Ultimately, there are cases where the former will be the best option, and other cases where it will be the latter option: it all comes down to the particular circumstances of the company at hand.

For example, a company that has a solid and long-standing in-house marketing staff—with more than sufficient resources to make convincing press releases, handle customers’ queries, and so forth—will probably choose to hire an exclusively SEO company.  That’s because they probably don’t have the in-house expertise to launch and manage an effective search engine optimization campaign, but have got pretty much every other aspect of marketing down to a T.

Surely a company that neither has a good marketing staff (in the traditional sense) nor any qualified SEO staff will be inclined to go the route of the full-service marketing firm.  Such a company has nothing to lose and everything to gain from following this path.

Some companies simply have no need for many traditional marketing techniques, and prefer to practically exclusively focus on online marketing initiatives.  This is the case for specific companies with even more specific target audiences: for example, a company specializing in hi-tech gadgetry aimed at computer experts is likely to get their message across more than effectively enough with e-advertising, as the intended customers are highly connected by default.  To reiterate, only companies in a very few niches can afford to make this call, and only if they are ready to pour lots of effort into the SEO side of things.

For most run of the mill companies, there really is no substitute for a comprehensive marketing firm that can tackle all their needs and produce one consolidated bill.  The more impressive such specimens can house an incredibly diverse set of skills under one roof, and that is a major asset for any company in need of marketing assistance.  Such firms will not only be able to tackle your SEO work, but they will tackle the copywriting work that complements and fills out said work.  Furthermore, as most companies cannot afford to abandon traditional avenues of marketing, such firms can help in the drafting of press releases and reaching strategic decisions on message content.

Furthermore, these kinds of broad, inclusive marketing firms can help you land new online revenue opportunities such as pay per click advertisements.  The money garnered from these channels, though on a minor scale at least to begin with, can end up subsidizing a good portion of online marketing initiatives in the future, and is one thing that you won’t find any exclusively-SEO company offering to do for you.

In this context, it is incredibly common to find companies committing gross and detrimental mistakes in their search engine marketing campaigns, especially when they have chosen to hire the services of people that are only minimally trained in the field (but perhaps knew more about the subject than the person hiring; a necessary though not sufficient condition).

Here we’ll tackle the ten biggest follies witnessed in many such online marketing campaigns, trying to point out the reasons and consequences for such predicaments:

1. Publishing duplicate content: what could make you look more amateurish?  Nothing, that’s what!  You will take a hard hit in terms of search engine placement (as the engines penalize sites with duplicate content) and will be written off by many consumers as either copy-cats or too lazy to come up with something new…neither of which does you any good.
2. Overloading keywords: another amateur’s trick, this time with less liability of being labeled a fraud but equal liability of being penalized by the search engines.  Not only is it important that a company choose their keywords wisely (not trying to dominate a keyword that is simply too broad or contested), but furthermore that they be conservative with its employment: 4% to 6% usually does the trick; anything over 10% is total overkill.
3. Focusing off-site rather than on-site: this is the folly of those who are too timid and indecisive to actually get down to the work of improving the site itself.  Though it is incredibly important to build up a strong army of (quality!) backlinks, etc., it is incredibly important to guarantee that your site has outstanding original content, balanced use of wisely-chosen keywords, clever page titles and names, and convincing meta-tags.
4. Failing to develop in-bound links: this is basically the counterpoint of the previous mistake, and proves the fact that a good balance needs to be struck between on-site and off-site work.  If you have been generous enough to host links to other sites, make sure you are protecting your own and demanding corresponding links or generating them one way or another back to your site.
5. Abandoning SEO before you see results: the flaw of the impatient!  Search Engine Marketing isn’t akin to getting the genie to come out of the lamp: it’s a process that may be slow to gather steam, but will be enormously important and effective once it does.
6. Expecting too much too soon: again, this drives at the same point as the last mistake.  You will most likely not shoot up to the first spot on Google when conducting a search with your coveted keyword after the first month of implementing search engine marketing at your company.
7. Going for keywords that are too competitive: this gets back to an idea brought up in point 2 above, and essentially boils down to excessive and misguided ambition.  On the one hand you may be vying for a keyword that another company with a much larger SEO budget is claiming, or you may be literally spitting in the wind—trying to claim a keyword that is too general for any one site to have it on lockdown.
8. Complicated navigation structure on-site: this is one of the worst and most elementary mistakes to be made: think of your business as a city, and your website as its roadmap.  Try to create sensible, thematic divisions for your site, and to prevent any particular page from being considerably “buried” within the site (aka many clicks away from the home page).
9. Poor landing pages: just as you want to make getting around your page easy, you want to make the content interesting!  This is especially true for landing pages, those to which people are brought from search engines or through links on other sites.  Landing pages should be the most carefully groomed and tidily packaged of all the pages on your site.
10. Links from poor quality sites: in keeping with the old-fashioned notion that you can judge somebody by the company they keep, links from poor quality sites will reflect poorly on you and lower your market credibility.  Be proactive about getting other sites to link to you, but don’t lower your standards so low that you start to get yourself muddy!

