One of the most important things a startup (or established business) can do, when it comes to their online presence, is to ensure that they build a solid stream of traffic. Most people assume that their business itself provides the value to keep people coming - but still enhance this by paying for SEO and marketing services from third party vendors. This often leads to a temporary boost in traffic that quickly dies out (depending on how good the contracted service was). This in turn leads to a frustrating cycle of web traffic boom and busts...

Speaking to a client yesterday, I noted that he had enlisted the services of an SEO/web marketing consultant to undertake a web promotion campaign on his company's behalf. It got me thinking about where the real value in farming out one's SEO lies. I know that the vast majority of companies are too busy focussing on their core business to start worrying about SEO and website marketing campaigns, so they outsource. Fair enough, right? Wrong...

Any third party that comes in and promotes a site can do it in one of two ways. They can undertake advertising and other marketing initiatives and this may well generate traffic. But, once it's over and done with, the traffic will die out - especially if there is nothing of long term interest to get visitors to return, or even create some buzz. Not particularly useful, but you've paid for a service and that's what you get.

A good SEO/marketing company will not rely on ads, but will instead take some time to learn about your business, write solid SEO content, make sure it gets disseminated and socialized and generally try boost your web presence and bring in traffic for a longer period of time. This is a far better option, but still ultimately flawed because they don't know your business like you do - and by definition are doing this on a temporary basis.

Most business owners are scared off by technical discussions about SEO enhanced content, like it's something magic that only specialized pros can do. This is not the case. Anyone can write SEO enhanced content by writing intelligently on subjects and topics that relate and link directly to their website. So here's the point of this article:

But, you might argue, we're back to the first problem in which businesses want to focus on their core function and pay someone else to look after web campaigns. The solution is this:

In other words, everyone in the company should be commenting on and writing blogs or articles about something related to the company at least once a week. These articles and blogs should be posted into either completely separate blogs (to link back to the main site) or onto the main site to keep its content fresh and vibrant. In this way you build up a huge reservoir of great content that will drive far more long term and reliable traffic to your site. That's not the only thing they can do, but it's the least they should be doing.

Why pay someone to do a one-time campaign that may or may not bring traffic in, when you have everything you need to do a far better, sustainable job for free? It only takes a few minutes each week - if everyone chips in. At the very least, any service you take on should take very seriously their role in empowering you and your people to take charge of SEO and online marketing yourselves.