SUBMIT 2.0

You’ve made your website. All the content is top-notch with those great-looking graphics. Now what? Where are the visitors? You build it and they shall come is not quite true on the internet. On a platform where a user can be transported from one place to another at the click of a button, getting a steady inflow of visitors requires a lot of marketing. You’ve heard all of this a hundred times and therefore opt for a search engine marketing plan trying to choose between the hundreds of service providers that claim to do miracles for you. If you don’t want to get cheated in the end, read on.

A comprehensive search engine marketing plan should cover all aspects of online marketing such as SEO, link-building, PPC, social bookmarking, directory submission and social media marketing. Most of the service providers are going to provide all these options in a single package or separately as special packages. When buying such a package, you need to keep the following things in mind:

Cost Effectiveness: A higher price doesn’t always mean better service. I recommend you to visit SEM related forums and take people’s advice on the services they use and the kind of results such efforts yield. You will find that a lot of these highly advertised companies are nothing but fraudsters who trick people into giving away their hard earned money. You will also find numerous people vouching for a few service providers who’ve provided them with excellent results in the past. For instance, take the social bookmarking services. An effective social bookmarking submission campaign requires a lot of manual labor to find such relevant directories and that too of high page rank. Service providers, who are dedicated to producing results, will undergo the process properly while others may just as well use automated bookmarking tools which in the end, produce no results. Manual Directory Submission Services on the other hand, produce high results even if done in low numbers.

Scalability: Since your website is going to grow in the future, you are also going to need to upgrade your SEM efforts accordingly. Therefore, you need to check if the service provider you intend to subscribe to has options for upgrading your package and at what cost. Generally, the more service you take, the cheaper it gets to upgrade. You must also see if the service provider has the capacity to take the kind of workload you intend to throw at him in the near future. Human resource issues are everywhere in each industry, be it online or offline. Scalability issues may destroy your site’s visibility and authority in the long run.

Contextual Marketing or Relevance Getting high traffic with low relevance is practically of no use. What good is a user searching for gardening tools if your site is about kitchen appliances? Service providers can trick you into thinking that your website is receiving high traffic, but you won’t profit from them because there will be no profit. Targeting the right keywords and phrases makes sure that your website becomes an authority in your niche in the long run.

If kept in mind, you are surely to land into a good package that will give you excellent results and hence, a generous return on your investment. A sure-fire way of getting good results is also to opt for manual Social Bookmarking Services who provide you with a detailed report on the submission they have made and offer cheap upgrade options.

Filed under: SEM