RevBuilders Marketing has a different belief. All marketing/advertising works at different times for different reasons. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is certainly the hottest item today and is an extremely important part of any well rounded marketing strategy. However, you must make sure that it works effectively with your current strategies as well.

So before you launch out and select a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company be sure to ask these questions:

1. Do they have any sales experience?
   Having great technical skills is important, but communicating vital. The goal of online marketing is to drive leads or sales. If you do not have someone on the team who understands this process, the results will not meet your expectations.  Hiring a company that understands the entire decision making process of your prospects and client is critical for long term success.
2. Do they have any marketing experience?
   Many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms have been established to take advantage of the growing market – nothing wrong with that.  However, many of them view online marketing from a strictly technical point of view. This approach could be harmful to your long-term goals.  Marketing is more then just Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It is the whole package. Having a company that can manage all aspect of your marketing gives you a distinct advantage over those who use several companies – you will be much more efficient and you will see more dramatic results.
3. Will they or can they work with other marketing disciplines?
   Coordinating different companies to work on an integrated marketing campaign is challenging at best. Working with a company that can act as the “marketing manager” and bring a team together to work for your success has a much better chance at succeeding. It could be several different companies, as long as you, the client, is working through one single contact point for all your marketing needs.

Large numbers of websites are added to the World Wide Web every day. According to domiantools.com over 66,000 new domains have been registered in the last 24 hours, and as time goes by it will only become more difficult for sites to rank for competitive terms. To survive, it is imperative for web site owners to employ effective SEO tactics to ensure top rankings and as much relevant traffic as possible.

SEO companies provide a number of services that includes analyzing the competition of the website, identification of the right keywords and key phrases, optimization of the web content, link building, article and directory submission, social media optimization, blog and forum posting and pay per click management.

How a website fares in search engine listing and what traffic they achieve over time depends upon a large number of constantly changing factors. A good SEO company not only keeps tabs on all these changing factors, but also analyzes the sites performance – its conversion rate. After all, what would be the purpose of driving traffic to the site that did not convert?

An effective SEO company enables the website to be competitive by driving only traffic that has a high probability to convert.

Conversions are the name of the game – not rankings.

The RevSEO Team

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of PageRank sculpting, here’s a brief explanation.
PageRank Sculpting involves the use of nofollow tags on links to control where the PageRank value flows within a website. So by using nofollow tag, PR can be channelized to the more important pages i.e. Home page & Service page.

Well Google’s SEO voice, Matt Cutts, has revealed that Google’s management of nofollow has changed – potentially rendering the practice of basic PageRank sculpting less effective.

According to Cutts, Google will no longer allow webmasters to build up link juice and funnel it to certain pages. If nofollow is used on links, the other pages wont get a PR boost – instead they’ll just receive the same PR value they would have, if all the links were followed.

So alas – PR sculpting, as we know it, will be less effective in the future and it was in the past. Given the announcement that was made during a Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle last month; webmasters will be waiting patiently for an official statement on the policy from Google.

For more details on PageRank sculpting read Matt Cutts Blog

The RevSEO Team