Internet Marketing is growing by the day. In such a situation, it is not enough for a business to have just a website. It is important for this website to be visible to the users and appear in search results when users search for related keywords. With so many companies and websites selling the same products or services as your business, how do you make sure that you get noticed and get more business?This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into picture. Many companies are incorporating SEO into their marketing strategies. This raises one more question. Is In-House SEO better or should you Outsource the SEO of your website to an agency? What are the pros and cons of getting the SEO of your website done In-House as compared to outsourcing your SEO needs? Both In-House SEO and Outsourcing SEO have its pros and cons. Each company needs to look into both these models and then decide based on their needs.Pros of In-House SEO1. An In-House SEO expert will know your business well and hence will understand the nuances of company and its challenges as well.2. Doing your SEO In-House gives you complete control over the strategies and their execution. The SEO expert can be contacted immediately for any changes since he sits in the same office as the other members of the company.3. The In-House SEO expert works only on your website and not on any other websites. This means that the expert can give full attention to your site and can work on improving the rankings of your website.4. Sometimes In-House SEO is lesser expensive that Outsourced SEO agencies.In-House SEO Cons1. SEO is a rapidly changing field. The algorithms of search engines keep changing. One needs to always be updated with the changes. The skills in SEO also keep changing. If you decide to do the SEO of your site In-House, then you need to spend time and sometimes money to learn the new aspects of SEO and keep yourself updated with the changes.2. It may be time consuming if you have to keep up to the trends of the business. And it is important to keep with the trends of the business if you choose to do your SEO In-House. You will also have to pay attention to the overall marketing of your website and may not find the time to update yourself with the latest in SEO. This can result in outdated SEO practices which can further affect your sites ranking.3. SEO requires a number of tools. If you choose to do your SEO In-House, then you need to buy these tools. This can be very expensive. Just having these tools is not enough. You also need to learn how to use them which can further take up a lot of your time.Outsourced SEO Pros1. The biggest advantage of outsourcing your SEO needs to an agency is that you get the expertise of an entire team of SEO experts who will work on your website. Since, it is a team that only works on SEO projects, they will be up to date with the latest trends in business and hence you do not have to spend time or money in getting yourself familiar with these trends. The team will create SEO strategies for your business keeping these trends in mind.2. SEO agencies work with a large number of clients. The advantage of this is that they have the experience of working on different kinds of businesses and understand their needs better. This wide perspective can be a big advantage in getting visibility on the web.3. If you outsource SEO to an agency, you don’t have to spend time, effort and money on hiring an In-House SEO team, training and tools.4. The outsourced SEO agency will not be affected by the pressures of other aspects of marketing your business and can concentrate only on the SEO of your website.5. Outsourcing SEO means faster execution of tasks since you get a team of people working on your website as opposed to one or two in-house experts.Outsourced SEO Cons1. Outsourcing SEO may require you to sometimes invest a little more money than you would if you were to do the SEO of your website in-house by yourself.2. If you outsource the SEO of your website to an agency, then they would need sometime to get to know your business and the way you work. This would take up sometime till the agency gets used to working with your company.3. Since the agency will be handling more than just your website, you cannot be sure of the time and focus that the agency will be giving your website. You may have to constantly keep checking on the work done and on the progress of your site.4. Some of the SEO agencies may use cheap tool based SEO or black hat SEO techniques to get the results that they promise their clients. You may have to be involved with the agency’s work to make sure such techniques are not being used for your website.

