Is SEO is the best way to drive traffic to the new websites.

While SEO still remains king for trafficl, its position is threatened by other means, namely social media that have inherent viral power.
SEO alone will not drive you very far unless seconded by strategic use of social media tools for enlarging the outreach of SEO. As to heavily investing in SEO and social media experts, I have come to doubt as to their effectiveness. The times when web designers or other web experts could charge whatever they thought their work was worth are a distant past. Companies scrutinise offers and prices and professionals have to prove ROI to get a contract. This is not necessarily bad, as the market will clear from undue promises or lousy professionalsl, claiming to be the best in town and doing nothing.

There is also the possibility for small businesses and independent professionals to save a lot of thousands of dollars by taking the plunge into learning how to do it themselves. There are plenty of resources on the web e.g. mashable, hubspot, etc. Believe there is an untapped gold mine in these resources. In difficult times we have to relearn to carry out tasks that during the last 20 years we have outsourced, and when the task is well done, we will congratulate ourselves and wonder why we have not tried it earlier.

So, if you still dispose of enough money try to locate someone knowledgeable both about SEO + social media (engagement +marketing), asking first about his/her most recent contracts, talk with their clients to understand what they have done from the client's point of view, how their services have improved SEO and company visibility and if not, venture out to learn and try to do it yourself. I assure you that in a few weeks you will start offering advice to other people!!

Guess what. Focus.com is probably one of the best sites you will ever find to build back links for SEO if your business is B2B or lead gen B2C. What's more...its free!. Here are several ways to boost your website's page rank and drive great traffic to your site.
1. Write briefs and find good reasons to link to the content of your website from the text of your brief. Don't be flagrant, don't link to your home page. Link to some interior pages of your site that more fully expound on the themes covered in your brief.
2. Give your briefs good headlines that are rich with keywords. These headlines will become title tags when the brief is published and your brief will end up ranking well in search results for the keywords you have embedded in your headline.
3. Link to other good briefs within Focus.com that are related to your topic, and link to other briefs that you have written.
4. When linking be sure to use anchor text that includes keywords you want to rank for.
5. For twenty bucks you can learn how to do all of the above with a simple tool from Newsforce.com ( http://www.newsforce.com/index_press_release_optimization.html ). The tool will help you chose keywords, create links and write headlines and subheadlines. Yes its for press releases, but it will work pretty well for a brief you have written.

Is SEO the best way to drive traffic to your website? Absolutely, because if you learn how to do it, its absolutely free. And if you hire a good consultant it will give you an excellent ROI.

I have made a few of my clients wealthy with SEO. I think social media is vastly overrated. I generate hundreds of leads every month for my clients with SEO, PPC and blog article traffic. Leads that come from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are scarce at best. I seldom see a LinkedIn reffered visitor convert to a lead, every now and then I see a twitter referral convert. But my best referral sources are search engines, directories and blog posts.

Focus.com brief referred visitors will not only convert, they will close. Anyone who has read your brief, followed your link out to your website and then called you on the phone is pretty darn warm.

Get your staff to write about 10 good briefs. Hire an SEO to optimize those briefs for a cost of about 150 dollars each and enjoy the lead flow. For your investment of time and money you will get a steady stream of traffic and leads for years to come.
I built campaigns for clients of mine back in 2005 and they still rank number one for their keywords and they haven't done a thing since then. Check out Evan Aidman for "Eye Injury Lawyer" - he has been pinned at number one for about 4 years now all with just a few ezinearticle.com posts. He does very well with that free advertising and hasn't spent a nickle in 4 years. But ezinearticles.com posts don't work anymore. The new hot site for building back links? Your on it! It's Focus.com.

I agree with Brad. SEO is a must for natural searches. However, a healthy balance on SEO, PPC, and Banner Ads delivers the best performance and traffic delivery to your site.

I'd recommend doing all three.

I would suggest Adwords if you wnt to increase the number of visitors on a short term. Organic SEO is the righ solution on a long term.

