If you’re just starting out, this post will serve as an introduction to the basics of creating content in ways that are SEO friendly. If you want to dig a little deeper into the theories behind content and SEO, read Good, Better, Best–Writing Content for Search Engine Optimization.

Content for Content’s Sake?

It would make sense to create content for no other reason than for search engine optimization, but there’s no reason to limit your intent solely to SEO, and in fact your content will be better for SEO if you don’t focus solely on SEO. What I mean is that if you focus on the human beings who will be coming to the site and using it, rather than thinking about SEO, you’ll often get better results for SEO.

When thinking about human beings and content on a website, the three areas to focus on are:

1. Accessibility
2. Relevance / Usefulness
3. Readability / Quality

Accessibility. How easy is it to find the content from the homepage or from any other page on the site? Chances are if the content is easy for a human to find it’s more likely to be picked up by search engines as well. Remember that search engines and therefore humans will not always access your site from the homepage. They may click through to a secondary page of your site that is indexed in a search engine and therefore that secondary page needs to do something to address visitors who haven’t seen the rest of the site. I don’t mean saying “Hi there” but rather the navigation and content of each page should make sense to a human being, even if that’s the first exposure they have to your website.

Relevance / Usefulness. This should be a given, but we mention it anyway. If the content has nothing to do with your website, then there’s probably no reason for it to be there. I’d rather focus on the word useful. If content is useful, it’s more likely to be visited, get bookmarked, get linked to from other websites, etc., and all of this builds positive SEO results.

Readability / Quality. Is your content interesting? Is it well-written? Search engines may not know the difference, but they are figuring it out, and human beings certainly do. The better your content is written, the more likely people are to trust it, to return to it, to reference it, and as with usefulness, this means better SEO results.

Now changing tracks a little bit, let’s think about what search engines want to see in content. Basically, the search engines want to see the same things as human beings, but I would also add a fourth item, which is keywords. If you know what your top 10 keywords are, then you’re going to want to make sure those keywords are being used liberally throughout your site. However, one should focus on items 1-3 first, and then review the content while asking the question “Are our keywords already in this content?” It very well may be that no more modifications to your content are needed to focus on keywords. Or it might be that you see opportunities here and there where keywords aren’t used, but they could be without negatively affecting items 1-3.

So where does one start?

Getting Started on Content

The content you place on your homepage is going to be more important than the content on any other page of your website. Other than the three points above, make sure you have enough content. A paragraph or two will often do, but try experimenting with more content and more links from the homepage to secondary pages on your site and see what works for your needs.

Here are some further recommendations for developing more content, not necessarily on the homepage.

1. Turn PDFs into HTML content wherever possible. I recognize this doesn’t always work, since some PDFs contains content/graphics that aren’t easily or conveniently reproduced in HTML, but do try. Often turning one PDF document into HTML can result in 10-20 additional HTML pages on your site, each one of which can be indexed and add to your site’s overall page count. It is true that PDFs are indexed by search engines, but HTML is better, and not just better for search engines, but many humans prefer to read an HTML page over a PDF because they find PDFs to be clunky and troublesome to the point that they avoid PDF files altogether. What I would recommend is providing both. Have an HTML page, but on that page have a link to the PDF so that they can save or print it if they want to.

2. Create informational resources. FAQs, articles, etc. Whatever it is you do, you can probably come up with 10-20 pages of content talking about your industry or your products without too much work.

3. Success stories. Not only do they add to the amount of content you have, they’re great for showing how whatever it is you do helps real people.

4. Blog. Create a blog, either as part of your site (i.e. yousite.com/blog) or on its own domain and then link liberally to your site from it. Search engines love blogs. The tricky part is often coming up with the strategy, or what to write about. But once you figure that out, the posts don’t have to be long, but they do need to be interesting, and the more often you blog, the faster you’ll develop content. I recommend posting on any blog at least once per week, if not daily. But if daily posting overwhelms you, try doing it once per week, or even just every other week to start.

This is probably enough to bite off for now. As always, questions and comments are welcome.

Both Google and Yahoo! allow you to upload an XML file, called a sitemap or sitemap file, that tells the search engines key information about your website. The benefit to you is that your site’s pages get indexed more quickly and completely than they might otherwise. Yes, some experts say to use the sitemap feature with caution, but you’re just a beginner, so carry on. Oh, and if you don’t know what “XML” stands for, just ignore it. The important thing to understand is that for the purposes of this post, the “sitemap” is a specific file on your site.

