Beyond SEO, combining online and offline efforts for better results

As an intelligent business person, you ask yourself an important questions: Is SEO all that I need to get a high ranking with search engines? The answer to this questions is NO, it is not all.

Reaching a high ranking with search engines

An effective SEO work is a major success factor if your site aims at outperforming the competition and climbing up the search engine rankings. However, there is more that you could do to further improve your end-result. Here is a full list of major ingredients for your success:

• Effective SEO
• Rich and topic related link popularity
• Impact online and traditional advertising
• Aggressive public relations

Search engine optimization is what you can’t do without if you want to be highly ranked on search engines. Your site’s online visibility is highly affected by the SEO strategy. Your SEO firm will combine on-site optimization factors, page titles, site wide architecture and more as well as off-site factors such as increasing your link popularity.

Gaining visibility by using link popularity and advertising

Your link popularity campaign must be efficiently designed. To obtain links only from sites that will positively affect your positioning with search engines is not a simple and easy task. Certain types of incoming links are useless for SEO - Javascript redirects are a perfect example, don't waste time chasing such websites. In fact, there are inbound hyperlinks that would even negatively affect your search engine positioning performance. Your site needs an effective strategy to link to other sites that have a positive impact on search engine ranking. A good link popularity campaign will really make a difference for your ranking - you can not go without it since it is a crucial element of the Google, Yahoo and MSN algorithms.
Online advertising brings additional benefits to your search engine ranking. Online advertising may take the form of either sponsored links (pay-per-click or pay-for-performance, or real text links ads and other variations) The benefits of online advertising include: increased brand recognition, increased sales, link popularity boost (text based ads) and more. The key to effective advertising is having a strong impact and a call to action to drive new prospects to your website.

Use of traditional methods

Adding traditional advertising in the form of print ads, TV and radio spots expands your brand awareness, therefore if you have good content people start linking to your website without you even asking them to do so, this increases first your link popularity, then your ranking and then your traffic.
Not to mention that you could reuse your existing press releases and have them submitted to online PR services to gain more visibility and eventually a few new back links. Press releases, articles and effective communication with your customers and prospects online as well as offline are not to be ignored. The benefits of PR go even beyond rankings with search engines.

The result for your e-business is what may be called a search engine juxtaposition [being at the right place at the right time on search engines]. Your site’s top positioning and increased visibility will exponentially increase your chances of meeting rewarding opportunities. Without a good exposure, your site, talent, unique offering and impeccable service will have but a little chance of being noticed by important decision makers.
Combine your SEO efforts with a strong linking strategy, an aggressive PR and powerful advertising campaigns and you will be on your way to truly increasing your chances of being at the right place at the right time and making a major impact on your prospective customers.

The bottom line is that by combining some of the above mentioned SEO, linking and traditional marketing strategies it is more likely that your business is noticed and that you start establishing long term relationships with your prospects.