Branding is of huge importance in marketing. Companies that own big consumer brands are worth billions of dollars, not just because of their plant and machinery, their intellectual property,or the skills of their workforce and management but because of the value of their brands. When we think of branding it is usually consumer brands that are the first to come to mind, but their is no reason why business-to-business marketers cannot use the same principles to power their businesses. Why bother? Because customers are willing to pay a premium price for a branded product compared to a generic one or a commodity.But what is a brand? Most people think of a brand in terms of names, logos, trade marks or packaging. While these are extremely important for a successful brand, a brand is so much more than just facets of its outward appearance. Brand identity emanates from the totality of outward appearance, product or service attributes, character, personality, promise, recognition, customer psychology, customer emotion, and the history of the brand. The promise of the brand to a purchaser is a certain perceived quality and value.The process of building a brand can be broken down into two broad steps.Step 1The first step in the branding process is to thoroughly understand your business’ brand. Your organization has a brand whether you realize it or not, the question is, what are your brand’s values? How do customers’ perceive your brand? What about employees and management, how would they describe your brand values? In asking the question it may be better to not use the word: ‘brand’ as people will naturally associate the term with consumer products. Rather, ask what your business stands for, or how are your products or services different from those of your competitors. Ask how you would like your products or services to be different from competitors and what potential opportunities are to differentiate the business.Step 2Having determined its brand values, a business needs to convey them effectively internally to management and staff and externally to its customers. Employees need to understand the brand and ‘live it.’ One aspect of the internal communication is formalizing, and communicating consistent brand elements. Since branding is so dependent on these design elements it is important to create and implement a brand identity that is professional and easy to replicate both off an on-line. This will include a logo, type style, style of imagery/photography type color and layout. Once implemented these elements must be faithfully used in all on-line communications (e.g. new Web pages, e-mails, and weblogs).Customer experience of your business will obviously have a positive or negative effect on your brand over time. Branded consumer goods often do not have any service elements associated with them. For example, if I wish to buy a specific brand of baked beans, I go to the store and make the purchase. I do not usually have any direct interaction with the manufacturer of the beans. I may like the taste or respect the brand because my mother used to give me this particular product, but I do not buy the brand because the manufacturer provides an associated service. With business brands the opposite is likely to be true. Even with product offerings there is often an associated service element. How this service is delivered will directly effect my perception of the brand.A major factor in brand building is marketing communications. The following are some of the many traditional methods at a business’ disposal.

Off-line advertising
Conferences and exhibitions
Packaging
Public relations
Direct mail
In addition to these, businesses have a wealth of Internet related communication opportunities:

Search engine optimization (SEO)
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Web based display advertising
‘Blogging’
Internet based public relations
Social media
Email marketing
Search engine optimizationSearch is still the most important way in which people find information on the Web. Not only does a high position say something positive about your brand, but having a branded name means you are more likely that people will search for a branded name rather than a generic one.SEO is a big subject by itself, however the following tips should go a long way in improving your search engine position:

Build rich and fresh content. Search engines want to provide useful results to their customers.
Analyze each of your pages and ensure that they contain the key words phrases that you are optimizing for.
Develop quality incoming links. Search engine algorithms rely on incoming links to gauge how popular a site is and thereby how useful it is likely to be for their customers.
Refine data that will appear in your search ‘snippet.’ Having got a good search position the snippet of information that appears in the results will largely determine whether some one will click through to your site.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisingSearch results divide into two categories: organic and paid for. in Google the PPC adverts can be seen above and to the right of the organic search results. PPC adverts also appear on a network of content providers’ Web sites. In the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model, the customer determines several keywords or keyword phrases. When someone enters on of these keywords into a search engine that match your keyword phrase, your advertisement is displayed. You also enter the maximum amount are prepared to pay for each click.Web based display advertisingWith this form of Web advertising an advert appeared on a site and the advertiser was charged based on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM). Every time that a web page appeared that had your advert on it is counted as an impression. This can still be a great way of building a brand provided that the Web site that your advert is to appear on is targeted to your business area and the CPM is within your budget.’Blogging’A blog or weblog is similar to a diary, but with capability of allowing visitors to add their own comments. Blogs are used for a multitude of purposes from personal diaries to political commentaries, but they also can play a major role in business marketing.There are several reasons why a blog can help your Web brand. If your blog is regularly updated it can be a source of fresh new content. This should increase search rankings and hence brand equity. But visitors can also add content in the form of their comments. This increases the amount of information content on the blog with little effort on your part (apart from moderating out spam comment.Public relationsPublic relations has long been an excellent way of promoting a business and hence building its brand. By submitting an interesting press release to a publication may result in your product or service getting an editorial mention. Not only does the editorial not cost, but it also has a greater credibility in the mind of a reader than an advert.The exact principles also apply to the Web, but the Internet has been a great boon in helping business make the most of public relations. These public relations efforts also directly help the SEO function. Prior to the Internet all releases were printed and mailed or faxed to the intended recipients. The Internet makes it easy to submit releases to services that help distribute the releases.In addition to the potential for being published or used by an on-line or off-line publication, if a news release appears in the Yahoo! or Google news services, the information will be indexed by their search engine spiders and will help your SEO efforts.Social mediaSocial media is on the ascendancy and as a result many businesses are setting up Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and LinkedIn profiles. Businesses need to think of creative ways in which to use these Web properties to be able to connect with customers and prospective customers. For example, some businesses have used them as a way of promoting special offers.Email marketing Email allows companies to easily send out targeted and timely messages to their customer and prospect bases. Such direct marketing have many advantages, including speed of being able to create, send and receive responses for messages, reduced cost compared with direct mail, ability to easily design e-mails that conform to the brand identity, excellent racking and analysis, and the ability to drive traffic to your Web site.In each case it is important that communications not just use the corporate identity guidelines, but actively espouse and reinforce brand values.