The sitemap file contains the following information:

1. Page location. That is, the file tells the search engines what pages exist on your site. This helps the search engines to index all the pages you want them to index and makes sure they don’t miss anything.

2. Importance, or priority. Some pages are more important than others, and this file allows you to tell the search engines which ones are the most important by giving them a rank.

3. Frequency of updates, or how often a page is updated. The more often a page is updated, the more often it needs to be indexed by a search engine.

Submitting your sitemap to Yahoo! and Google is pretty easy. Here are step by step instructions.

1. Create your sitemap.

a. Create your sitemap by going to www.xml-sitemaps.com. Right there on the homepage you can type in your URL and the site will generate an XML sitemap file for you, for free. That is, it’s free up to 500 pages, which shouldn’t be a problem for you.

b. Download the file once the site has finished generating it.

c. Open the file in a text or HTML editor and edit the priorities if need be. The website puts everything at the same priority, but in reality your homepage is more important than other pages so you may have to change some of those numbers.

d. Once you’ve finished editing your file, upload it to the main directory on your website.

2. Submit sitemap to Google.

a. Visit www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ to get started. If you do not have a Google account you will need to create one.

b. Login and on the dashboard there will be a field where you can type in the URL of your website and the click “add site”.

c. Google will then ask you to verify your website. Click on the “verify your site” link.

d. On the next page it will allow you to choose how you want to verify your site. I generally opt to create an HTML file. Create the file and upload it to your site, then click on the “verify” button at the bottom.

e. You’ve now verified for Google that you indeed own this website. The next step is to submit your sitemap. Click on the “sitemaps” link in the navigation on the left. Then click on “add a sitemap”.

f. Where it says “choose type” just choose “add general web sitemap”. Then it will ask you to enter the name of the sitemap file you already uploaded to your website. If you went with the defaults this should be “sitemap.xml”.

g. Submit your sitemap, and that’s it! You’re done. If you make changes to your site in the future you can re-create your sitemap and re-submit it to make sure Google picks up those changes.

3. Add your sitemap to Yahoo!

a. Go to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.comand click on the sign in link in the upper left corner. If you do not have a Yahoo! account you will need to create one.

b. Once you’ve logged in, simply enter the URL of the site you want to add.

c. Once added, click the “manage” button on the left.

d. Enter the name of your sitemap file (again, probably sitemap.xml). Although there is no slash shown after the URL you do not need to add one. Just enter the filename.

e. Great, now that you’ve successfully submitted your sitemap click on the “authenticate” button on the right side.

f. Download the authentication file, and then upload it to the main directory of your website.

g. Once you’ve uploaded the file, click the “ready to authenticate” button. That’s it, you’re done. If your sitemap changes, recreate it and then come here and resubmit it at any time.

Any questions?

First of all, chances are they might “submit” your site to 200+ search engines, but whether you’ll actually end up in all 200 is dubious. Second, are these the search engines you want to be listed in, or are they spammy, unethical search engines that will only result in you getting tons of spam emails and no real traffic? Third, any SEO professional worth their salt knows very well that in general there are only three search engines that matter; Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, in that order. Oh, did I say three search engines? I meant one. Google. Ok, that might be an overstatement, but if I had to choose between a company that claimed to submit your site to 200+ search engines of unknown quality vs. an SEO company that claimed to be able to get you ranked in Google I’d go with the latter.

But you know what, you don’t even need to hire an SEO consultant to get listed in the search engines. Here are three fairly simple, do-it-yourself methods for getting listed and ranked in the most important search engines.

1. Paid directories. If you’re willing to spend anywhere from $50-$1,000 you can pay to be included in a host of SEO friendly web directories that will get you started.

2. Site maps. Google and Yahoo! have a feature called “sitemaps” that allows you to upload a file that lists all the pages on your website to make sure they can see all the pages on your site, and submission of your sitemap is completely free if it you do it yourself. Or you can do things the easy, pay a little money, and XML Sitemaps will do all the work for you.

Google Sitemaps
Yahoo! Sitemaps
Microsoft

If you have a brand new site I’d recommend submitting your site map via Google and Yahoo! (can’t find a place to submit it to MSN since they claim they’ll just find it on their own), but SearchEngineLand.com says all the search engines will discover site maps whether you submit them or not.

