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.

Many search engine optimization ‘experts’ will tell you that organic traffic is ‘free’. Don’t believe them! Nothing is free as the saying goes and that includes traffic from the search engines.

If you have a well optimized site that has used all the best search engine optimization techniques then you may find your site ranked highly for your keywords in the search results. Any traffic from those searches may not cost you a cent, but getting to the top of the search results has cost you.

If you undertake your own search engine optimization then your time has been the investment. Your time has a value - a value that only you can place on it. If you outsource your search engine optimization program then that will come with a monthly invoice.

Having said that, organic traffic can be very cost effective. Whilst it is hard to put a cost per click value on traffic arriving through organic searches, for some high value keywords it would certainly work out at a fraction of the cost.

Never consider organic traffic as free traffic. It has a value and as such should be treated as being valuable. Most web masters look at organic traffic as being a bonus - it is not. The search engine optimization process is often difficult. Place a value on that organic traffic and treat the visitor accordingly - don’t treat them as optional free visitors.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an uncommonly dynamic and broad field of marketing which is constantly changing and adapting to market conditions, users’ search habits, industry trends, and other factors. As such, Search Engine Optimization facts that were true six months or even six weeks ago may or may not still apply. Further complicating the issue is the fact that the combination of SEO strategies that achieve great results for one site may not bring the same results for another.

Yet another confusing aspect of Search Engine Optimization is that there are so many different facets to SEO that understanding the impact of these strategies and how they work together to achieve positive results is challenging at best. But despite the ongoing changes and evolving nature of SEO, there are some Search Engine Optimization facts that continue to endure and are applicable to any website. Some of these SEO facts include:

> Research Rules – You see this mentioned quite a bit because the quality of research you conduct on your industry, keywords, and phrases to optimize, keyword competition, and the planning of your site is the single biggest factor of ranking well.

> Quality Content Delivers – Your company’s website and especially the quality of the site content are a huge factor on how site visitors perceive your company’s goods and services. Whether it has been optimized or not, poorly written content turns off readers and dissuades the owners of other sites to create links to your site.

> Proper Site Architecture is Essential – Developing your site with a logical, intuitive layout of splash pages, supporting pages, and an SEO-friendly URL structure makes it easier for site visitors to find what they’re looking for quickly and increases each page ranking potential.

> Clean HTML Code is a Big Factor – Websites constructed with clean code load more quickly for site visitors, are easier for search engines to index, and are much less likely to result in loading errors which turn off visitors and search engines alike.

> Search Engines Favor Quality Links – The quality, not quantity, of inbound and outbound links that your site features are a big part of how search engines determine ranking. Each inbound link from another site is perceived by the search engines as a ‘vote’ for the credibility of your site. If the content on your site is very good, the webmasters of other sites will be more inclined to link to it.

> Adding Fresh Content Regularly is Key – This gives your site visitors a reason to visit your site more often and search engines are more inclined to index the pages of your site more frequently if you add new content on a regular basis.

It’s fair to say that each of these Search Engine Optimization facts contribute to the success of a website in the same way that a sound foundation ensures that a building will endure over time. If a website is planned, written, coded, and built from the very beginning to rank well, the chances of achieving that goal are greatly enhanced.

Believe it or not there was a time when search engines didn’t exist, at least, not in their present format and back then, there was little in the way of search engine optimization. We still received visitors, and some sites even managed to generate sales!

So how did we get visitors to our sites when search engines couldn’t help and search engine optimization was totally unknown?

Believe it or not, it was simple old fashioned marketing. Go through any of the computer magazines for the mid 1990’s and you will see page after page of ads. Visit one of those websites and what did you find, ads to other related sites.

If it wasn’t advertising, it was through forum’s and bulletin boards. We hardly hear of bulletin boards anymore. Forums still exist and are widely used still - but not quite in the same way.

Call me old fashioned - however I still believe a website can survive without any search engine optimization - so long as it is prepared to go down the tough road of simple advertising.

Yahoo! Search Marketing blog has an interesting article on what they feel are the “5 secrets for managing keywords in your account“. Their ‘5 secrets’:

1. Consider Your Customer
The advice here is to consider ‘browsers’ and ‘buyers’ separately. Browsers are still researching whilst buyers have their cash in their hand ready to spend. But yourself in the users shoes and consider terms that ‘browsers’ may use along with terms that ‘buyers’ may use.

2. Go High and Low
Yahoo recommends using separate ad-groups for high volume and low volume keywords:

Why? If you have a mix of high- and low-volume keywords in the same ad group, it may hurt your quality index score, which is based on the performance of the ad group as a whole. Also, using separate ad groups will make it easier to see which ads and keywords are working, and which aren’t.

3. Try Branding and Niche Marketing
Since you don’t pay for impressions, using high value keywords in a niche will place your brand on display - you may not get high click throughs - you do get publicity.

4. Know the Wrong Keywords
Just because you offer a particular product or service does not mean you should bid for that term - use modifiers to more accurately define your product or service.

5. Don’t Ignore the Obvious
We always seem to ignore the obvious:

Sometimes the most obvious keywords are the ones that advertisers end up forgetting, such as bidding on their brand name, domain name and variations thereof.

