Search engine marketing budget : Top five places to spend

Barry Schwartz, the Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and President of RustyBrick, Inc., a Web services firm specializing in customized online technology, shares a recent discussion board forum where a member asks, ‘which do you consider the top five SEO techniques for money investment?’

Barry pulled Chris Bogg’s response as a good summary of the SEO Top 5 money investments.

• Site structure – if the site has content that cannot be seen by search engines (such as within frames or in a dynamic state) you are not going to go far. (I’d add that a site designed on XHTML/CSS will out perform, the usual tables and cells site)
• Content – you must have sufficient content about a particular topic.
• Link building – inbound linking from authoritative sources such as the Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, and other legitimate (read here: ranking) directories and websites that are relevant to your site will help to establish that you are a qualified source of information.
• Usability – making the site user-friendly will help the search engines to crawl your content more easily, and increase the chances of relevant content being found.
• Longevity – older domains will perform better than new domains.

Lawyers, law firm marketing staff and other business professionals need to know this stuff or they are going to get ripped off by shady SEO firms or well intentioned Web developers who do not have a clue what they are doing.

Spoke to an eight lawyer firm last week which received a bid for $30,000 for SEO work for one year. Fact was that until the site was redone for a cost of about $9,000, including all the SEO work needed, the proposed SEO work would have minimal impact. Just knowing what they were doing would save the firm $22,000 and bring in significant work through the search engines.