More info on site maps:

My Advice on Google Sitemaps – Verify, but Don’t Submit
Sitemaps and Spidering
Sitemaps & URL Submission
The Right Way To Think About Site Maps
Search Engines Come Together on Sitemaps Auto-discovery

3. Incoming links. Or you could totally ignore paid directories, uploading your XML sitemap, and just get a few incoming links from other websites that are already indexed in the search engines. I’ve always found this to be the fastest and most reliable way to get a new website indexed. Of course it requires that you find a way to get the links. My SEO firm happens to manage a lot of other web properties that are already indexed so it’s pretty easy, but if you’re just starting out and this is your first website it might require a little more work. Some places to start are message boards or forums, free directories, and blogs that cover your industry.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to get too fancy to get started. In fact, you don’t need to get fancy even if you’re an SEO professional. 95% of what you need to get done can be done with a small number of fairly inexpensive or free tools.

Web CEO – For me, this is the first SEO tool I would invest in. Sure, it leaves some things to be desired, and there are a lot of things in it I don’t desire, but what I use it for it does well. What Web CEO allows you to do is set up profiles for the different websites you manage them and run reports so you can track progress. There are four principle reports I use from Web CEO:

1. Search engine rankings – You enter in your website and your keywords and it goes out and queries the search engines and gives you a nice, easy to read report, showing where your site ranks. You can also run it to rank your competitors as well so you can compare. You could get this information for free, it just wouldn’t be as easy and you wouldn’t get the nice reports.

As with all Web CEO reports, you can customize this one to show data from certain search engines. I don’t care about any search engines except Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, so I only run the reports to show rankings in those search engines. Often I only run the reports to show rankings in Google.

To buy Web CEO click here.

2. Indexed pages – A simple report showing you which pages of your site have been indexed by the various search engines. If your pages aren’t indexed by a certain search engine then that search engine doesn’t know they exist and therefore can’t rank that page, so it’s helpful to see which pages have not been indexed so you can do whatever is necessary to get them indexed and ranking. You can also get this information for Google by typing in “site:www.whateveryourdomainis.com“.

3. Inbound links – A very simple report showing you how many links Google and Yahoo! recognize as coming to your site. Not extremely helpful, but I like to show it to clients once in a while. But generally I’d rather just use the search engines themselves to look at the data. Again, you can get this data from Google by typing in “link:www.yourwebsite.com“.

4. Link text analysis – Tells you the text of the links linking to your site. Helpful in that the text of inbound links matters to your rankings. The report also tells you what sites the links are coming from.

Google Toolbar – A free SEO tool, so you can’t complain about the price. Install it in seconds, and then use it to quickly see inbound links for the website you’re on. Of course you can also get this data straight from Google without using the toolbar, but I find the toolbar to be more convenient.

Google Analytics – Another free SEO tool. Well, it’s not necessarily an SEO tool, per se, seeing as how you could use it for a lot of non-SEO purposes, but for me it’s an SEO tool. Did I mention it’s free? I used to work for a company that charged $25/month for the same thing. Lucky for them they sold it several years ago and focused on website analytics for enterprise customers and they’ve done quite well for themselves. Anyhoo…Google Analytics gives you information about your website visitors. How many of them, what they did on your site, how they found your site, and if they found your site through a search engine you can see what keywords they used to find your site. Pretty helpful stuff.

Google Keyword Tool – In case you don’t know which keywords to focus on, this tool can help you figure things out. If you just have one keyword it will help you go from there.

To be honest, just these four SEO tools are probably what 99% of you need to get started and do well, so I’m going to leave it at that. There are plenty of other SEO tools, but if you’re just getting started you can do without them.

First of all, it’s not the search engine that gets optimized, but rather your website gets optimized for search engines. And what does that mean? Well, listen up and I’ll tell you.

To explain what SEO is, we first need to understand some of the basics about search engines. A search engine is a website that helps you find other websites. The most famous and most profitable search engine is Google. Let’s go there right now. Click this link and Google will open in a new window or tab.

Now, let’s suppose you wanted to buy a house in Utah. You don’t live in Utah? That’s ok, it’s just an investment property. Type in “buy a house in utah” and then click on the button that says “Google Search”. What’s it mean to get lucky? Just ignore it, it doesn’t matter. Once you click on that button you’re going to get a screen that looks like this.

If you’re wondering how Google makes all those tens of billions of dollars this is it. See the red area that says “paid advertisements? Those are ads. Like billboards, or TV commercials. People and companies put their ads there, and if you click on one of those ads, then it costs the advertiser money. It’s sort of an auction system, and whoever bids the highest gets into first place. Well, it’s not entirely an auction system, but let’s not get complicated just yet, right?

