You know the saying: those that can’t do… hire. Well, maybe that’s not really the way it goes, but it works. If you don’t know much about seo and /or don’t have the time or inclination to learn, you can hire a company to do the work for you.

There are a lot of companies that specialize in this and many of them are quite reasonable in their pricing structure.

If you can’t afford to hire a company at this stage in the game, don’t worry, with a little knowledge and a few simple tweaks you can easily benefit from some basic seo and at least get your foot in the door.

Once you are making more money online you can invest in the knowledge, or hire someone, to take your seo efforts to the next level. For now, though, you can start here:

1. It all starts with your keyword list. Choosing the right keywords for your onsite seo has to be the first step, everything revolves around these keywords.

Make sure that you choose words, or phrases, that get at least one thousand searches a month and less than 20,000 competitors. They must also be closely targeted and highly relevant to the content of your website.

Search engines will either reward or penalize you on the relevance of your keywords, you don’t want to be penalized.

Once you’ve got your keywords focus on placing them in your meta tags, your headers and footers to start. This will grab the attention of the search engine spiders and they will move your site to the top of the rankings if they think it is highly relevant.

2. You can use a similar method to drive traffic to your website by writing and submitting quality, keyword focused articles. Now, this is the point when a lot of people make a mistake; they don’t write a quality informative article, instead they try to stuff as many keywords as possible into it until is is virtually all gibberish.

You won’t be rewarded for that, the search engines are too smart. Write your article around a keyword, but don’t write for the search engines, write for people.

If you supply your readers with genuinely helpful information, and optimize it with keywords, your article can get a top rating in the search engines and subsequently drive a lot of traffic to your website.

Don’t drive yourself into the poor house when you’re just starting out online by hiring an seo company that you can’t really afford. First, start making some money and then you can outsource much of your daily work. In the meantime, use these tips and utilize these seo strategies

to keep the traffic flowing and the cash register (virtual, of course) ringing.

I have heard stories ranging from Chinese sweatshop link builders to automated software solutions that essentially pollute the Internet with garbage (fake profiles, bogus blog comments, etc.). Anyone who attempts to game the system is usually doing everyone a disservice. There will be a short-term gain from getting ranked well for your keyword but eventually you will be removed altogether.

I am sure that the engineers at Google are already working on several plans to make link popularity less relevant in the future. I have made a short list of things I think would be useful tools to judge the popularity of a website, brand, person, product.

Mentions Within The Social Media Space.

Increasingly, social media sites like twitter offer new metrics into the world of popularity. Not only is the data up-to-date and current, it’s much more difficult for anyone to mimic a piece of content going viral and social media. Companies like Google could easily make deals with Facebook and twitter to access their data feeds and use them as a gauge for popularity.

Additionally, Google could search for mentions of the name of a company, twitter account for that company, or any subsequent products as a measure of likability.

Mentions Within E-Mail Communications.

Google is now one of the largest free e-mail providers in the world. It would be very simple for them (if they aren’t already) to monitor the number of times a link is sent through Gmail’s mail servers. This would also be difficult to game because your accounts would quickly get flagged for spam. Additionally Google can monitor the Gmail accounts to see which ones appear to be trying to increase their footprint.

Although I believe that your link popularity score will always play a role in your final ranking. I think it’s time for that metric to stop beating the primary source of data for Google. Once this happens, companies will increasingly be working towards social media strategies to help their bottom line.

If you participate in any kind of link building consider this. Quality will trump quantity in the future. One really good Flickr profile will be better than 100 crappy blog comments. Try to engage the communities within each one of your social profiles online.

Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are relevant to what your website is promoting. If you find that you have kind of missed the boat you can either renew your keyword list or change some of the content on your website to make it match up more closely with your keyword list.

All the search engines consider relevance very highly. If you target keywords that are not closely related to your website, the search engines will find that you have very low relevance and won’t rank your site as high.

