Outsourcing Everything In Terms Of SEO

We have been working as a search engine optimization firm for around 1 year now; however I have worked in the search engine optimization field for over 12 years and have optimized for ancient search engines like Alta Vista, Excite, ASK Jeeves, MSN, Yahoo, Google and others. This has given my company an excellent grasp on what the search engines like to see as well as what to be careful of.

To rank high in the search engines, you need to do 2 things properly. You need to get your website in order and properly optimized. Then you need to show the search engines that your search friendly website is credible by building it’s authority through inbound links from other websites.

As a search engine optimization firm, we will occasionally outsource certain aspects of our operations to stay competitive, and I am going to give you some insight in to how you can do the same (even to a further extent if you would like).

Let’s start with your fresh website that has not yet been optimized and show you the most effective steps to take in order to improve your rankings cost effectively and effectively. Working smarter instead of harder is a huge benefit when it comes to search engine optimization and marketing; this can propel you forward at an extremely speedy pace compared to doing it all on your own.

First off, Once you have your website online – we recommend that you outsource one aspect of your SEO campaign to an organic SEO consulting firm. I recommend that every business with a website obtain a certain amount of consulting from a respected firm to help ensure that your website is properly optimized to rank properly. Search engine optimization firms make most of their money performing link building on a monthly basis, so simple advice can be a cost effective way to utilize a search engine optimization firm. If your website is optimized properly, you will be able to pinpoint that problems are originating with your link building instead of your website design. Consulting will allow you to ask questions while you are launching your search engine optimization campaign, so that you are as efficient as possible.

Quality SEO consulting usually ranges from $80 per hour to several hundred dollars per hour (but you can accomplish a lot in 2-3 hours). I simply recommend that you hire someone that has over 5 years of on-site optimization experience so that they can save you time and money by doing things right the first time.

After you complete your on site optimization for your website, you are ready to build your websites authority through link building so that you can rank in Google, Yahoo & Bing (as well as others with similar algorithms). Link building is necessary because the search engines treat links to your website like a vote of trust. Once you have enough votes for your website from high authority websites, you are going to begin beating your competition. I would recommend that you outsource certain aspects of your link building, however you should always be overseeing everything to ensure that you only obtain quality links from websites with authority. If a website doesn’t seem like a valuable website you would find useful, you should not probably not obtain a link from it.

One high quality link is often times more valuable than 100 low quality links. Low quality links can actually have an adverse affect on your rankings and penalize your website, so you need to stay away from sites that seem to have no value or websites that aren’t active. I have seen website owners obtain some amazing inbound links tied in with hundreds or thousands of low quality ineffective links, and then Google really penalized them and it took a long time to get back to where they were before. Don’t obtain links from websites that are only link farms and offer no relevant or useful information.

We obtain links in a wide variety of methods, and the major methods are outlined below:

A: Article and News distribution to highly relevant and authoritative websites and blogs.
B: Press release distribution through companies like Market Wire, PRWeb, PRLog and others.
C: Hunting down your competitions most powerful links.
D: Obtaining local listings in websites like Yahoo!, Google, MSN (Bing), Merchant Circle, SuperPages, Yelp and other high authority websites.
E: Get involved in popular forums that are relevant to your business niche and include a link to your website.
F: Create high quality information and resources on your website that will naturally attract links from other website owners and web users.
G: Update your website bi-weekly in order to always show the search engine spider that your website is constantly evolving.

The search engines know that a truly valuable website will be talked about on blogs, forums, link pages, articles, press releases, EDU websites and more. This is a type of link mesh that the search engines like to see. Now, let’s examine all of the above ways to obtain links and determine how we can outsource different aspects of link building.

Article & News Distribution
First off, when you are writing and distributing news and articles, you first need to have content written. You can hire ghost writers to write content on your behalf. This will save a large amount of time, and often times you can have an article written for $8-$30 a piece (depending on the quality) – You just need to find a quality writer to create the information. After the content is written you can submit it to popular article websites like Ezine Articles, ArticlesBase, American Chronicle, Buzzle, Google Knol and other popular and quality article websites. Something that works even better is submitting your articles to popular blogs or websites that are relevant to your industry. We recommend changing articles titles and content each time you submit it to a new website (if you want to submit to several locations). If you don’t change the content, Google’s guidelines state that you should link to the original article post if you post duplicate content on the web; which we recommend you do if you aren’t changing the article content.