The other search results are called “natural” or “organic” search results. Why? Because Google decides which websites show up in those results based on a formula or algorithm they’ve developed. Now put yourself in Google’s shoes for a moment and ask yourself this question “As Google, what kind of search results do I want to give to people if I want people to keep using me?” Wouldn’t you want to give them search results that make them happy? You make people happy and they’ll keep coming back for more, any drug dealer will tell you that.

Now switch back to being yourself. In this case, Google has decided that the website at utahhomes.com is the website that will make people happier than any other website possibly can when they search for “buy a house in utah”. But who owns utahhomes.com? Why, it’s Coldwell Banker. How much do you think that #1 spot is worth to Coldwell Banker? How many other realtors do you think would like to have that spot? And guess how much CB paid Google for that spot…exactly nothing. CB doesn’t pay Google a dime to be in that spot, and they don’t pay if someone clicks on that link. Meanwhile the guys right above and to the right in the paid ads areas are paying as much as $20 every time somebody clicks on their link.

And get this, most people don’t click on the ads. You see, a lot of people know about the ads, and they don’t trust them since anyone can buy their way in there, so they click on the natural results more often. So CB gets more clicks than the guys paying and doesn’t pay a dime!

Ok, that’s not exactly true. CB doesn’t pay Google a dime, but the question you must ask is how the heck did they get there then? Ah…this is where SEO comes into play.

As I mentioned earlier, Google uses a formula or algorithm to rank websites from the #1 spot on down. The only problem is they won’t tell anyone what that formula is. But there are those of us who make a living by figuring out what that formula is, and then we sell our expertise to clients who pay us to tweak their websites to better match Google’s formula. Call us SEO consultants, SEO professionals, SEO nerds, or whatever you want, the point is that there are companies like CB that make a lot of money by being in that #1 spot, and they’re willing to pay a lot of money to get there or stay there. Think about it, if CB sells one additional house per month by virtue of being in that #1 spot vs. being at #20, how much is that worth to them? Let’s see…6% commission on a $500K home is $30K, right? Do you think they’d pay $15K per month to the guy who can keep them at #1? You betcha, and they’re probably selling more than one $500K home per month as a result of that position.

Do you sell a product or service? If you do, then chances are people are looking for it on search engines like Google. How much would it be worth to you to be in that #1 spot for a few keywords related to what you do? Worth hiring an SEO firm or learning SEO on your own? Well, here are some resources in case you’re interested in either:

10 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Small Businesses
Search Engine Optimization Whitepaper – 10 Tips
How SEO Professionals Trick You
Common SEO Misconceptions
What is Linkbaiting or Link Bait and Why Should I Care?
Backlink Basics
Basic Keyword Strategy
Hiring an SEO Consultant
The Trap of Affordable SEO Services
Do-It-Yourself SEO Options
Recommended List of SEO Consultants, Experts, Firms & Service Providers
Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Ranking Factors

1. First of all, Google assumes the more incoming links a website has, the more important it is and therefore it should get ranked higher.

2. Second, if Google thinks Website A is important and gives it good rankings and Website A links to Website B, then Google also assumes Website B is important.

3. Third, if Website A which has a lot of content about Topic A, and Website A links to Website B, then Google will assume that Website B also has something to do with Topic A.

4. Fourth, the text of the incoming link matters. For example, let’s say you own a flower shop call Pink and Purple Pansies that sells flowers online. You should be more focused on improving your rankings for keywords like “flowers” than for “pink and purple pansies” because getting ranked for “pink and purple pansies” is easy, seeing as how that’s probably the text in your URL, nobody else is truly competing for that term, and anybody searching for that term is obviously already looking for you and won’t be satisfied until they find you. However, somebody searching for “flowers” is not necessarily searching for you and may not even be aware of you, there is going to be more competition since it’s a more generic term, and you don’t have any inherent advantage when it comes to that term.

That being the case, the more incoming links you can build the text of which reads “flowers” the better, because when Google follows a link from Website A to Website B, it reads the text of the link on Website A and assumes, quite logically, that Website B has something to do with the text contained in the link on Website A, and therefore Website B is going to be ranked higher for a certain keyword if it has lots of incoming links that contain that keyword.

To sum up, the ideal incoming link comes from a high-ranking website related by topic to your website (i.e. the other website already ranks for the keyword(s) you want to rank for), and the text of the link from the other website to yours would contain the keywords you want to rank for.