Do not get too caught up on one or two word keywords, in almost all cases they will be much too competitive and you will have a very hard time ranking for them. Instead, find a large list of keyword phrases. When you have a 3 or 4 word keyword phrase you may not get quite as many searches but you also won’t have nearly as much competition.

Longer keyword phrases can still deliver a lot of searches, probably not as many as the more popular one and two word phrases, but they will also be much less competitive.

When you first start your keyword research you can use many tools online, some of them are free, some of them are not. If you have a limited budget you should start with the free Google keyword tool. This one tool can give you all the information you need to compile an excellent keyword list.

Again, the basics of a good keyword list is to have keywords that get a lot of monthly searches (around 1,500) and few competitors (usually anything less than 20,000, though this can vary, you have to find your own parameters).

It may take you and little trial and error to find the highly relevant, well searched for keywords that also don’t have a lot of competition. This process can sometimes get a little tedious, but remember a good keyword list is like money in the bank. When you have a highly targeted keyword list you can get a lot of quality traffic to your website and that can relate directly into sales.

To recap, in order to build a top notch keyword list that will allow you to get a ton of very targeted traffic you will need to consider several variables. One of them is to find only the most relevant keyword possible. The keyword must relate directly to the subject of your website. If it does you can have a much higher conversion rate and you can also get a lot more organic traffic.

many people seem to think that you can either write for humans or you can write for the search engines. They don’t seem to understand that you can actually do it both ways with one article.

To get the most out of all your seo article marketing efforts the first thing you have to do is find a good list of quality keywords associated with your niche website (fairly high searches with little competition).

Once you have your keyword list all you have to do is write quality articles around that keyword. As long as the articles you write are quality and provide good information that’s going to be half the battle.

Do not get stuck in the idea that you have to include your keyword in every sentence of your article. That is considered keyword stuffing and won’t do you any good.

Strive for no more than 3% keyword density. Put the keyword in your title, the first and last paragraph and a few other times throughout your article. That’s all you need.

The simplicity, yet effectiveness, of this methods is why it is so popular. By writing articles you will set yourself up as an expert in your niche. you can use your articles to provide a lot of helpful information to all you readers.

Online, it’s always best to give something of value before you expect to get anything. By giving your readers some good and helpful information and advice, you are building trust with them.

The other huge benefit of doing this, with the proper keywords, is that the search engines will reward you for your content with a high search engine ranking. This will give you a lot of organic traffic.

For example, if your niche is bird houses all you need to do is write some keyword optimized articles around the keyword “bird houses”. Then when someone does a search and types in the phrase “bird houses” your article may well be one of the first that shows up on the page! How is that for free traffic!

The same basic principle holds true for making blog posts. When you are adding content to your blog you simply follow these same basic steps. That way when someone does a search for your keywords they will see your blog post and subsequently land on your blog.

This provides you with a great opportunity to add an autoresponder to your blog and capture the visitors email address so you can contact them again.

Using this seo article marketing method can really help you ramp up your website traffic and the best part? It’s all for free! Just be careful to not fall into the mind set that if one keyword in an article is good, ten must be better. Don’t try to stuff your article with keywords, a few well placed keywords is all you need.

Besides the free traffic another wonderful benefit of this type of traffic is that it meets yet another criteria for quality website traffic: all the traffic that comes to your website via this technique will be very qualified and targeted.

You may be wondering how I can know that, simple, since the people who visit your site are doing a search for a keyword phrase you are targeting you know that they have a big interest in your product or service, they are very targeted.

Don’t worry, I know this can sound complicated… and it can be complicated, but in it’s simplest form it looks a little like this:

Let’s say you are selling a book about improving your golf swing. The whole focus of your website is to help golfers improve their game by improving their swing.

You’ve isolated a list of keywords that are very focused on golf swings. These keywords get decent monthly traffic and relatively low competition.

