Advertising options can be overwhelmingly confusing when trying to compute budgeting by conversion rates from each medium to see which ones are worth continuing. There are various local and national directories offering listings, all with different prices and features. There is direct mail, television, radio, pay-per-click, e-mail lists, telemarketing, door-to-door sales, paid internet directories of all types, digital display advertising, and many other media. Money has been invested in web design but there’s little understanding how to communicate to search engines. There’s a misconception that SEO is a medium that belongs in this group; it does not. SEO is not a medium – it is a strategy of building an architecture that interacts with the medium of the World Wide Web, the second-largest network in the World (the largest one belongs to the U.S. Military according to a phone interview I conducted with a high-level civilian programmer working in the central computer center in Fort Hood Texas). Your website is the ad, the Web is the medium, and SEO is the key the highway and an intelligence map for Googlebot to follow, not a recurring advertising cost. Smaller sites don’t even need ongoing optimization if it’s done right the first time.

If you read marketing blogs you’ll learn that SEO goes on largely behind the scenes; it contains the essence of your business and directs a funnel of information composed by the optimizer to entice search engines to spider the external content, find the anchor text keywords containing links to your pages, and retrieve a page to display on search results. Your business, unless it’s in a highly competitive market should be in this position: it didn’t cost you a penny this year because your SEO campaign was paid for several years ago. A good program should be permanent. Moreover, a well-done optimization program should get you even higher rankings and more traffic each year without further activity due the method of viral content marketing, where downloads and RSS feeds of the article placed on your behalf keep multiplying as they are published with links intact on other websites. This fact leads to the next misconception: “I’ll save money by putting this off…” or “I’ll negotiate down to a low price with my SEO and get the best of the deal…” which is a natural reflex in business. It’s the wrong reaction in this case.

It doesn’t matter what you pay for SEO. Even within a few thousand dollars, it simply doesn’t matter in the long run. The SEO is on your side and he should be offered good compensation. Several factors make it unproductive to treat this contract grudgingly, like some intrusion into your budget by an enemy force. The first factor is the number of sales you lose while you procrastinate (don’t mistake caution with procrastination, the consultant has heard it all and knows the difference). Think of your company’s net profit on one customer (especially repeat customers and steady clients). If you net $800 dollars on a deal and lose 7 customers in a two month period that you would have picked up from random searches (a conservative figure), you’ve kissed good-bye to $5,600 – more than the price of a major SEO program. Your business should have optimized long ago if any expansion was planned because you can be sure others want a large share of the market sector.

Another factor is totally overlooked – mostly because of a failure to think the relationship through – is the morale of the optimization consultant. Working with any consultant means that a cooperative atmosphere is essential but when creative writing is involved there is also a delicate line where mediocre work can become excellent work. Concentration on the content by the writer and clever ways to make your business interesting is negatively affected by the distractions of money problems or a sense of getting the bad end of the deal. Writers tend to have vivid imaginations and they can get moody quickly. From recent experience, many clients seem to be under similar pressure and it can be heard in a person’s breathing on the phone; the slightest straw can break the camel’s back and make a deal go south to the financial detriment of both parties. Knowing what I know now, if I was a site owner I would give extra money to the optimizer to get him to focus on your business instead of another client. The rewards are gradual but long-lasting; many businesses are looking at six figure amounts in profits by being able to expand into their market sector with a high-ranking web site. That SEO investment doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all.

Search engine (SE) optimization techniques vary. Some techniques will be beneficial for ranking in some search engines, but other search engines may penalize for overuse of these techniques. An understanding of the different SE and how they rank sites will help give someone who carries out SEO, a better understanding of how they should go about doing it.

It’s important to look at both on-site and off-site SEO to get the rankings you are after. Sites should be built in such a way that search engines notice quickly what your site is about through correct usage of metadata, titles, headings and keywords and you should actively promote your site on other web sites using off-site SEO techniques.

Keywords are the words that people search for in a SE. Metadata keywords are words you can store in the website code as a summary for search engines and they should be carefully chosen so that they actually reflect what is on the page. You need both metadata keywords – not more than 20 – and a meta description – a short description that summarizes the page in well constructed English, and contains the essential keywords relating to the content. Search engines will look at the content of your page and see how it relates to the keywords and whether the keywords are actually present.

One technique that is worth avoiding is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing refers to the over use of keywords, so that the search engine counts more occurrences and so the page is returned as a more relevant search result, higher up in the search results. This technique should now be considered obsolete and content should be written naturally without the constant repetition of keywords. They should definitely still be there, but not in every line, every title and certainly not hidden by using text coloring that matches the background.

When a site is first listed with the SE, the search engines will not have any information in regard to the site. Sites need to be crawled by ’spiders’ that gather information which can be used to determine search results. With thousands of new web pages being created and added everyday, it’s unlikely that your page will be crawled straight away. It may even take months.

Link building can increase your chances of being crawled by a SE spider more quickly. Spiders follow the links from other websites that they crawl, and so by having a few links on other sites that are well established in search engines then you can speed up the process. Once crawled, a site may not be visited again for a while. Some sites though are crawled very regularly. These tend to be sites that have new content added constantly. By placing a link to your site on one of these sites, you will certainly increase the chances of a spider coming your way, crawling your site, and soon you will start to receive traffic from the search engines.