New, Affordable Options for Website Promotion

As a website owner, you know it's not so easy to promote your site effectively. You could do it yourself - but where do you start, and when would you have the time to run your business? You could hire a search engine optimization consultant - but the costs might be more than your business can handle. Even a low-level SEO campaign can run close to $1,000 per month -- and that's just for starters.

As a response, some lower-cost, online options are beginning to appear. A new entry, and a good example of bringing "SEO to the masses", is a service called ClickSprout. This online tool focuses on one of the more difficult -- and necessary -- parts of website promotion: getting "backlinks", or links from other sites to your site. The theory behind backlinks is that if a page is good, people will link to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better that website must be. So a page with a lot of backlinks is one that should appear at the top of the list.

To achieve its mission, ClickSprout's system constantly posts new, relevant content with links to your website throughout the Internet -- on blogs, web pages, tag clouds, social networking and bookmarking sites, and more. It uses its own Custom Syndicated Content Distribution (CSCD) Engine, which the company developed to place this content --written by actual people -- across the web at little cost to the website owner. This differs from traditional automated website promotion in that ClickSprout doesn't just promote the website URL as a link, but it actually merges industry-related content with the website content. So, it's the same result as if you had 1000 of your closest friends and colleagues posting articles and links to your website on their sites and blogs.

The ClickSprout service costs $14.95/month, or $149/year, and there is a 14-day free trial so you can check it out. The sign-up process takes about 10 minutes -- you supply your website address, description and keywords, and the ClickSprout system takes it from there. The site also offers a $99 Concierge Service for those of us who can't come up with a good description and keywords.

ClickSprout can be found at http://www.clicksprout.com

A different approach to the "assisted SEO" idea is SEOIntelligence, a hosted software solution provides you with regularly-updated reports on your site's performance in any keyword category, and offers code and link strategy recommendations to drive your site to the top. Much if not all of this information is available through other, free sources -- Google, for example, offers a full complement of SEO tools in its Webmaster section (see http://www.google.com/webmasters) -- but this puts it all in one convenient place, and adds in a level of analysis and control.

SEOIntelligence is "aimed at the entrepreneur, the average startup – who doesn’t have the bandwidth or the capital to invest in high cost toolsets/outsourcing. Through SEOi you can easily learn the secrets of successful search engine optimization, while using it to constantly to remain competitive – by consistently growing website traffic."

This online service also offers a free trial, and then costs $39.95/month. The website is at http://www.seointelligence.com

With the need for realistically affordable SEO, these types of sites will continue to pop up -- and we'll keep you posted as they do.