While your hosting company may not directly impact your SEO, choosing the wrong company to host your website can indirectly harm your SEO. Think about it, your website is the center of your Internet marketing. If your website goes offline, no matter for how long, your entire inbound marketing campaign collapses on itself!

I’ve spoken with plenty of site owners over the years that want to pay as little as possible for hosting services and I just don’t understand why. Sounds penny wise, pound foolish to me! How much money does your website bring in for your company each month? $1,000? $10,000? $50,000? Can you really not afford $500 a month for a great hosting company that is going to give you a dedicated server, protect your site from hackers with a strong firewall and anti-virus software, and backup your site in case something goes wrong?

With the holiday season just behind us, the reports of how much consumers spent in the last few weeks are pouring out. Imagine if you owned an e-commerce site and it went offline at any point in the last month because your site was hosted through a cheap hosting company. How many thousands in sales did your site lose because you weren’t willing to pay the extra hundred dollars for a secure, US based hosting company?

I understand the need to meticulously manage a small business budget, especially in these economic times. Companies are looking to pinch pennies wherever possible, but some things are worth the cost. If you ran a brick and mortar business, wouldn’t you be willing to pay a little more in rent to set up shop in high-traffic, affluent neighborhood? Why aren’t you willing to do the same thing for your website?

If you are thinking about reeling in your SEO campaign due to budget constraints, restructure the traditional link building budget into content marketing and social media marketing and take a more social approach to SEO to not only continue, but augment your success.

To make it easy, let’s say you’re paying your SEO provider $1,000 a month for their services. Right now, $700 of that is devoted to link building in various forms (online PR, joining industry associations, etc). After 2 years of link building, chances are the number of great industry associations and business directories your company can join is getting slim. Meanwhile, best practice says you shouldn’t publish a press release unless you have a real newsworthy topic to share, so that has probably eased up in recent months. Why not use a large chunk of that $700 and pay your SEO provider (or hire a freelance writer) to write two extra blog posts each week, a monthly whitepaper or focus on guest blog submissions.

You can also reorganize that monthly link building budget and focus on really building your social community. Having a Facebook page or Twitter handle is the first step, but what are you really doing with it? Can you take some of that link building budget and use it to buy ads on LinkedIn or Facebook? Hold a competition or giveaway on your social profiles to drive engagement? Make your profiles more appealing by adding videos, photos and other forms of multimedia content?

You can also take some of your traditional link building budget and use it for offline, local marketing events (remember, everything can be leveraged for SEO!) Are their local events that you could sponsor? Could you host your own local event and drive foot traffic to your business and work on building your local brand? Are there any upcoming industry conferences that you can become a media sponsor of?

Obviously you can’t stop traditional, white hat link building entirely, but that doesn’t mean your methods have to stay the same year to year. If you are willing to redistribute the link building budget across content marketing and social media marketing opportunities, you’ll build a far more diverse link portfolio and continue to build your online brand without having to change the budget.

Keyword Research
The nice thing about launching a PPC campaign is that you can get a lot of useful data very quickly that can then be applied to your SEO campaigns, including keyword research. Site owners can test the effectiveness of certain keywords with a PPC campaign and then slowly incorporate those new keywords into their SEO. Instead of waiting 3-6 months to find out if you targeted the right keywords, you can make faster headway and start your SEO off in the right direction. SEO is a long term process, but cutting out some of the uncertainty about choosing the right keywords can definitely give your SEO a boost.

Online Branding
I have found that PPC ads work best for branded searches. When someone is searching for your site directly they are already one step closer to conversion. I’d rather pay the few dollars for that click when I know that someone is actively looking for my company, and not just checking out their options. The further they are in the buying cycle the more worthwhile that PPC ad is.

Search Presence
Having a strong, branded presence in both the organic and paid search listings really enhances your overall online brand presence and helps build your trust factor. The more touch points you create with your website, PPC ads, social profiles, blogs and so forth the more likely you are to connect with your target audience, increasing your traffic and ultimately your conversion rate.

I feel like I should mention that some site owners claim that they’ve noticed a correlation between how much they spend in Google AdWords and where their site ranks; the more they spend the better they do organically. Google emphatically denies they offer any preferential treatment to big AdWords accounts, but that hasn’t done much to quash the rumors. Personally, I have yet to notice any correlation between my or my client’s PPC budget and our organic success. It will be interested to see what happens as time goes on.

Here are 3 benefits of incorporating SEO into the initial design process:

Your content is ready to rank.
Optimizing your content to incorporate important keywords is one of most important components of onsite SEO. If you create your content with SEO in mind, you’re already a step ahead of the game. As the search engines crawl and index your site, they will know exactly what kind of search queries your site matches, so you can rank well for targeted visitors from the get-go. You can start collecting data on your visitors and their search behavior from the day your site launches and know what keywords are working and what keywords aren’t much sooner than if you waited 6 months to optimize your content.

You can create a strong internal linking structure.
Developing an internal linking structure helps move your visitors along through your site, as well as helps boost the SEO value of internal pages. For most sites, your homepage is going to receive the lion’s share of the links, but the search engines don’t just rank homepages. Your internal products and services pages have the potential to rank as well. By linking from one page to another, you are spreading out the link juice that first page has earned to other pages, making them more important in the eyes of the search engines.

A good internal linking structure can also help increase your conversion rate. You want to lead your visitors down a predetermined path of conversion that keeps distractions at a minimum. By linking related pages together you can provide all the information your visitors need to make a purchasing decision without ever having to leave your site. It also helps keep your visitor focused—too many links and they don’t know where to go next!

