Learning SEO

Search engine optimisation is the latest industry to hit the news, and is a rapidly growing sector. In depth knowledge in this area opens the door to you either sourcing out your skills to business in order to help them increase their online presence, or using them to promote your own website. Thankfully this sometimes complicated process has become a lot easier to master due to a variety of SEO Cources and information becoming available to the general public.

One such way to gain this information is through various e-books which are available all over the internet if you have the time to look for them. A quick search for seo e-books on Google will bring a large number of results, and many are distributed free of cost. The best bet is to download every one you can find and have a read through them all. Once you gain a general understanding of SEO and its various methods you can then make a more qualified decision as to whether you need to make purchases of e-books for more information or if you think you have the handle of it already. This is most definitely the place to start though as it is a low cost way of getting a feel for the industry.

Once you've read through the available literature you'll want to get started on actually promoting your website and moving up the rankings. The e-books will explain the various methods required to achieve better rankings, through link building and other methods. All these things can be done by hand although it will become very time consuming and tedious, if you wish to build enough links to rank well for profitable keyword terms. Therefore many internet marketers turn to SEO software to automate the process and give them more time to work on the content of their site rather than promotion. These software programs can automatically email link requests, check your backlinks, find out which keywords will work best for you and every other task connected to SEO. There are many different programs out there to help you optimize and promote your website and most of them offer a free trial. Therefore it’s not hard to just look around downloading the different trial programs and testing them out until you find one you like. It must be said though that a good SEO program is a must if you want to streamline your online promotion as it will cut through the grunt work, leaving you more time to use your mind creatively to build better websites and plumb new markets.

Ok you have been shown the do it yourself alternatives to taking an SEO course, and the best ways to learn SEO at your own pace. If you still want to take an SEO course, and there are many reasons to do so, such as if it was required by your place of employment or you want to have a certificate to show potential employers, then there are some good courses out there. Your typical SEO course should be up to date with current algorithm theories and make sure you get a solid guarantee so if the course doesn’t live up to expectations you won't be out of pocket. Most SEO Cources out there are far more expensive than just getting an e-book and some software and learning for yourself, which many consider to be the best option. So it might be an idea to do a smaller course first and see if you enjoy learning that way before shelling out for the major courses. It is hoped that you find something suitable to your situation as there is a wealth of choice out there.

This has been up until now a general outline of all the different ways you can become competent in search engine optimisation and be able to handle your internet marketing yourself. Now there will be a summary of what to do if you find it hard to get a handle on the techniques involved, or if you just find it plain boring and would rather spend your time doing something else.

Out Sourcing

Depending on the keyword you have decided to optimise for, it could be extremely easy or extremely difficult to achieve high rankings. For a non-competitive keyword, relatively few backlinks and optimisation factors will be needed and you will probably find it quite easy to manage a successful SEO campaign all by yourself. However for the more competitive keywords, which are often the most profitable ones, ranking high will be very difficult. For the more competitive keywords, one may need to consider outside help to build your pages search engine ranking and traffic. There are a few different options to consider here, such as purchasing the SEO services of an experience practitioner, or purchasing targeted traffic for your websites niche. Moreover there are many other forms of advertising on the internet available for you to try out, as long as you’re willing to put in the effort to find them. We will go through the various options available to you to increase the traffic to your website.

SEO Companies

If you find that either SEO is too technical for you, or your efforts have not born any fruit then it may be time to consider handing it over to a professional search engine optimisation firm. There are many different companies out there working with a lot of websites to achieve better rankings for their customers and you can definitely benefit from their resources. They achieve better rankings for your website through the same techniques you could implement yourself, but at greater efficiency and with far less time invested on your part. There are many companies offering these services and some are farm more successful than others. It is an absolute necessity that any company you choose to purchase SEO services from offers a full money back guarantee, if they don't offer it then do not go near them. Sadly there are no free options in this category, as no one will do SEO work on your website for free as it is just too time consuming to do even to build up company image.

Targeted Traffic

Another option available to internet promoters who have not found success with search engine optimisation would be to purchase targeted traffic. This is when a company who owns a large amount of expired domains sends the traffic to your website for a fee. Depending on the quality of the traffic this can be very lucrative but this is one area which contains far more rip off merchants than honest ones. Often times you will buy a traffic package and the company will send your site X amount of bot hits which will mean your site will register a lot of visits but as none of them are actual people you will obviously receive no sales or revenue of any kind. The upside of this all is that targeted traffic is an instant solution to visitor numbers, and the relatively low cost ( $20-$60 for 5k to 10k visitors) it is not a huge outlay to experiment with a few companies and see which ones work for you. One traffic seller we most definitely do not recommend is one called BuyExpiredDomains.com. They have very attractive prices, and so we took a test run of 5000 visitors.

On one of our websites known to convert visitors to sales, not one of those 5000 visitors made a purchase. So it makes you wonder whether any real human visitors were delivered to our site. As stated earlier though, the cost to test a company’s traffic is so small that it won't hurt the bank if you do encounter a few duds. The thing about this kind of traffic is it’s never going to be as targeted as regular search engine traffic so you won't be able to convert at 1/110 like you would normally. You might get one sale for every 500 or so visitors they send you, but that can still turn profitable depending on the items you sell.

Traffic Exchanges

As we all know, a budget is a very important thing when starting a business or trying to turn a profit. A free method of generating more traffic would obviously be a godsend to most websites out there. So it’s quite a good thing that these kinds of programs exist and are proving quite successful. Traffic exchange networks work by either you viewing ads and in doing so earning your own ads some viewing time on their networks, or getting a visitor to your site for every one sent to another site in the network. Both methods can work very well if implemented correctly and are great sources of free traffic. Though it sounds too simple this method has been working for many people for a long time. It’s also a great way to test out new products as the audience is there waiting for you. Many traffic exchanges work free of charge so you have nothing to lose by testing them out.

Purchasing Ad Space

When considering purchasing ad space, so many people jump straight onto Google Adwords and start shelling out money. The fact of the matter is paying per click will always be a low margin game, meaning you have a great chance of making nothing at all or even losing money. Moreover Google’s cost per click does seem to be a little extreme at times, though that is probably because so many people advertise there that it drives the price into orbit. A better option is to purchase adverts which will be displayed for a set period of time regardless of the amount of people who click on them. As long as the price is right this can be a very profitable way of going about your internet promotion. Buying advertising space based on the length of time your ad will be displayed is by far the best method for a new business, and search engines such as ExactSeek supply exactly this. Just Google ExactSeek and check out their paid inclusion program, which is a far better option than most pay per click programs.

The above methods can all be invaluable when trying to increase your online presence and the profitability of your web business. When starting out it is often very hard to catch up to the rest of the pack with all the technical things SEO involves. Therefore outsourcing your internet marketing can be a great way of getting more revenue out of your website without having to put in the man hours learning the technical side of all the methods involved. Good luck in your internet promotion campaign.

John Samuels has been a web developer and internet marketer for 7 years. He now manages a number of successful websites and will soon be launching an SEO firm in his homeland Australia. Visit SEO Cources for more advice and articles on how to make your mark on the internet. This article may be used only if posted with the authors information link to website.