Search engine optimization is as easy as you want it to be – and as difficult as you want it to be. The reality is that it is as simple as A,B,C.

A well designed SEO friendly website that is W3C compliant and user friendly. Your websites design should include a good URL structure and easy to navigate links.

Building links from other other related sites. Whether you gain links from similar sites, directories or social sites is not important. In fact gaining links from a variety of these sites probably helps. What is important is to gain as many links as possible.

Creating content that relates to your niche, is keyword relevant and that readers will find relevant. If other sites find this content relevant enough they will also link to it. Once you have quality content you can start to develop link relationships with other relevant sites.

Despite everything you may read, search engine optimization comes down to those three basic points. Each point is of equal value – no one point takes precedence.

Obviously ensuring things like title tags, heading formats (H1, H2) and content layout is important. These have dual purposes in that they help readers scan your content whilst providing good search engine optimization structure to your content.

Search engine optimization is not rocket science or quantum physics. It is about quality in design, linking and content. Get those areas right and you will have a strong platform to base any future tweaking.

Search engine optimization is not a cheap process with cost ranging from $35 per page to $100 per page. If you have a website with 20 pages then you are going to pay from around $700 for very basic services upwards to around $2000. So how do you justify those costs.

Justifying costs and setting a budget for search engine optimization is no different to setting a budget for advertising, salaries or any other area within a business. The real justification comes in the results. You can almost place a good search engine optimization campaign in the same basket as advertising, the aim of both is to get people onto your site, hopefully to spend money.

If you had to write a report for management justifying the cost of a search engine optimization campaign, then perhaps the following figures may help – let’s face it, management like numbers and want the bottom line, not the fluff.

Take a baseline of $50 per page with a website of 20 pages. That is a cost of $1000 for a good search engine optimization campaign on those 20 pages. The hard part is then trying to determine what sort of traffic could be generated. Statistics show that around 80% of users access their information through one of the search engines.

A check on the number of times a particular keyword is used in the search engines is a good start. Checking competitors to see what sort of traffic they are receiving is a second area to look at. A good search engine optimization consultant can provide you with a rough idea of what share of this traffic you may be able to acquire.

To justify costs, you need to be able to get your visitors from the search engines at less than the cost of an Adwords pay-per-click campaign so knowing what sort of costs are involved there will also help.

If you can see each page bringing in an extra 100 visitors per month, that’s 2000 visitors per month for all 20 pages, the cost works out at $0.50 per visitor. However, the cost to optimize these pages is generally a one off so you can reasonably extrapolate those figures to an annual basis. Over a 12 month period the cost per visitor works out at around $0.04 cents each.

Now do a comparison with any other form of advertising. I think you will find that four cents per visitor is one of the cheapest costs around. It can be easy to justify the cost of a good search engine optimization program if you collate all the facts and do some simple maths. It can beat pay-per-click advertising hands down.

Wherever you go you are going to find advice on how you should undertake a good search engine optimization program. There are however many website owners (and blog owners) who feel that a couple of SEO tricks will do the job. Here are the top three myths debunked.

SEO Myth 1: Search engine optimization only needs to be done once.
If your website is providing ‘fresh’ content on a regular basis then your SEO program needs to work on that new content. As new content is added you need to consider the internal link structure along with external links and service submissions. SEO is constantly evolving so there is never going to be a one stop SEO fix.

SEO Myth 2: Web Designers are good at SEO.
The reality is that most web designers are good at just that – web design. Most SEO consultants battle with web designers to gain the most effective SEO design for the site they are working on. Many blogs claim to be SEO ready – and they are – “ready’ that is. You still need to deliver the right search engine optimization strategies if you want to rank well.

SEO Myth 3: Throw some keywords around in the content to rate.
Keywords need to appear in more than just the content. They need to appear in the headings, page titles as within the content. There needs to be effective use of keywords within links as well.

Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving process. As consultants there are times when something will work on site A but when repeated on site B it has no affect – we need to be constantly monitoring the progress each time we make a slight change in the what we are doing.

By employing an expert the long term gains to your search results position can be dramatic – don’t believe all the myths and hype that can sometimes be found on the net.

Your own analytics may just be hiding a few gems when it comes to keywords and search engine optimization. Most people look at their analytics and start to assess their keywords; what is working; what is not working; which pages are drawing traffic; what search terms are delivering the most traffic. Sometimes it pays to look at which search terms are delivering the least amount of traffic.