For this example, let’s say you are targeting the keyword phrase “improve your golf swing”. Using this phrase in your website optimization plan will help the search engines find your site. They will be able to identify that you site is about improving golf swings.

If they believe your website can offer valuable information on improving golf swings to anyone who visits it, they will rank your site very high. Ideally you want your site to be ranked within the first page of results.

So, if someone goes to their web browser and types in the phrase “improve golf swing” and your site is one of the first ones that show up, they will very likely click on the link and be taken to your website.

Since they were actively searching for the term “improve golf swing” you know that they have a high level of interest in improving their golf swing which makes them a good potential customer of yours.

This technique works well for not only your website but you can also use it for distributing articles for article marketing as well as for all your blog posts.

Just use your keywords as the basis for your posts and articles. If you choose the right keywords and submit them to good article directories, your articles or blog can show up in the top ten for that particular keyword phrase… again, good free traffic.

There are a few things to keep in mind: for one thing, the algorithms that the search engines use to determine how relevant any particular site is change frequently.

To be really competitive, especially in a competitive market, you need to stay on top of your optimization efforts (or hire someone to do it for you), but you can still benefit from this method even with just a few simple tweaks to your website.

As a business owner you understand the importance of getting every advantage you can and using

keyword search engine ranking techniques is one of those advantages.

Consider your copy the same way you’d consider yourself before going on an interview for a job. You’d be clean, you’d look professional, and you might even rehearse a little bit about what you were going to say. Your copy should present itself like it’s going in for an interview as well – this is your business speaking for itself, after all!

What are the cornerstones of good copy? Well, let’s start off with the obvious – good copy is first and foremost well organized and free of grammatical errors. If your copy is hard to read and misspelled, it looks unprofessional which sets off red flags in the mind of your customers. Don’t let the incorrect usage of semicolons drive away potential revenue. Also, if nothing else, be sure to run everything through spellchecker before putting it up.

But if you want your copy to truly pop, you’ll need to do more than make sure that you cross your Ts and dot your Is. Good copy can accurately describe the product or services that you sell, as well as inform the customer why your product and services are better than what’s offered by the competition. It paints you, the seller, as credible and honest, and it adds a touch of urgency to the transaction, convincing the customer that it’s in his/her best interest to make a purchase as soon as possible. Good copy is convincing, but not overbearing.

There are two obvious ways to go about getting good copy for your online business. The first is writing it yourself. The second is outsourcing. The first is definitely the cheaper way to go, and even if you are utterly incapable of designing a website, it’s likely that you know how to work a word processor and use spellchecker. You could write your own copy very persuasively and well.

But this is another area in which potential online business owners should not scrimp. Be honest with yourself. Will you be able to represent your services and products to the extent they deserve – and need to be represented in order to be profitable – with your writing abilities?

Many people opt to outsource their copy just as they outsource their web design. Just as there are people who have dedicated themselves to the art of making web pages, there are those who make a living out of writing the copy that fills these pages. Many of these places are also versed in writing copy that will make your website appear higher in search engine rankings, which is a worthy consideration as well.

Either way, be sure not to forget about spellchecker.

What this means is that starting an online business can be profitable if done correctly, given the predominance of the Internet in the average household. People who are naturally entrepreneurial or those who have already started a non-internet based business will definitely have a leg up on the rest of the game, but for the right person who’s willing to take appropriate steps to ensure success, starting an online business can be easy, fun, and even profitable.

In general, the differences between online business and traditional businesses are slight but distinct. Here are a few things that potential online business owners should take into consideration before jumping on the Information Superhighway:

Lower start up costs/high effort. One of the greatest things about online businesses is that they typically don’t cost much to get started. There’s no need to rent out a space or pay utilities, and there are lots of free avenues to advertise with over the digital waves. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that “less money invested means less work,” because nothing could be further from the truth. Online business owners often feel like their computers are grafted onto their hands!