SEO is important. PPC is important. Social Media is important. Email is important. To say what the priority should be is situation-specific...since we don't know the details behind the question, it's hard to prioritize the types of marketing.

However, having a inexperienced freelancer put in charge of corporate SEO efforts is like putting me in charge of fixing the Gulf Oil Spill...it's not difficult to come up with a few good ideas but the experience and value lies in the execution of the initiative.

Having turned a new website into a very popular website in a matter of months, I'm qualified to answer. Be everywhere. Create great content. In the short run, use advertising like Adwords, Facebook, and Linkedin. Ask for help on social networks. Content, content, content. Over time, as SEO results improve, cut back on the paid advertising. Keep publishing every day. Write a blog too.

Hope this helps,
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
http://www.fearlesscompetitor.com
President, Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net (Rated 96.7 out of 100 in WebsiteGrader.com.)

I agree with both of you, but are we forgetting E-Mail marketing? What are your opinions on this tool?

Companies’ spending on search engine marketing is growing faster than spending on other online advertising means and analysts estimate that
search engine marketing spending soon will capture a lion’s
share of the online advertising pie (Garside 2007)

we are in total agreement. Now it begs the question ...is it more cost effective to have someone "in house" or contract it out?

Organically, SEO is an essential for building traffic and visibility. It is also one of the potentially most cost effective when combined with the power of blogging, article marketing, and video. The magic is in the keywords. The proper keyword research and regular action with those keywords will yield results. Mastery is in being consistent and persistent as well as monitoring performance and making changes as needed along the way. Yes, changes occur on an almost moment to moment basis but it doesn't mean don't do it.

For me SEO is primarily about sales and Social Media is about brand building and customer engagement.

As Seth Godin would probably say, Social Media is about farming, SEO is about hunting!

You want people to find your business right at the moment when they in purchasing mode, either early in the cycle or late in the cycle.

What is SEO anyway these days? It's about any activity that gets your business listed in a search engine. Nowadays that does not just include your website.

I wrote a blog about this recently (http://bit.ly/dgIdHZ ), specifically how Google's recent interface update is changing the traditional website audit, to a more holistic Web Business Audit.

My definition of an SEO Audit as part of this process is here - http://bit.ly/aJpEhJ

To get back to the original question, 'Can freelancers keep on top of this stuff and do their day job?' - Not sure what 'freelancers' means in this context, but developing and implementing a Web Business Strategy can be a full time job!

Here's an interesting infographic that illustrates SEO ROI

There are many ways to gather information as to what is working for your search marketing efforts. By classifying them into easy to maintain categories, it's easier to take a methodical approach to realizing your conversions.

http://searchengineoptimization.elliance.com/search-marketing-resources/seo-i...

I agree with the previous posts in that SEO is critical to drive traffic to your site (it also helps with brand awareness, leads, sales, etc) and that its important that your copywriters have some level of appreciation and understanding of SEO and have an ability to write for both the end user while also making pieces with relevant keyword-rich content for the search crawlers.

I also agree that other elements of the mix are critical to driving site traffic and those should not be ignored.
One specific medium I would emphasize for generating quality site traffic is PR. PR is a powerful driver of quality site traffic and it also helps generate brand awareness, word of mouth, credibility, etc. I would put an emphasis on crafting high quality, SEO-optimized press releases, distributing those via the press release networks (PRnewswire, PRWeb, Businesswire, etc), and also building strong media relations.

Rob

It depends on what you are selling. It depends on your audience, site content, conversion and marketing knowhow. In short:

* SEO will take long time to build up. So do it, but use your PPC traffic to figure out what your low-hanging keywords are.
* PPC is good to kick start your site. But depending on payout ratio, sales cycle, it may not be sustainable on full-throttle.
* So lower your PPC to find good balance.
* Work on Social Media Marketing, including viral lead-gen campaigns for those bursts.

So do SEM (which includes

I read all the comments on my blog, seo is the best way to drive traffic to the websites, email marketing is now marked as spam mailing and not so effective way to drive traffic

I saw all posting & read my opinion is best way is Organic SEO right way traffics driven any web sites.