It appears you can’t stare at the TV for 60 minutes without seeing a notice with William Shatner discussing Travelocity or that senseless dwarf discussing Orbitz. These travel sites have been extremely effective at encouraging voyagers to book their own particular carrier and lodging reservations on the web. So with this colossal push from the web to assume control over the travel business, one needs to ask, “Are travel agents old school?”In the event that you have searched for some of these travel web sites, you have watched that they are stunning in the assorted qualities of travel choices that they make accessible. As a business traveler, be that as it may, your requirements are fairly unique in relation to the run of the mill aircraft traveler.There are some certain administrations and genuine help that a living and breathing travel agent can give that basically can’t be duplicated by a computerized site like Travelocity or Orbitz. Some of those administrations that a prepared business traveler would be unable to live without having…A Travel Agent will give you…- Focus. You as a business traveler are not orchestrating this excursion for excitement. You have particular business goals as a main priority. So on the off chance that you should remove time from planning for your business assignment to stress over travel agendas, lodging and rental auto reservations and so forth, that is time that you are not being beneficial for your business.When you get the chance that you can call a skilled travel agent who knows your travel profile well and delegate those courses of action to that agent, they carry out their occupation in finding only the right facilities for you and you are liberated to do what you excel at, spotlight on your business and the up and coming business trip.- Economy. It is hard to find that harmony between finding the housing that fit the requesting timetable of a businessman out and about and is conscious of the organizations travel spending plan too.On the off chance that you utilize a computerized online travel administration, you may need to relinquish accommodation, timetable or area for economy.A decent travel agent will endeavor to get you the right schedule while getting as close the corporate travel cost confinements as would be prudent. Furthermore, they will do it without taking up a considerable measure of your time.- Back up. You needn’t bother with help if your excursion goes totally as arranged. Be that as it may, in the event that you experience issues out and about, you can wind up in need or rescheduling flights and finding new lodging to work around scratched off flights, climate issues or other surprising intrusions to your arrangements.These travel debacles are not aware of your tight due dates to meet your business objectives. In any case, you have a travel agent who is committed to giving you administration, he or she can locate those option courses and assets to do whatever they can to get you to your destination so you can direct your business on time.- That individual touch. You may have travel inclinations that you need to accomplish with every outing you take. A travel agent has your profile and your travel history so they can do what they can to suit your inclinations.Yet, in addition, when you have particular unique needs, for example, an eating regimen constraint or a requirement for convenience because of an inability, it will be a travel agent that sees to it that your needs are accommodated and you are well dealt with out and about.- No Complications. In the event that your travel agenda includes making associations with different business accomplices who are going from various workplaces, complex travel calendars and schedule challenges that just can’t be depicted to the nonexclusive screens of an online travel administration, you can disclose these inconveniences to your travel agent and they can work with other travel agents attempting to arrange the meeting and see to it that your agenda meets your prerequisites.While the online travel administrations do give a profitable and moderate other option to the general voyaging open, it is anything but difficult to see their confinements on the off chance that you are attempting to book a trek that is dubious or in the event that you have particular needs that the screens don’t suspect.That is the reason working with a human travel agent ensures that this travel proficient person will devote themselves to the assignment of ensuring your excursion attempts to your details and that you get to your destination prepared to lead in business and be fruitful in your accomplishing your objectives.