One thing I’ve left out is competition. All other things being equal it’s harder to get a good ranking for a keyword that everybody else wants to rank well for, and generally speaking those keywords that have higher search volume or more people searching for them are more competitive, so just remember that, and I’ll talk about it a little later as well.

First, let me explain these terms.

Search volume – The number of searches being made for a keyword. The more people who search for a certain keyword the higher the volume.

Results – Whether or not a certain keyword gives you a high percentage of business relative to the number of people clicking through. For example, if you have a widget company, your site ranked for the keyword “widget,” and 50% of the people who clicked on your link after searching for that keyword ended up buying a widget, those would be pretty good results. If your site ranks for a keyword but the people who come to your site after searching for it don’t buy anything, then those are poor results. What’s the use of ranking well for a keyword if the people who come to your website after searching for it don’t buy anything?

Now, onto the matrix explanation.

High search volume / Good results – Obviously we’d all like to be in this space. If you can get a good ranking for a keyword a lot of people search for, and that keyword happens to give you good results, then you’re golden.

High search volume / Poor results – Even if a keyword doesn’t give you the greatest results, it can redeem itself if there is a lot of volume. The challenge here is that while you get poor results, someone else might get good results, and therefore might be more motivated to rank well for this keyword.

Low search volume / Good results – This is where most people end up. A low search volume means less competition, but if you get good results from the keywords, then you’ve found a niche that might fit you very nicely. For example, I have a web design firm. I’d love to have the site rank well for “web design” but that would be pretty tough because there is a ton of search volume and everyone thinks they can get good results, so the competition is fierce. However, there is a lot less search volume if I add the word “utah” to the mix. There’s not nearly as much competition, and I get a lot of leads from the traffic I get from that keyword.

Low search volume / Poor results – And of course nobody wants to be here. If nobody is searching on a keyword, and those that do don’t buy what you’re selling when they come to your site, what’s the use of ranking well?

So how do you use this? Well, if you’ve got some keywords that have high search volume and produce good results and you can get ranked well, that’s where you focus first. But there’s a good chance you won’t be able to go after any of these types of keywords. The entire area might be off-limits to you, especially if you are a new company or the market is hyper-competitive, like real estate or web hosting.

Most people will have success in the box of low search volume and good results. Find ways to alter your keywords such that there isn’t too much competition, meaning it’s easier for you to get a good ranking, but the traffic you get from it produces good results. If you can find a large number of keywords you’ll be able to get high search volume by aggregating the results of all keywords, and achieve positive overall results.

Our take on the article…

The article starts out on the right foot by giving the warnings about SEO firms. Not all SEO firms are honest, not all are created equal, and the consequences can be dire if you depend on SEO for your revenue.

Ha! It’s nice to hear someone answer the question “What ranking guarantees do you provide?” with “If the answer is anything but “none,” look elsewhere.” So many clients are under the impression that results can be guaranteed because so much of the hype used to sell SEO gives guarantees. But it just ain’t so.

Overall I think the article is an excellent resource. I only take slight issue with one statement:

“You should receive ranking and analytics reporting weekly, monthly and quarterly.” – For most of our clients, weekly reports would be overkill. Most of the time it’s obvious our clients don’t do more than skim our monthly reports, if they look at them at all. And we don’t provide quarterly reports because our monthly reports provide all the information that is needed to compare to past months.

Also, in answer to the question “Are you going to make changes to my website?” I think it would have been instructive to point out that some firms provide consulting services as an option without providing implementation services. We have several clients who feel comfortable making changes themselves, but don’t know what changes to make, and so we provide them with monthly advice and reports, but we don’t actually make the changes ourselves. This can present challenges in that some clients don’t implement the changes we suggest, generally due to not making it a priority, and then they are unhappy with the results, and of course it’s easier to blame your consultant than yourself. But overall consulting has worked out well for my SEO firm.

Which Online Marketing Options Are Best?
There is no doubt that most businesses need to market their services and/or products in some method in order to succeed. Finding the marketing methods that have the highest ROI is often a challenge for businesses with very few attaining the level of satisfaction with their marketing plan that is ideal. This is especially true in our dynamic world that is in constant change and commotion with consumers being bombarded with subliminal marketing messages every minute of the day. This sometimes leaves us scratching our heads with marketing methods that worked great in the past only to take a sudden turn and fail overnight.