Best Discussion ! ! !

Thanks David for the overview of briefs. I will try that. For the overall question though, this site provides one domain to link to you, and you'll need much more than that to stay competitive for broad/competitive keywords and multiple keywords. That means contributing content in forums like this one.

I do agree that SEO will be at least 50% of your traffic and it send it in under a couple of months with the right strategy. As as SEO expert, I don't outsource any of my SEO because I have a hard time letting others write my content for me. I think you could use an agency to devise the SEO strategy for you, but use your own resources to implement that strategy (write content, build links). You know your topic and your audience the best so its hard to automate that.

Once you have an audience, email marketing can generate 25-50% of your traffic assuming your content is something users want to subscribe to. A huge call to action on your site should be to gather these opt-ins. They are the ones who will visit your site often and spread the word.

Lastly a blog is a simple way to add rich content and use it as a promotional tool since it sounds less product/marketing focused. For example a blog can get you listed in places like Technorati and Blog Catalog and potentially reach evangelists in your niche.

SEO, organic positioning, is THE marketing method that returns the highest ROI.

It is also proactive, needing little to maintain top listing positions.

Most everything else is much more labor intensive. Link building, Blogs, Social Networking, contributing to sites like Focus.com can work well but depend on a high level of participation.

As to which is best I would have to say do the SEO first then concentrate on building your brand through SN and other methods.
Concentrate on getting your keyword phrases out in front of those searching for them, and then start marketing to those also marketing through SN.

Top SEO is almost instantaneous, don't be led to believe it takes months.
My last website was visited by Google less than 12 hours after the first link was posted, and was indexed when I checked it about 8 hours later.

Pages showed in the top positions immediately and have stayed pretty much the same since.
My PR 0 website beats out high authority sites (PR7) due to the quality of the content.

For more information on SEO please see my articles on DotCom-Productions.

http://dotcom-productions.com/08/articles.php?tPath=6

Best to all,
Reg

As I have mentioned in a previous answer posted on focus.com, I think SEO should form the basis of the marketing, sales and technological structure of your site (business). It is a cheap way to create authority and build trust in an online marketplace as well as a cheap way to increase traffic and online awareness and presence.

What I dont understand is why people see SEO as something so mysterious that they tend to keep it separate from the rest of their marketing and sales. SEO should be present in all areas of your business.

• I think anyone working with content for a site should be educated in the basics of SEO. Why waste time, writing things that are not SEO optimised and keyword focused? This doesn’t make business sense in any way to me.

• All your other sister sites, social media channels, articles you write online etc helps you increase your online presence both from a “normal” marketing point of view as well as from an SEO point of view, it will help you rank higher as well as give you increased trust and awareness to make your brand/business/site competitive

• SEO is not an alternative that you can go for and then ignore everything else, its something that will help all your other efforts. Therefore, your marketing should also be SEO optimized (if you are generating more content online, why not optimize it and maximize what you get out of your work put in?) so that everything you do can be aimed at getting to where you wanted to be, and most importantly, it should be helping you sell your product.

• Social media is usually pointed out to be the next thing that we should go for. But this does not mean SEO is out the window. Now youc an use social media to improve your SEO rankings, social search is only getting bigger and bigger.. (read more here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html) Social media is the next layer in SEO, as well as a great communication channel with future clients, AS WELL as a great way to market your product.

I think the article about the SEO success pyramid that I read a while back nicely summarizes how you should think about SEO: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/the-seo-success-pyramid/971/ Reading this you can see that everything you do when you are mentioning your site/business anywhere, can be linked to SEO and to improving it. And most of the time, all this can be achieved at a very little cost.

I agree with pretty much everything said about the long term benefits of SEO. The great thing about SEM in general, is that you catch people while they are active in the buying stage. Social media will rarely be able to do that, and shopping cart conversion rates (very low percentages) from social media campaigns prove it.

What I have found social media works best for is bringing social users from one social site to another, or targeting based on addictive hobbies and interests.