Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Is SEO Cost Effective?

Is SEO Cost Effective?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is often lauded as being one of the more affordable and cost effective forms of online advertising. While this can be true, it is important to remember that an SEO campaign should be an ongoing process to ensure the best results. It is also true that the more competitive the keywords you target, the more costly a campaign will prove and the less cost effective it will be. There are methods to help ensure that an SEO campaign proves both effective and cost effective.

One Page – One SEO Campaign

Every individual page on your site should be treated as a separate potential SEO campaign. By establishing a single campaign per page you can ensure that each page is properly optimized. The consequence of attempting to promote an entire site with one SEO campaign is that different pages should target different keywords and different visitors. Not only does this help to ensure a more effective SEO marketing campaign for your site as a whole, it also enables easier tracking of performance and monitoring of ROI. Most pages will have different requirements according to the competitiveness of keywords and the return per lead for each page. Tailoring an SEO campaign to meet these individual requirements helps to ensure its effectiveness.

Building A Link Profile

Gone are the days of cramming a page with keywords and subsequently seeing it ranked highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). One of the most important facets of an SEO campaign is the building of a powerful link profile. Search engines use the number of links pointing to your site as a guide to its value. Not only do they consider the sheer weight of links, though, they also take into account the value of the page where the link is found. The most effective link profile should consist of a combination of directory links and website links, single page links and site-wide links, even inbound and reciprocal links. However, all of these links need to be relevant and from good quality sites. Some marketers and webmasters opt for paid linking because it enables them to effectively select the pages where there link will appear. While paid linking does offer greater control over the pages that link to you, it can prove very costly. Paying for links in high quality directories should provide more than a link profile boost, though, and this should also be taken into consideration. The same is also true of links placed in prominent positions on busy and relevant pages.

Ongoing SEO Work

SEO is not a one-off marketing package. Everything about an SEO campaign should be regularly monitored and optimized according to results and other figures. Keyword popularity and the number of sites competing for the top positions can make some keywords less competitive while others become more appealing. Sites that are especially caught up in highly competitive markets will find that they need to build a particularly powerful link profile. This will take time, especially if the link profile is to appear natural to the search engines. Less competitive pages will also need to keep their profile updated and will need to ensure that they are still targeting appropriate keywords.