SEO has been around for almost as long as search engines have. And for good reason. Everyone wants free advertising. But a lot has changed over the past thirteen years and with SEO gurus charging upwards of $1,000 per month, to small startups, just for maintenance you really can't call it "free advertising" anymore.
Back in the day, you could get top ranking for just about any search term you wanted just by using tricks like keyword stuffing, invisible text and cloaking. Try any of that today and Google will kick you to the curb.
Another thing that makes optimizing your site tougher than ever is competition. In 1998 when I got into SEO, there were a couple hundred million pages indexed on Google. Now there are billions upon billions! In fact, I can not remember the last time I ran a search for anything that had less than 300,000 results found. Beating out a few thousand pages by loading your page and META tags with keywords was easy a decade ago. Today you really need to know your stuff, or at least use a tool or service that can guide you.
Even with the killer SEO software products available today, it is still not easy. The fact that finding the right tool will make the difference between dominating Google, Yahoo and MSN and just average results puts pressure on you early in the game. And that is difficult because not only can using the wrong product be a waste of money and time, it can also damage your site in a way that takes years to undue.
So, no matter how you optimize your work just remember this you are not competing against the search engines or Websites. You are competing against the search engine ranking of individual Web pages. Too many people focus on beating search engines or whole sites, but that is not your competition. Search engines rank pages not sites.
Here are three ways to optimize your sites on a budget. All three are excellent methods but will vary greatly in time investment, cost and return on investment. For most entrepreneurs however, these are the best ways to put your optimization efforts on the fast track.
To be continued..
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