Even though more and more people are turning their budgets toward online spending people as a whole just are not spending enough.  I realize it sounds a little crazy, telling people they need to spend more to get results but it is really true.  The fact of the matter is there are a lot of search engine marketing companies out there that are willing to sell you a $500.00 a month online marketing package.  The problem is that just isn’t enough money to actually get anything done.  What this does is it sets expectations way too low it causes all sorts of problems with perception as well.  There are a couple of problems with price setting when it comes to online marketing that you need to watch out for.

Competitiveness: Yes that is certainly the most powerful influence when it comes to budget.  If for example you wanted to rank for “home made windmills” in your hometown it would take a lot less than ranking for say something like  “Viagra”.  The more people you have competitive in a space the more expensive it gets.

Profit Margin: The amount of profit per sale can also influence how competitive a term may be, and by association how much you will need to set your budget at.  If people are making a 5 to 1 return on investment they certainly have more money to invest in online marketing.

Market Size: It depends how large your potential market is as well.  If you are geo-targeting a specific state, city, or area it can be a lot easier to rank for competitive terms.  For example, I built a lead generation business in roofing a few years ago.  I targeted a very competitive term “roofing” .  It would of taken thousands and thousands of dollars and many months to begin to rank for that term had I not targeted by city.  Market size also refers to the number of people searching for a product or service.  The more people in that space the more it is going to cost you to rank for those terms as a general rule.

It may seem like I am over generalizing but seriously, Search Engine Optimization budgets can range anywhere from $1000 a month to $50,000 a month.  I have sites that command both ends of the spectrum and both budgets are equally effective.  It all

Today’s post will be a quick one. As websites grow, changes get made, pages get removed there will almost always be broken links. This can be something as simple as removing a picture and forgetting to remove the link, or deleting a page and forgetting that somewhere on your website there is some random page that had a link to it.

A broken link can frustrate both your website visitors and search engine bots. While frustrating people is the first priority you need to worry about, the bot one is important too. If website crawlers find loads of broken links or missing files on your website they are not going to place much value on it. It doesn’t show you keep things up to date.

Tool For Detecting Broken Links (free yea!)

There is a quick and easy tool I have been using for a very long time called XENU Link Sleuth. It is totally free and works pretty awesome. Basically all you have to do is download it, enter your domain name and allow it to search. I will post a few screen shots below. The results page shows you specifically where the broken links are and what they are linking to. It makes it really easy to just browse the code, correct the error and rescan to verify.

Sure there are a lot of other software programs that claim to do what Xenu does but for my sites it is the only option for me. Just keep in mind if you have a large site it could take several hours to run a scan, so just don’t freak out if it is running forever. In addition, if you have something like a customer forum on your website get ready for a really long scan. It could be worthwhile to take a look at your robots.txt file and rule out a few directories at this time. Things like calendars, and profile pages in forums are usually ripe for spammers anyway so you might as well exclude them from the search engine results pages. (SERPS)

Also, make sure to check the box to check external links too, nothing worst than a dead link there too! See below.

The Install Screen:

Choosing The Settings:

You can set how many levels deep you want it to look normally I just go 1-2 but once in a while it is good form to do a deep scan, send over the results page to your webmaster with a bunch of question marks and have them get it all cleaned up. If you don’t scan on a somewhat regular basis it will get out of control. This is especially true when you make major changes to the website, the CSS, or images. Keep it clean and you will already have an advantage on a lot of your competition. (go ahead scan their sites and see)

Disclaimer: This is not an affiliate post or a sales pitch.

I just came across a pretty cool site this week called Knowem. As businesses launch more and more things online it can be really frustrating to have to go through all the social media sites and claim your facebook page, your myspace page, twitter feed, and so much more. There is an aspect however that most people do not look at and that is brand protection. We just went through a new company launch and I came across a great tool to at minimum reserve your name at all (more…)

As companies get big enough to start facing the question of hiring in house or outsourcing to a firm when it pertains to marketing there are several unique factors make this decision unique and not just about dollars and cents. Many online companies start the same way, with a single owner, doing everything from advertising, copy writing, shipping, receiving, and janitorial. Once your website starts to get traction and nears its own tipping point you will inevitably be faced with the decision of whether to keep wearing 74 hats or (more…)

It seems like using video to drive traffic is losing some steam as far as SEO tactics go. Certainly I could be wrong but it seems like the quality of free video content on places like Youtube and Vimeo has gone down. Most people seem to think all they need to do is throw a few videos on youtube and just wait for the traffic avalanche to bury them in money and cute kittens. (more…)