You’ll be able to build SEO friendly URLs.
I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve come across that have the worst URL structure! It’ll be a string of numbers, letters and keywords that is far too long and has no SEO value. The problem is that because the URL structure is tied directly to the way the site was built there is no way to optimize them without redesigning the entire site! Save yourself some headaches down the road and build a URL structure you’ll be happy with for the life cycle of your site.

Scale
The most obvious problem facing many large websites looking to begin their onsite SEO is the sheer size of their website. I can tell you first hand that optimizing a 1,000+ page website is no small feat; the keyword research alone can easily take 40-80 hours of work, while actually optimizing the content (including writing Meta tags, optimizing the URL structure and so forth) can take twice the amount of time, depending on how content heavy the site is. Getting the ball rolling on the onsite SEO is oftentimes the hardest step, especially if your marketing team is already maxed out on time. Where are you going to squeeze an extra 50 hours of work into your work week? Even if you try to spread it out over a month, things come up and your onsite SEO is pushed even further down the priority list. Many enterprise websites outsource their SEO for that very reason, leaving the heavy lifting to someone else.

Leadership
However, just because a large website outsources their SEO, that doesn’t mean the final product is produced any faster than if they had just done it themselves. I’ve seen many enterprise websites drop the SEO ball on their end because they couldn’t designate an internal SEO liaison with their SEO partner. A good SEO provider is not going to start changing your site without getting your approval first, and many larger websites have a huge chain of command that all changes have to work their way through, getting approval each step of the way. Either the SEO liaison either can’t get things moving through the chain of command quickly or there is no liaison to ensure that the work is getting into the right hands for approval. The work may be done, but without the go-ahead from the website’s management, the onsite SEO is stalled.

Segregation
Another common onsite SEO challenge I have seen with many larger websites is that one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. Just like the SEO liaison is responsible for keeping the momentum moving on their end, they are also the ones who make sure the right people are involved at the right time. For instance, does your IT director really need to be involved in the social media marketing strategy planning session? Should your PR firm have a say in what keywords your onsite SEO should target? Does the CEO need to be involved in meetings about coding issues? Sometimes there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and other times there are too few.

So when should you incorporate outbound links?

The most obvious scenario for incorporating an outbound link is when you are citing/quoting/referencing someone else’s work. For instance, if I mention a recent marketing study in a blog post, I link to that study so my blog readers can read more about it, in addition to the key points I may have talked about. I can’t claim responsibility for generating that report, so I have no right to infer that I came up with that data on my own. Plus, pulling statistics out of thin air doesn’t lend much credibility to the data. Anyone can make up a statistic and claim it as fact, so linking to the published report will assuage any doubts your readers may have.

The same holds true for quoting someone. If you pull a quote from another blogger, you should link to the post you pulled it from. Don’t let the search engines, readers or that blogger think that you’re plagiarizing content and claiming it as your own words! Outbound linking can help defend your integrity as a white hat link builder. You never want to give anyone the ability to trash talk you or your brand and claim that you are stealing content.

You can also incorporate outbound links as additional references for your readers, which is really useful if you are discussing a trending topic and don’t want to rehash background information every time you write about it. If a reader finds themselves in the middle of a developing situation they are unfamiliar with, they can follow those outbound links back to the beginning and better educate themselves to understand the situation. It saves you the time and effort of rewriting the same information again and again for those few new readers and lets you focus on keeping up with the topic as it develops, which what the majority of your readers care about.

Blog owners should never be afraid to link to their own websites, especially if that website is on a separate domain. Why not take your blog readers, who have already pre-qualified themselves as your target audience, and send them to some of the more internal pages of your website? That kind of outbound linking helps spread your blog’s link juice over to your website, raising the SEO value of your site and taking your readers one step closer to conversion.

If you’ve read enough posts here on Search Engine Optimization Journal. You’ll know that there is no silver bullet to high search engine rankings. So if any SEO agency could guarantee top 10 rankings, it’s simply not worth the risk. Which is why Brick Marketing is a huge advocate of quality original content with its SEO infused social media services
http://www.brickmarketing.com/social-media-seo-service

To prove my point why you should obey Google’s Rules:

What would you do if you went to work and noticed that you were no where to be found in the search engines? Plus this was your peak Q4 season that counted for a majority of your ten million dollar plus e-commerce site. Would you start to freak out about how you were going to move a quarter of a million dollars worth of inventory? That had your own personal house assets as collateral.

This is exactly the moment when Ryan Abood the CEO of GourmetGiftBaskets.com wished he would have NOT taken a search ranking short cut by buying a massive amount of text links. Which is a direct violation of Google’s algorithm. Ryan was left begging at the mercy for re inclusion consideration, before peak holiday sales.

Mr. Abood changed his companies SEO strategy to provide value online through viral marketing efforts to earn social media SEO link bait. So Gourmet Gift Baskets went from buying links to winning records from the world’s largest cup cake to coffee mug.

Ryan shared this personal story as a guest speaker to the BostonSEO.org SEO meetup. That Nick from Brick Marketing sponsors and has spoken several times as the featured presenter.

World’s Longest Phone Call

I’m trying to duplicate’s GourmetGiftBaskets.com success, by being the official time keeper and in part sponsor to a Harvard University student group attempt to achieve the world’s longest phone call. I hope to have a great follow up guest post to share my own case story of social media SEO link bait for Search Engine Optimization Journal readers. Learn more at AWorldRecordAttempt.com

Want Attention?

Start thinking about doing something remarkable online! Think about what world record you want to attempt?

About The Author – Brian Hawkins
Brian Hawkins is the assistant organizer for the BostonSEO.org Meetup where Brick Marketing is the official food sponsor. He’s a dot com survivor that went on to work at an SEO agency along side Nick Stimulus. He’s currently the Internet marketing manager for http://www.Pingo.com. A global virtual prepaid calling card service. Follow him at @BrianHawkins