There are few that would challenge the fact that technology has had a marvelous impact on marketing strategies in our day. Having a website was somewhat of a luxury to a business even a few decades ago; this has now become a necessity. There are new options available to advertise via technology at an overwhelming rate. One of the more recent successful technology marketing avenues is the internet offering several different sublets of online marketing options to choose from. Choosing which online marketing strategy will bring up the bottom line and have the highest ROI can be somewhat of a mystery at times; how can you weed out the winners from the mediocre performers?

Here is a list of internet marketing avenues that almost any business can experiment with. The success of each avenue will depend largely on the business; some will work better than others and there is no single option that is far superior to the others.

Website Redesign
Having a website is commonplace for most businesses, if you do not have one you can not accomplish much else on the internet in terms of marketing or sales. There is a difference between having a website and having a good website. Having a well-oiled marketing machine online is something that is a rare find when searching through the millions of websites we stumble across every day. If you website is not fine-tuned then directed website visitors from marketing campaigns will provide minimal benefits.

Take this for example: you have the best widget in your market for sale in your store, you decide to put up a billboard ad and customers start flooding in however no one buys. When you are closing one night wondering why no one has bought anything you glance around your store and notice a few things. It is difficult to find the widget, they are scattered in random places, your store is messy, has garbage on the floor, and the cash register is hidden in the backroom. This could be considered an extreme example but this is exactly how a website can be perceived by website visitors if it is not built correctly.

When looking over your website and preparing for an overhaul there are many questions to ask yourself. Is your navigation straight forward and easy to use? Does the website look professional or does it give the impression that your 14-year old nephew designed it? Do you avoid introduction pages? Can someone clearly understand what your business offers in less than 3 seconds? Is there a clear call to action on every page? Is the information provided that which your potential customers are seeking? These are just a few items of many that you could use to analyze your website.

Who Is This For?
** Those that have never spent any time on your website to see where people are coming from, what they are clicking on, why they are leaving.
** Those that receive occasional complaints about how difficult it is to use your website.
** Those that have a large amount of website visitors with very few sales or leads.

How Do I Get Started?
** Do a focus group study: gather up some of your clients and make a survey based on their experience with your website.
** Hire a consultant to take an outsider look at your website and offer suggestions.
** Install web analytics software on your website so you can gather information about your visitor’s activities. Google offers a free analytical service you can install quickly and easily.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the art of getting your website to magically appear in a search engine’s (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) natural results for a targeted keyword phrase. Ok, it’s not really magic, but it can easily be classified it as a science. It is a very complicated and time-consuming process capable yielding wonderful results if you have the patience and knowledge.

In the early 90’s SEO was a new and untapped form of advertising. At that time all you had to do in order to get ranked in a search engine was add a keyword meta tag to your website. For example if you sold blue widgets you would simply add “blue widgets” to your keyword meta tag on your website, go to google and type in “blue widgets” and your website would be there on the top of the page. Those days are long gone yet that by-gone era mentality still exists among many business owners. There is no such thing as a successful $39/month SEO campaign, use the money more effectively by going out to dinner one night instead. Although it is becoming more expensive to compete online for popular keyword phrases the ROI is incredible if you can manage to climb to the top of the rankings for well-researched keyword phrases.

SEO is accomplished through a myriad web of tweaking thousands of factors on your website. Some of the most common and necessary factors include title tags, content, text placement, use of bold, use of italics, incoming links to your website, keyword research, and heading text. There are also black hat techniques that are shady to say the least that search engines may penalize you for implementing. Some such tactics could include using a font color that is the same as the background color of the website, using the same words repeated over and over, spamming meta tags on your webpage, and copying other website’s content. These techniques should be avoided as your website could be blacklisted or removed from a search engine’s database if they recognize the black hat technique.

Who Is This For
** Those that offer a product and/or service that is searched for online in adequate amounts and online competition is not extreme.
** Those that have never done SEO on their website before; a short fast tune-up on a website that has never had any SEO aspects integrated will have dramatic initial results.
** Those that have customers that are internet and technology savvy.
** Those that are patient and want a long-term high ROI marketing option.

How Do I Get Started?
** Find out if people are searching for your products/services. One free tool to find this out is at overture.
** Do a search in Google or Yahoo for your keywords to see how many web pages are competing for that search phrase. As a general rule anything with more than 5 million competing websites will be more difficult to gain a ranking on the first page of results.
** Get proposals from a SEO consultant or SEO firm. Make sure you ask for referrals to avoid scams.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is very similar to SEO as both are using search engines to get a website to appear in the search results page for a specific keyword phrase. The most common form of pay per click is with search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Natural SEO results in Google are in the middle white section of results. PPC results are those in the top and bottom with the blue background and on those appearing in the right sidebar. PPC results are quarantined off by the title of Sponsored Links.

