can convert from ppc traffic through to telephone enquiries, but they’re not particularly cheap & they’re fairly complex to set up & run properly.

I’ve had direct experience of this – years ago I had an offline business, with a website which did have some online selling but it was mainly an enquiry generation website, I was pumping money into adwords just assuming that this was where a chunk of the sales were coming form as it seemed to increase as I put more cash into PPC, but one day I decided to pause the PPC campaign, and I discovered that it made no difference at all to sales, and that in fact the sales were coming in mainly via organic SEO and some offline marketing I’d done – figuring this out saved me about a thousand dollars per month, and if I’d known this 18 months earlier….

Don’t get me wrong – PPC can be fantastic, and there are people making a LOT of profit from it – but equally there are some businesses wasting money on PPC, either just because they’re not using conversion tracking, or because their website is an enquiry generation tool so they cannot figure out whether they’re making a profit from PPC marketing.

When PPC started out, you could get onto page one with google adwords for pennies per click, now however it’s got so popular that many search terms have expensive minimum page one bid amounts, many of which are higher than $0.50 per click, some which are $1 per click or considerably more. Average online sales conversion is usually somewhere between 0.25% – 1%, which means you need between 100 and 400 clicks in order to make a sale, so lets work this out:

If you’re paying an average of $0.50 per click, the cost of sale is between  $50 – $200. So if your average profit per sale is $20 – OOPS!! If you’re paying an average of $1.50 per click, the cost of sale with an average conversion rate is $150 – $600.

This may seem steep, but this is the issue many have when it comes to PPC, they don’t have high enough conversion rates, and/or high enough average profit per sale.

If you’re making a couple of grand per sale, then you’re probably safe as your profit level will cover the cost of sale even if you’re paying a fairly high PPC & your conversion rate isn’t amazing, but if you’re only making tens of dollars per sale, then you can see that it’s not going to be very easy to make money via PPC.

So, PPC is good for direct sales sites, and particularly good for high profit sales, but you need to be able to track conversion & profit.

SEO on the other hand is good for enquiry sites, and list generation, because you’re not paying per click – so if you get to page one for a search term which is performing, then you have a traffic generation system which will feed your enquiry generation or list building website, without having to continually pay for the traffic.

There you go, hopefully this has given you a better understanding of SEO vs PPC

I’m here in the sunny (it actually is today!) United kingdom, quite a bit of the traffic to my SEO blog comes from the states, Australia, India, various parts of Europe & various other parts of the world – but I can see that some visitors are reaching my blog by searches related to SEO united kingdom, UK, GB etc.

I’m assuming that while some people may be tying to find out if there’s a different way to approach SEO in the UK, I think probably most of these searches relate to business people searching for SEO services here in the UK.

If you do have a question relating to what is the difference between SEO in the US or anywhere else, and SEO in the United Kingdom, there’s only really one major difference, here we spell it optimisation, not optimization . Other than that, the search terms are often slightly different, there are spelling differences, differences in competition levels – which are usually counter balanced by differences in search volume.

I’m not going to plug my SEO services – due to the fact that I very rarely take on SEO clients now, I’ve just got too much going on, with my business website design business, and SEO consultancy for a few key clients with whom I’ve been working for several years in some cases –  I take on the odd new SEO client by referral, usually as a favour more than anything else, but I don’t really have the time or inclination to take on lots of SEO clients – I only have one pair of hands, and they’re quite busy.  I do enjoy writing about this stuff, which is why I blog when I have a spare few minutes (I type fast!), but I do this because I enjoy it, I’m not really looking to further my career in any way with my SEO blog.

So – anyway, there you go, a little – possibly pointless but nevertheless quite enjoyable (for me, anyway!) post about SEO United Kingdom

As you’re probably aware, content is king when it comes to SEO. Many people forget this, or probably they try to ignore it & hope it’ll go away, and that they’ll find a way to get great search engine rankings without great SEO content writing, because it’s time consuming. If you’ve been searching for SEO magic bullets – I can say from experience that you won’t find one – and if you try to omit great unique content from your plan, then I would put money on your plan not working too well.

Once people realise that despite their best efforts, they’re unable to find anything to do away with the need for unique content – the next thing many try (speaking from experience…) is inexpensive content. The old rule – you get what you pay for – is true when it comes to content. What I have found is that cheap SEO content is flawed in one or more ways, either it’s not unique at all, or it’s badly written, I’ve had some articles delivered which just don’t make any sense, quite often Indian content writers & others for whom English isn’t the first language, while it may be grammatically brilliant in some cases, what I often find is that it just just doesn’t read in the way that English speakers are used to. I know some people don’t believe that articles need to be well written, or need to make perfect sense, or need to be enjoyable to read – as many are of the opinion that content – especially when it’s for article submitting, is for marketing purposes & not for readers, but personally I think it makes sense to focus on creating content which you are proud to distribute,  produce content for visitors first, SEO second. I believe that if you stay focused on quality over SEO score, focus on creating content which your visitors will like – you’re investing very, very soundly – yet if you’re pumping out poor content, you may just be treading water, and as Google continue to become even more intelligent in the way that they allow the cream to rise to the top, I’m confident that if you take my advise – in the long term you’ll find it was worth it.

What you have to remember is that all of Google’s algorithm is designed to allow the cream to rise & the crap to fall – if you generally focus on making your site the cream, rather than trying to pass off junk as cream and hoping it’ll rise – then in the longterm I cannot see how you can fail. In terms of SEO that is, and traffic – that isn’t to say that this guarantees that your business will make a profit – which brings me to another point that I’ll take up more in a future post – being sure that your SEO efforts are not all for nothing. There are websites which are doing great for SEO, which will never make money – don’t forget that SEO is just a way to get traffic, you need to make sure that your website converts visitors into customers.

So to conclude this post – I would recommend that you either write your own content, or that you hire great, experienced content writers. This will cost you, but its an investment, as quality content is what you need – in fact, a decent SEO content writer will probably cost you roughly ten times what you can get cheap lesser quality content writer to write content for, but in my opinion it’s worth it for a great content writer, as a well researched, well written article or page of content is far, far more valuable than a cheap, poor quality page of content.