You can create and design a great website, but if no one can find it then it doesn’t have much value.  At Losasso we try to impart the importance of SEO to our clients.  We are not in the camp of “all traffic is good traffic” but rather we believe that driving qualified traffic to our client’s sites through solid search engine optimization is what is important.

There are some fairly simple steps you can follow to make sure your website is optimized and easy to find.  In an interview with USA Today, Google’s Matt Cutts imparts some of his SEO wisdom to the masses.  From making sure you are properly utilizing you “tags” to creating a blog, take a look at this article to read all the simple steps Cutts suggests in order to get your site in good SEO standing.

With several thousand advertising, marketing and PR companies in Chicago, maintaining first position in the search engines is an unrealistic objective for a tiny agency in Ravenswood – yet there we are – #1 in Yahoo! for the term “Chicago marketing agency”. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure – we are currently on page 2 in Google – down from our all time high on Google of #3. Organic search marketing can be a vexing concept. It is so much more nebulous than most forms of advertising that it often gets pushed to the back burner – or handed off to in house marketing staff person with little time or training. This is a mistake. The dynamics of marketing have changed a great deal in the past 5 years. Search marketing is the fastest growing discipline in the marketing world. And if you have not committed to a search strategy, now is the time. Most of your competitors are spending fewer dollars and will be slower to move. This gives you a time advantage that can pay dividends because organic search takes time.

About 7 months ago we were virtually invisible to the search engines. Ranking below position 100 for just about every keyword we wanted to show for. Since we were constantly pushing our clients to do a better job with their search marketing, we decided to walk the talk.

As a small shop, we maintain a lean staff, so we required lean plan for our SEO work. We redesigned our site using best practice architecture, incorporated a blog and began actively publishing highly relevant content with embedded links to our site and to other legitimate resources. We have also utilized social media such as Facebook, Linked in and Twitter to provide more traffic and visibility to our site. We have employed a few other tricks of the trade, but all has been done with a relatively modest time effort.

The key to this effort for our agency and clients is the continuous learning of our online marketing team. We have dedicated specialists for search marketing and web development. We encourage continuous development, and require that they spend time each day staying current with best practice.

The most common mistake in this part of our industry is the casual approach that many marketers take to this very important component of their marketing strategy. Search marketing is a discipline that requires distinct and separate skill sets that include web development, search engine optimization and pay per click ad management. And while it may be an anchor point, search marketing is only one component in the rapidly evolving digital marketing space.

eMarketer chart

There is great opportunity in digital marketing, but managing and executing this work is still a great challenge for many marketers and agencies. This is reflected in the active turnover of agency relationships in the digital space as recently reported by eMarketer.

Scott LoSasso is President of LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency specializing in content marketing strategies and customer acquisition for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by Scott)

This morning, our company received an email from an SEO service concerned about our search engine ranking.

The search term in question (“marketing interactive”) allegedly listed us at position 5 on page 31 in Google’s search results, and the only way we could improve these results was if we used their back-linking service. A colleague of mine got the same exact email at his company halfway across the country. The same exact keyword supposedly lists his site at position 5 on page 31 in Google’s results.

This is one main reason SEO gets a bad rap. You receive an email claiming you do not have enough inbound links to your site, and they trick you into buying their service. The main concern is, a lot of companies like this use link building tactics that are considered “black hat” and are the quickest way to get your site blacklisted in search engines. A couple “black hat” techniques include spamming blog comments with your website’s URL, and buying links in link farms.

While linking is arguably the number one way to improve your website’s results in search engines, it is only one factor out of several hundred in search engines’ algorithms. How clean is your navigation and internal link structure? Do you have proper page titles? Do you have an appropriate amount of content? Do your images include proper alt text?

When deciding which SEO agency is right for you, always consider the full-service agency that understands your business enough to drive high quality traffic to your site. Not the agency only wanting to build links to ensure you rank high for nefarious keywords. As Steve Irwin always said *danger* *danger* *danger*.

Mike Hernalsteen is the Senior Interactive Marketing Specialist at LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency where he develops comprehensive online marketing strategies for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by Mike)

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is an evolving field that requires constant monitoring by a professional interactive agency. While a do-it-yourself approach to search engine optimization might seem like the fastest and cheapest method when seeking to improve your site ranking in the search engines; the truth is, doing it yourself can end up costing you more time, effort and money – and deliver less than satisfactory results.

A professional SEO consultant can point you in the right direction at the beginning of the process. If your site is floundering, they can help quickly identify what may be going wrong and develop a plan to boost your results.

Unlike a paid search (pay per click) campaign, organic search takes time to achieve results, even if you’re “doing everything right.” Working with an SEO specialist lets you focus on your business, not on the ongoing monitoring and adjustments needed to achieve and maintain good search results.

Knowing what techniques are effective, and allowed by Google and the other major engines, is critical. Experimenting with questionable techniques – known as “Black Hat SEO” – in order to boost results is one of the fastest ways to get your site banned from the search engines. A reputable SEO specialist knows what works and won’t risk using questionable tactics that could do more harm than good.

Make sure you work with an SEO specialist that understands your business. For a firm to deliver strong search results, they need to understand your business, your customers and how those customers are searching for products or services like yours. If a company promises the moon, but doesn’t want to learn more about your business, its probably time to look for another partner.

Developing and implementing ethical, effective search engine optimization techniques includes a wide range of activities. From research and planning through optimization and results tracking, SEO is an intensive process. People searching online for products or services like yours are hot, qualified leads. Make sure you are there when they are actively seeking to learn more or buy.