Press Release Distribution
Secondly, When submitting a press release we recommend that you hire a ghost writer to create the content or else prepare it yourself (whatever you prefer). After you have the press release written, you should submit it to popular press release distribution websites. This will help you obtain some high authority links that are often times syndicated to a large numbers of other quality websites which gives you more link value! You can also submit your press release to free press release distribution websites like PRlog as well that also carry a large amount of link value.

Some other press release distribution websites we would recommend are PRWeb, MarketWire, PR.Com and PR News Wire. Each time a press release is submitted, it is best to slightly re-write the content to ensure you obtain maximum link value from each press release distributed.

Seeking Out Your Competitor’s Links
Third, you can find out what links are helping your competition by simply pulling up their website in Yahoo!. You go to Yahoo.com and type in the following query including your competitions url:

link:webaddresshere.com

Then once you hit submit, you will be able to see all the links pointing to their website (by clicking on inlinks). Yahoo! will categorize the links for you and show the most powerful links first and lower authority links further down in the results. This makes the link building process very easy for you because you can see the top links pointing to main competitors websites. If you obtain links from the top 20 sites in your industry, you will probably be able to quickly rank and beat your competition online. If you wanted to outsource all or part of this link building tactic; You can save time by hiring a personal assistant with link building experience to find the best links pointing to your top competition and report back to you. Also, if you trust a link builder; you can have them obtain the links on your behalf (Make sure they report back to you in order to maintain quality standards).

Local Authority Directories
Fourth, we need to obtain listings from local websites and popular directories. Make sure to always include your website address (link) whenever you create a listing online or submit content online. These websites are very trusted by the search engines, so there is a large amount of value whenever you obtain a link anywhere on one of these websites.

There is a company out there called Universal Business Listing that will do a lot of the work for you by creating your listing on a large number of high authority websites for a minimal fee. Most companies charge $40 per month for this service; Universal Business Listing has a minimal annual fee to maintain these listings. Their website is http://www.universalbusinesslisting.org – UBL will automatically provide you local listings on a large number of powerful directories & data feeds including:

411 DA
ALK -CoPilot
AOL
Ask
AssistGuide
City Search
Collarity
DENSO Auto Nav.
Dex
Disney
GetFave
Go2
IBegin
Idearc
InfoSpace
Insider Pages
JVC GPS
kgb_USA/infonxx
Kudzu
LiveDeal
Localeze
Lowrance/Navico
LSSI – Volt
Menu Network
Merchant Circle
Mojo Pages
Onstar
Open List
Quebecor/Canoe.ca
Search Bug
Spock
Super Pages
TeleAtlas
Telemap
Tellme
Topix
V-Enable
viaMichelin
Vindigo/Zingy
WhitePages.com
Windows Live
Yellow Book
Yellow Bot
Yellow Page City
Yellow Pages
YellowPagesInc
Yelp
YP
Zenrin

Get Involved In Online Communication
Fifth, you need to have one of your employees, contractors or yourself talk online in popular forums and bulletin boards that are related to your business. Whenever they talk online they should include a link in their signature pointing to your website when talking online. This will be beneficial to boost link popularity as well as company branding and relationships. There is no better way that a business can be marketed than word of mouth marketing (and that’s coming from an SEO!). Make sure you hire someone to talk online for you – ensuring that you choose someone that will represent your company properly while protecting your image.

Always attempt to leave your link online whenever possible. For example, if your Human Resources department is posting a job online, make sure they link back to your company website if possible.

One Last Tip To Obtain Long Term Success
One of the best long term link building tactics is to create compelling free information, tutorials, videos and or tools that will attract links to your website without manually hunting them down. Natural links are usually the best links that you can obtain, because the search engines are pretty good at deciphering between organic and manipulated links. This should be a long term tactic to improve website traffic and rankings without constantly obtaining new links to your website.

I recommend that you show the search engines that your website is active and full of helpful information by updating your website bi-weekly (at least). This will show the search engines that you are not a website that is simply dying off from old age. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this would be to create a blog located on your website itself using an application such as WordPress. Obviously you can outsource this aspect of ongoing maintenance by hiring a ghost writer to create the information for your website.

Always focus on deploying quality information on the internet, this will help internet surfers socially bookmark your content and spread information about your website for you.

Joel McLaughlin
Dataflurry.com