Be a jack of all trades. It’s not good enough just to have a stellar idea or a fantastic service. In order to be successful, you need to be able to do graphic design, understand web server technology, programming, and knowledge of the Internet as a marketing medium. For those that can’t do all of this single handedly, outsourcing is an option, but this raises overall cost.

Think globally. This isn’t opening up a small Mom and Pop store in your neighborhood. The business will be able to reach all corners of the globe, thanks to the Internet. The good part is that this potentially means more business – the bad part is that owners will have to make provisions for costs such as international shipping, and maybe even pay for translated versions of their websites.

Marketers make the market. There are thousands of ways to market on the Internet, including pay-per-click, viral, drip, social networking, AdWords, and many others. Don’t know what these things mean? Owners of successful online businesses take the time to learn!

Some of these attributes make working online easier, some may prove to be more of a challenge – but they all make online businesses unique!

Place the ad on the free sites. You never know, the one person who really needs what you are selling may just be looking there right now. Why anyone would ignore such a good resource is beyond me but even I know someone who has listened to the naysayers and she has not been very successful in her internet business endeavors because she has no online ad traffic. Just think of the millions of people she could have reached if she had just placed that ad on the free sites.

Learning how to write a n effective ad will put you one above the rest. If you can’t write or are intimidated by the process then hire someone to write it for you. You will need to make sure you have the budget for this.

The cheapest way is to learn to write for yourself. My advice to you is to take a look at what is out there for writing samples on the internet. If you can speak English and can hold a pen in your hand you are qualified to write your own ads. Some of the stuff you find out there is so bad it will leave you shaking your head in wonder as to how they ever got published in the first place. Some of it doesn’t even make sense!

Anyway, you can do this, I have faith in you. First, make a list of, say, ten free classified ad sites you think you can trust. Then, research them to be sure you can trust them. Make sure they are on the up and up with no funny stuff going on. When you get ready to submit your ad, be sure to follow their rules for submitting ads closely. Remember you are trying to get more traffic to you website not the other way around.

Read all of the directions before you do anything. Find out if you can upload a picture of what you are selling. This will help increase sales. The free sites may not allow pictures but check it out and if they do then put one up. It can’t hurt.

These free sites may not have categories of ads listed so your ad may get lost in the jumble but like I said if it is not out there then it surely will not be seen. Use every advantage you can find when it comes to trying to drive online ad traffic to your site. Use the free sites to start and then graduate to paid sites when the money starts rolling in.

Normally when I hear this problem I know that most people who complain about time management are actually time wasters. Case in point: my client was spending an hour each day making cold calls which she felt was a good utilization of her time. Entrepreneurs love to make justifications for the things they do and cold callers are no exception, in many cases we can always look to the one or two really good customers who we have found through a cold call to make it all worthwhile.

What my client didn’t understand was that if she spent that hour each day publishing content to the Internet she would be much more effective over the long term. Filming a five-minute video and putting it up on YouTube is very easy. It’s also very easy to get 1000 people to view that video. YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world next to Google. If 1000 people watch your video, it’s the equivalent of making 1000 five-minute phone calls.

Start thinking about the messages you want to get across to your audience and start thinking about the mediums you want to use to deliver those messages. I prefer to use articles and video to deliver my messages. Increasingly my audience has been growing exponentially because I spend more time putting content out and less time talking to people one-on-one.

I am not saying that you should completely replace face-to-face or telephone communication, I am suggesting however that you find ways to maximize that communication and leverage it to a larger audience. As a for instance yesterday I spent 30 minutes on the phone with one of my trainers. We did a question-and-answer session that was intended for a larger audience. This call was recorded and will be heard by thousands of people.

Lately when people have been asking me for mentoring or business coaching and they don’t have any money to pay for my time, I have been asking them to do recorded calls with me that I can later release on my blog. These calls will be a valuable tool for me to recruit new clients, so even when I give up some of my free time, I am able to monetize it down the road.