Although PPC is generally a short-term lower ROI marketing strategy when compared to SEO it does have some benefits. You have control of your budget, it can be turned off or on in an instant, the results are very easy to track, and you only pay for actual website visitors. There are other large publishers that offer internal PPC systems that can be slightly cheaper than search engines if you are targeting a niche market.

To start a PPC campaign you need to create an account with a PPC system such as Google Adwords. You need to choose keyword phrases that are related to your website, write some ads to appear to potential website visitors, set a budget, and click go. You will then start receiving website visitors and at any time you can cancel the campaign or put it on hold. PPC is a good option for those who have not yet tried any type of online marketing.

Who Is This For?
** Those that are not sure if online marketing is for them or not. You can run a test PPC campaign for a few hundred dollars to analyze if it will be profitable or not.
** Those that are not yet ready to start a full-out SEO campaign.
** Those that need a short burst of extra website traffic.

How Do I Get Started?
** Create an account with Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing.
** Look at PPC Directory to find other smaller websites that offer PPC.
** Get proposals from a consultant or internet marketing firm. Ask for examples of previous clients and how they were successful.

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is slightly newer than SEO and PPC. It is usually extremely successful or an absolute disaster. Whether your affiliate marketing campaign is a superstar or flop will largely depend on your business, how you setup the campaign, and how you continually manage the campaign. Here are the basics of affiliate marketing: first you get website owners (it could be anyone) to place a link on their website to your website, they become your affiliate. If a website visitor clicks on your affiliate’s link to your website a tracking cookie is placed on the potential customer’s computer; if they end up making a purchase on your website you then pay the affiliate a commission based on the sale.

This is extremely appealing compared to SEO and PPC as you only pay for an actual sale. Sounds great huh? Then why is it not as common as it should be? The biggest obstacle is finding good affiliates. If you take a look at affiliate marketing from their stand point they have all the risk and therefore will not engage in your program unless they feel it will be extremely profitable. The area where most affiliate marketing programs fall short is that they do not actively search for potential affiliates; rather they throw a link up on their website and call it done. If you put the time and effort into an affiliate marketing program you should come out ahead in the end.

Who Is This For?
** Those that have high profit margins. If you can only give an affiliate $1 per sale you will not attract very many people, any affiliate offer over $50 is usually very appealing.
** Those that want to place all the sales risk on others.
** Those that have the time and resources to actively communicate with future and current affiliates.

How Do I Get Started?
** Although large managed affiliate marketing systems are usually expensive and offer minimal benefits they are easy to setup and start quick. You can look into commission junction, linkshare or shareasale.
** Hire a programmer to develop and implement an internal custom affiliate marketing system.
** Do some research: contact a few website owners that you feel receive a large amount of qualified traffic that could become your potential customers. Ask the website owner if they would be interested in participating in an affiliate program with you or not. Find out at what price they would be motivated to join in.

Blogs, Podcasts, and Social Networking
Some of the most recent forms of online advertising are blogs, podcasts, and social networking website such as myspace.com. These are becoming more widespread as time ticks on. These forms of online marketing generally take a non-direct approach to attaining new clients. The focus is first on building a relationship with the potential client hoping that in time you will earn their trust. Once you have earned their trust they will make a purchase or spread the word to others on your behalf.

Blogs are similar to an online journal; they can be personal or professional. Having a successful blog requires time and effort; if you can not devote time to it do not start one. Podcasts are similar as they require even more time than a blog and a little more technical knowledge. You must also market your blogs and podcasts as you would your own website; successful blogs and podcasts are ones that eventually are self-sustaining in generating new website visitors from other readers or listeners.

Social networking is a broad term that can have different meanings depending on who you talk to. It is closely related to public relations and viral marketing strategies. The goal could be to generate hype about a product/service, provide non-biased information on subjects relating to your industry, create a niche network of potential customers, or get others to promote your products/services without you asking. These advanced online marketing strategies can have great results if implemented properly.

Who Is This For?
** Those that like to experiment with new technology that is somewhat risky but has the potential to be very successful.
** Those that are good at networking or a ‘people-person’.
** Those that want to do some marketing on their own for a low cost requiring a large amount of personal time.

