Code-Tips.com - Web Development, Programming, SEO

Web Development and online Marketing in the industry today often involves a large number of broad areas such as planning / BA, website or system design, system or application development, system testing., server configuration and maintenance, DNS configuration, Internet Marketing / SEO, etc. There are many cases where a developer will carried out similar tasks to the webmaster, SEO or internet marketing consultant, especially when the Web site is managed externally by a single company. Most companies and individuals who offer online services for the development of web sites may also need to configure and maintain the DNS and web server. Many developers become experienced in some of these areas, but to become a real expert in any given area requires a lifetime of knowledge and experience. This is often the deciding point between outsourcing website development and SEO services to an individual with lower prices, or a larger company higher prices, but have access to a much greater range of skills in each area. In business scenarios, outsourcing the company with a wide range of talent is required to get the site off the ground, and will generally be more worth while in the end in regards to return on investment.

Professional SEO Consultants and Internet marketers should have at least moderate web development skills in order to optimize a website internally for search engines. This may require an understanding of multiple programming languages, data sources and business integration and reporting platforms. This can be one of the gotchas when outsourcing SEO or development, as there are many web development companies that will also claim to provide the necessary SEO services for you site or company. If a company claims to provide a "SEO Services" consist primarily of developers and not professional SEO, Advertising and Internet Marketing consultants where high quality content, language and marketing skills are their main focus, you may find that the techniques employed to market you site are not ethical or legal, and certainly not useful enough to serve it’s purpose of marketing another place on the internet. Many development companies use their development skills to create automated solutions for marketing a websites on the internet, which can seem attractive due to the number of external links being obtained, but is in most cases a complete waste of time and money.

If your SEO company uses forums to create content to market your site, make sure that the forums related to your site, and that the marketing content added to forums is informative, useful, and not the sales pitch unless published in the appropriate area. For external content to be most successful, it should be useful and relevant in the context of the website it has been placed on.

For example, you might feel as though you are getting great value for the purchase of 10 000 or similar links for low price. Chances are that each of the previous customers/clients also have a link to their website on the same 10,000 pages or sites, regardless of the purpose of each external web page or types of products / services being offered. Although the price seems cheap, it will most likely be a complete waste of time, since most major search engines choose to ignore spammy content, or content from spammy domains. If the site is useful and worth sharing with others, websites and publishers will naturally link to your web site to help you build backlinks. Another downfall with purchasing links in bulk is that Search Engines may notice the unnatural growth in external links to your site, which can result in being penalised or even banned. This, and many other similar techniques would be termed 'Black Hat' SEO that may work at the time of purchase, but technology and other emerging black hat techniques will eventually be recognized by major search engines making use the techniques useless, a waste of time and risk severely damaging the reputation of the website (and SEO company).

The thing that catches most people, is that is pretty widely known that backlinks help promote websites in search engines. When you see an offer for 10,000 backlinks for a small price, it can seem to good to be true as to create 10,000 pages manually to link back to your site would be impossible to do in a short time with quality (non duplicate) content. Purchasing links in bulk will in most cases be completely useless in terms of affect on SERPs and return on investment. Although building backlinks is important to help expose a website to the Internet and in Search Results, for maximum success in the marketing campaign you need to think in terms of content as apposed to links. If the content is not useful in some way, or published to a location that is not trusted by other websites and search engines it won’t be much use. In the past I was much more successful with between 5 and 10 backlinks from pages with high quality original, and highly related  content, as I have to thousands of links from sites and pages that are not closely associated with the primary purpose of your website. In my opinion you are not paying for the actual backlinks at all, but instead for the time necessary to create high quality and useful content that contains a link to your website. Paying for 10,000 backlinks may seem easy and cheap if compared with the amount of time required to create these links, but the process to create the links would be automated, taking less than a few hours to complete at worse. To get many links from high-quality content itself would take a very long time to complete and involve large costs.  When outsourcing or purchasing links from companies that provide bulk links offers at small prices, high quality content is certainly not what you are paying for.

This is not to say that all Web Development / SEO companies that use forums (or similar) to create backlinks from relevant content do so using spammy techniques.  Many companies employ experienced content writers with the appropriate skills required to write high quality content relating to your website. High-quality marketing content on external websites will be most successful if engaging, useful and original in the context of the site or page the content is published on. Purchasing links from such content or paying professional writers themselves to create high quality content is much more expensive than buying a large number of generic links in bulk.  In the past, I have found that hiring professional writers will always result in effective and useful marketing campaign, which yields results greater than that of links from generic, duplicate and spammy content.  If you are hiring a professional writer, be sure to provide enough detail in the brief to ensure that the content produced is appropriate and written to target the required keywords and phrases in a non manipulative way.

Further indication of the quality and professionalism of Internet Marketing SEO firm, is whether or not they are open to the techniques used to market your site. If information like this is withheld from you, then it's probably because they engage in unethical practices when promoting websites online. There are not many secrets of good SEO, which is why all of a well established professional SEO firms will certainly explain the process they go though to write and publish high quality content to trusted external sites. Some companies also offer SEO services, advising publishers and website owners to use techniques to continuously promote your website. Many also have a number of specialized forums, directories and Web sites that allow content to be added in the areas relevant to your site.  This is most successful when actively participating on the forums in constructive ways that result in the threads being indexed and followed promptly by search engines.

When planning to outsourcing SEO or Internet Marketing services to promote your website, the most important things to consider if money spent is likely to bring higher returns in the long run. Be sure to analyze your competitor sites and SERPs, and websites of the chosen SEO company's previous clients to determine what marketing techniques are used. Avoid taking short-cuts, such as purchasing large amounts of links, which can result in your site being penalised or excluded from search engines all together.  You will generally get what you pay for, and be satisfied as long as you spend the time doing some research before handing over the money.