Think about this logically. If you have not optimized a search term yet it is delivering you traffic – why? Chances are if you do a search using these search terms you will not be on the front page of the results. You may be on page two, or perhaps deeper. If your search engine optimizations strategy has not targeted that search phrase, and it is not on the front page of the SERP’s, why are people digging in a page or two and finding yours.

My first response is to look at what is appearing at the top of the SERP’s. Is their content not really satisfying the search term? Is there an opportunity here? Can I create a page or two and use my search engine optimization strategies to target that search term and perhaps get to the top of the SERP’s and gain more traffic?

The answer is yes you can and if your content does satisfy the searchers queries then one could argue that you have provided a valuable service. I would suggest a couple of precautions before jumping in and wasting your valuable search engine optimization time.

Check the search history for that term. You may receive 5-10 visitors per day for that term, but it could be from a very low base. If there are not a significant number of searches for that term then be satisfied with what you have. If there are a lot of searches for that term, check on some of the alternate terms to see if there is value there as well. You may be able to include these in your search engine optimization strategies to gain even more traffic.

Sometimes the search terms that bring the lowest traffic can be the gems that lead to a huge increase in targeted traffic. Simple search engine optimization strategies can turn these terms into your top traffic generators.

ICANN has voted to make some interesting changes to domain names and the management of those names.

WebProNews has a fairly comprehensive post on the topic. One of the areas that I do find interesting and worth reporting is the proposed end to domain name tasting. To quote from the post:

It passed a resolution to eliminate domain tasting, a practice of using the grace periods to register domain names in bulk to see which ones are profitable.

Many people have called for the banning of this practice – they have finally decided to listen. Even bigger is the issue of opening up the current domain classification restrictions. You will soon be able to classify your own web address – at a cost – perhaps as high as $100,000.

It will be interesting to see how some of the large corporations use this freedom. Will we see search.msn or search.google. I can see over time there will be a lot of confusion. One of the areas that I don’t quite understand is the requirement to have a ‘business plan and technical capacity’.

How long will take for domain registration businesses to find a way around this requirement allowing individuals to register names under their ‘business plan and technical capacity’. Removing domain name tasting has been a necessity – putting stiff requirements on domain names is a different story. Time will tell.

Sometimes it is easy to understand why doctors hide their professional when going to parties, you know the story, “hey your a doctor, I have this pain in my …..”. These days, tell people your a search engine optimization consultant and those with web pages will pounce. “I’ve got this web site and I was wondering if you could take a look at it sometime and …….”

Sometimes I oblige, generally I don’t and these days I talk less about what I do and more about what the web can do for other, if I talk about it at all. When pressed, I explain that search engine optimization is really just another term for web site quality control.

In reality, when you look closely at what we do, that is exactly what we do. It can be difficult at times, particularly when your trying to squeeze a couple of ranking spots out of the search engines to get above the fold, otherwise, search engine optimization is a fairly process that, for the basics at least, can processed from a check list.

You have read it all before. Good page structure with good keywords rich content. Effective titles, keyword titles and meta tags and links, links and more links. The hardest part of any search engine optimization program is development of inbound links.

When it comes to your web page and search engine placement, don’t stress about it, think of your search engine optimization program as a form of quality control and get those basics right first. You will be surprised how much traffic you can get just by chilling out and getting it right.

WordPress has for a long time been a popular platform for blogs. It has also been loosely classified as a content management software or CMS. There are however many other different types of CMS out there and they to need effective search engine optimization strategies.

Two of the more popular CMS platforms are Drupal and Joomla. Drupal has not always been an easy tiger to tame when it comes to search engine optimization. However there are several modules that can now be added that makes this process a whole lot easier. I will cover some of these modules in a later post.

Joomla on the other hand can be very awkward especially if you are coming from a HTML or WordPress background. There are components for Joomla that enable effective search engine optimization – you do however need to watch exactly what you do.

One component that can be used to add effective search engine optimization strategies to areas such as URL’s and meta tags is SEF Advance. Redevolution have a very comprehensive search engine optimization checklist for Joomla which is well worth a read if you are using this CMS platform.

It does not matter which platform you use for your content management, you need to be able to manipulate URL’s, meta tags and page titles for search engine optimization rankings. There are many articles around describing how to optimize each of CMS platforms.