It doesn't matter how good your website is, if no one sees it, it's absolutely worthless. You need a strategy to ensure your prospects and customers see your website. The best options are SEO, PPC and drive to web initiatives.

First there was SEO.

Then came PPC.

Now the latest TLA (three-letter-acronym) in search engine marketing is SMO.

It stands for "Social Media Optimization". Basically it's about reaching your target market using Web 2.0/social media channels, such as blogs, YouTube, tagging, etc.

Frankly I'm not a big fan of Web 2.0 for business, for the simple reason that from my experience most Australian businesses are yet to successfully implement Web 0.7.

I believe marketing resources are better spent on the low-hanging fruit of online marketing, such as creating compelling content, SEO and PPC, rather than dabbling in a corporate blog.

However, Marketing Experiments recent exposé on SMO really caught my attention. They pitted a $10/hour blogger against a PPC (Google Adwords) campaign to see which would produce the better ROI.

The Adwords campaign generated 2,057 visitors for a cost of $1,250 (or 61c per visitor).

The blogger generated 93,207 visitors for a cost of $3,600 (or 4c per visitor).

Bottom line: SMO yielded a 1,427% greater ROI than PPC!

Read more about this experiment

BTW: the Marketing Experiments e-newsletter is a fascinating source of information on what strategies and tactics actually work in online marketing.

Today I read a couple of articles about buying text links to increase the Google PageRank of your site. While not totally contradicting each other, they each presented a radically different take on the issue.

This article by Armand Morin highly recommends buying a text ad on a site with a high PageRank in order to improve your search engine rankings.

However, my trusted source, Jill Whalen, writes in her latest newsletter that buying text ads, while a valid strategy now, will probably only work in the short term.

This got me thinking about who I believe when it comes to SEO strategies and why. Because the only people who really know what factors make a high-ranking site are the folks who write the search algorithms at Google, Yahoo, etc. And they aren't telling.

All the SEO "experts" are just second guessing. So if you're choosing to take the advice of an expert, the trick is to choose the best second guesser. I put my money on Jill Whalen. Why? Because I think she's credible, her SEO process is systematic and her tactics pass my test of reasonableness. I've followed her advice and it's worked.

Web copywriters note: Jill has written a very good book on SEO copywriting. It's a quick read and tells you everything you need to know. There are some useful before and after examples as well.