How Do I Get Started?
** Talk to others who have blogs, podcasts, or social networking to see how they have become successful.
** Hire a consultant to take an outsider look at your website and offer suggestions.
** Start a free blog at blogger, typepad or wordpress.

These are just a few of the many options to take advantage of technology this year to help your business grow. Seek advice from others who are involved in internet marketing and you are sure to have a successful year online.

Eric Morgan is an internet marketing manager at MWI. He has more than a decade of experience working in the IT arena, specifically web design and internet marketing. He holds a Management B.S. degree from the University of Utah.

The trap here is that affordable SEO services have a very low chance of being effective. Someone who tells you they can provide full-service SEO for your site for less than $500 per month is either inexperienced, giving you a super deal, or misinforming you about what they can achieve. Or they could just be straight out lying to you. I wouldn’t count on it being a super deal unless the person providing the SEO services to you is a family member or a buddy.

The fact of the matter is there is no magic formula for effective SEO. There is no tool that automates the process. Effective SEO takes a lot of time, both in terms of hours per month as well as months themselves. Here are some of the unethical or downright dishonest practices I’ve seen SEO firms participate in, just to get a client hooked.

1. The long-term contract. There is no reason for you to sign a long-term contract with an SEO firm. The only reason they’re trying to get you to sign a 12-month contract is so that once you’ve paid them for three months and you realize you’re being taken advantage of you’ll have to either keep paying for 12 months or buy your way out of the contract.

2. Lots of work up front, then little or nothing. Some SEO companies will provide legitimate SEO services for 2-3 months, and then slown down to a small fraction of what they were doing or stop altogether. This type of practice is generally combined with a long-term contract. But it might be months before you start to suspect they’re not doing anything.

3. Fake rankings. Some SEO firms will get you ranked for keywords that don’t bring you any additional business. They’ll give you reports that show that you’re #1 for a particular keyword, but if you look a little deeper you’ll notice nobody searches for that keyword.

4. No service at all. In some cases, a firm doesn’t provide any service at all. I recently heard of a company that provides web design services and offers SEO services as an additional service. However, if somebody signs up for SEO, they don’t do anything at all. They don’t even have an SEO expert on staff.

Unethical SEO firms don’t just cost you the money you pay them, which may be nothing more than several hundred dollars, there is also an opportunity cost. After going with an affordable SEO firm that uses unethical business practices you may have lost six months in which you could have been building an effective SEO campaign and improving your bottom line. How much is that lost opportunity going to cost your business?

Granted, it’s not only affordable SEO companies that rip people off, there are plenty of very expensive SEO firms that are also dealing dishonestly with their clients. The only difference between an affordable SEO firm and an expensive one is that while the affordable SEO firm is almost certainly providing an ineffective or non-existent service, the expensive one only may be.

The point is to avoid getting ripped off, and here are some tips on how to avoid being ripped off by an SEO company:

1. Check references. Of course no SEO company is going to give you bad references, but if they can give you three or more good ones at least you know they’ve done a good job for somebody. If you don’t check references then for all you know they’ve never had a happy client.

2. Ask questions. Do research on SEO and ask them a lot of questions. If they can respond clearly, confidently, and what they say seems to make sense, that’s a good sign.

3. Make sure they provide monthly reports. I’m amazed at how many people hire SEO firms that don’t provide any monthly reports. Any competent SEO company should provide monthly reports that show ranking performance, indexed pages, incoming links, total website traffic, website referrers, and more. If an SEO firm doesn’t provide this then they’re probably avoiding showing you the lack of results they’re getting for you.

4. Go with your gut. Trust your instincts. Some companies will just give you a feeling that something isn’t altogether legit. But sometimes you won’t realize how uncomfortable a certain company makes you feel until you can compare them to another, which leads to #5.

5. Talk to multiple companies. Don’t just go with the first company that comes along. Get proposals from at least three companies, and perhaps as many as ten. The more proposals you’ll get, the more you’ll be able to make the right decision.

6. Talk to an objective third party. If possible, find someone who is an SEO expert who is willing to help you screen proposals from SEO companies without trying to get inserted into the bidding process themselves. You may know someone who has an lawyer as a family member, and they always talk about how their brother the attorney gives them free advice. If you can find a friend, relative, or a friend of a friend who is an SEO expert and who is willing to give you some tips, it can save you a lot of pain, time, and money.