If you use search engine marketing then perhaps those tips will help. The most important tip for any search marketing is to place yourself in your customers shoes. If you can do that successfully then you should be able to hit the right keywords fairly accurately.

Every now and then this little question raises its head and the same information seems to be broadcast. Search engine optimization for you images using the Alt - or using Titles? Problem is - it’s always from the Google perspective.

Google reads the Alt tag - end of story - according to Google:

the “alt” attribute specifies an alternate text for user agents that cannot display images, forms or applets. The “title” attribute is a bit different: it “offers advisory information about the element for which it is set.” As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the “alt” attribute. Feel free to supplement the “alt” attribute with “title” and other attributes if they provide value to your users!

Since Google is not the only search engine in town, I suggest you use both and optimize them as accurately as possible. They do need to add value to your user - but there is no reason why they cannot add search engine optimization value as well.

The Alt text is what a visitor is going to see if they have images turned off in their browser so make it meaningful. The title tag can also be optimized using keywords where appropriate. Search engine optimization is not just doing the minimum requirements - some time that little extra may help - particularly on the alternate search engines.

Getting the right keywords for your website, your product/service or niche can be a difficult job. There are many tools available that can help to sift through the millions of possible keywords and keywords combinations, however, sometimes nothing beats asking the potential customers.

You don’t even need to ask - often it is more a case of listening to what they are saying and what questions they are asking. Search engine optimization has for a long time preferred single keywords or short 3 word key-phrases. As internet users become more skilled in their searches, the use of long tail phrases has been increasing.

Humans are different in skills, whether its internet, reading, writing, or, as we are all to familiar with these days, spelling. You will always find it difficult to find perfect long tail matches for your search engine optimization program.

The key is to find generic long tail phrases - phrases that are open ended. Rather than optimizing ‘how to update WordPress 2.X to WordPress 2.5′, you may want to limit the question to “how to update WordPress to” - probably not the best of example - but you should get the idea - the question is not complete and you could insert any number of endings - but that is what we want. That key-phrase would hopefully capture any search based on those words.

Social networks can be one your best friends when it comes to finding keywords - or key-phrases. By watching what others are saying and by noting how questions are phrased, you can soon get a feel for what is either current in discussions, or at the very least, current in questions styles and types.

Use the information collected as the starting point to refine your keyword structure. Search engine optimization based on what is current will have a better success rate than some standard single (highly competitive) keywords.

Chris McElroy, AKA namecritic left a comment on this morning’s post USA Today Interviews Matt Cutts On Search Engine Optimization and I just had to take his opening line in reply.

My post was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response to his interview - perhaps my tongue was not pushed far enough into my cheek. The interview was pretty much a Google search engine optimization how to, although nothing of real interest was revealed - certainly nothing new.

Chris makes a valid point when he states:

But maybe some other search engines do pay attention to those things. Google will not punish you for using keywords as a meta, so why ignore anything that might help a website get traffic from another source?

To take his point a little further, I think search engine optimization can be broken into three components:

Minimum SEO Requirements:
Generally speaking the minimum search engine optimization strategies required to get your page noticed and ranked within all of the search engines.

Wont Hurt To Include:
Search engine optimization strategies that, whilst they may not have your pages shooting to number one, add that little extra without suffering any penalties.

Time Wasters:
There are time wasters when it comes to search engine optimization. An example is trying to stuff content full of keywords and trying to make is look ‘natural’ to both the reader and the search engine. You can spend a lot of time creating this type of content with little or no benefit and perhaps the risk of penalties for over stuffing.

It can be interesting to read a lot of the information that comes out of Google. At times they talk like they are the only search engine in town and that all search engine optimization strategies should be targeted at them.

The long term reality is that no webmaster can afford to rely on just the one search engine for traffic. Until Google can claim to provide 100% of all search traffic, you have to be able to claim your share from any of the other providers.

Having a search engine optimization strategy that covers all the basics for all the search engines should be every webmaster (and bloggers) primary aim. If you can repeatedly get those basics right, you can then work at tightening individual pages. If you don’t have those basics to begin with, you will have little chance of any meaningful rank on any of the search engines.

Thanks for your reminder Chris.

Search engine optimization comes in all shapes and sizes. For those who have great sites and products but with no option to sell ProStores has created the ability for all to sell. ProStores is a full service company that allows you to build your own web store without having to hire a design firm and a programmer to get things started for you.

This ecommerce service is extremely simple to use and is designed to help those in great need to sell a product. This service is designed for all experience levels. Whether you are a seasoned online entrepreneur or just starting out ProStores can help you get started easily, efficiently and safely. If you are an EBay seller than this service might be what you need to take your business to the next level. You can now take your products and put them in your own personal website that mirrors your EBay site. You continue to manage your EBay store and all inventory figures and numbers will match and sync to your EBay store so there is no need to worry. ProStores will walk you through the entire process from start to finish ensuring that you have the confidence in what is being done for you.

For all those interested in what ProStores can do for your business please visit the website and learn more.