You probably don’t need to read the latest advice from the online marketing consultants to figure out the basic idea behind link building. Without links, your site won’t develop authority. Without authority, it won’t move up on the search engines. But even the most savvy online marketing consultant would have to admit that doing that is just not as easy as it sounds.

If you’ve been involved in marketing of any kind over the last two decades, I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “Content is King”. Marketers, successful marketers, live by that mantra. When I look at the Internet what I really see are two things. There is the content and then there are the applications that allow you to interact with the content.

There are two different types of webmaster out there – those who really understand how to generate traffic online and those that bend over backwards to obey the master that is Google. Generally speaking, the former are more successful than the latter, or at least have a much greater percentage chance of being successful.

Frankly, the biggest search engine optimization mistake you can make is not doing any SEO at all. It’s amazing how many people believe “if you build it, they will come”. Marketing coaching makes one thing clear. Just putting a site up on the Internet won’t get you the traffic you want or need. By the same token, building a site and then thinking about SEO after the fact is a bad plan too. SEO needs to be at the heart of your Web plans from day one, and it’s a job that’s never “finished”.

If you are new to the world of SEO and SEM, you may not know all of the actual subtleties involved. But, if you are going to hire someone to do your SEO work for you, you better know a whole lot more or you could suffer far worse than you ever would trying to do your own SEO work… even without any real experience. Even if you hire an SEO Professional to promote your site, if they do anything that the search engines decide is unethical, your site will be banned and you will have no recourse, legal or otherwise to get it back in!

Websites with more content rank better with the search engines. Any online marketing consultant will emphasize, however, that “more” isn’t enough. For successful SEO, your site needs a steady stream of fresh, relevant content.

Unsuccessful online marketers are notorious opportunity seekers – giving an opportunity only a couple of weeks to start showing results, before changing directions to chase the next flavor of the week. It almost seems that the majority of online marketers are chasing get-rich-quick schemes, rather than trying to develop a legitimate business.

What is Dmoz? Dmoz is a human edited directory that has been running since 1998. It was created as a cooperative environment that would allow volunteer editors to keep up with the internet explosion. Way back, Yahoo used to be a directory – not a search engine – and Dmoz was an (eventually bigger) alternative to this. The only difference of course is that we are now well into the Google era of information at your fingertips. Dmoz on the other hand, is pretty much where it started.

Cultivating online credibility requires currying favor with Google, which is best done by link building. So let’s think... If your business and website were top of mind and authoritative, where would you expect to be listed or referenced on the Internet? Are your competitors referenced there already?

One of the most difficult concepts to grasp for online business owners who are writing their own sales copy is to write about the benefits of your product or service, rather than the features. Even though this skill is critically important, I would guess that less than 10% of business owners truly understand it. Not surprisingly, it’s also the primary reason that so many marketing campaigns fail.