Cheap Search Engine Optimization

Finding a cheap search engine optimization expert can be a difficult task to accomplish. While employed at a small, start up company, I was asked to get some quotes on Web designers and for SEO services. Some of the quotes for the SEO were in upwards of $1,700! They all promised to get a strong Page Rank, lots of traffic, and first page rankings for targeted keywords on search engine results in a matter of weeks. Just like with fixing a car, once you get a good understanding of search engine optimization, its an easy and cheap task to accomplish. However, when using cheap search engine optimization, you usually won't reap the rewards of it upfront. Patience is a key and with proper SEO implemented, your site will mature and will prove to be more beneficial to you then having an overly aggressive SEO plan.

Cheap Search Engine Optimization steps:

While there have been a number of sites that out of pure desperation, I've created using only the $9.95 I paid the host every month, you get the best out of your site by spending a little money. My cheap search engine optimization methods actually, in my opinion, wind up benefiting your site more then using professional services due to the fact that I try to make the SEO process as natural to the search engines as possible.

Use your Page Rank as your guide

Although your Google Toolbar PR (Page Rank) of your site isn't a definitive promise that traffic will be coming in hoards to your site and many people argue that you shouldn't pay attention to your Page Rank, but I tend to disagree. If Google gives you a high Page Rank, that means you're doing something right that they like. With that guiding factor, you know to keep up the good work!

Keep in mind that it may take a while for your Page Rank to improve. Google wants to make sure that your site is being kept up to date and regularly adding unique content to it. If they just gave your page a high ranking right away, it would be easy to make a lot of money by just throwing up a site full of content and walking away. Unfortunately, work has to be put into the page to get a high PR rank.

Keep your content fresh

This might be the most important aspect in cheap search engine optimization. Search engines all love original and unique content, not duplicated content. So if you're planning on just copying someones article and pasting it on their site, that is not going to work and it'll only hurt your Page Rank. Also, as a side note, I've had little success with article spinners. If you don't know what an article spinner is, basically you paste your article into the spinner and it changes around certain words to make the article seem unique. Problem is that when the article is spun, it tends to make very little sense or is grammatically incorrect. If your viewers see an article with horrible grammar, they aren't going to take you seriously and will probably leave your page. In addition, I have a feeling, eventually search engines will be able to determine the absolute uniqueness of an article and determine if the article has been spun.

Remember to keep your content fresh, interesting, and even controversial. This is why I stress that you start a site about something your passionate and interested in. I love to write educational and informative articles about making money, allowing me to always keep my readers educated and entertained.

Article Submissions

Once you've written your articles, go back and paste it into a Word document. Now change a word or two from each sentence in your article. Take that article and submit it to either eZineArticles.com or GoArticles.com. I tend to like GoArticles.com better because it seems to get me a lot more pingbacks.

The reason you need to change words in each sentence is to once again, prevent duplicate content. Now, this isn't black hat spinning in my view, since you are changing the words on your own and to the point where the sentences make sense. Now why are you submitting your site to these article sites? Well, these article sites have high Page Ranks and will get your link out there. You can submit your page to a variety of other article submission sites, but eZine and GoArticles are my favorite and most effective. Since you'll have your link on your article, you'll now have a back link from a high page ranking site. Once you have a bunch of back links, you'll be getting a lot of traffic from this easy and completely cheap search engine optimization tip.

Back links

Google has a particular formula they use to determine your Page Ranking. One of the keys to earning a high Page Ranking and probably the most influential factor is back linking. Back linking is basically a reference to your site. When another site posts your link on their page, that is a one way back link. Now, if you guys agree to exchange links, that is two-way links and no longer really boosts your rankings.

The Page Rank of the site back linking to you can determine the importance of the backlink. If a site with a PR 9, say Facebook, is linking to your site, then you'll get more strength on your site. Also, if you can get backlinks from educational and governmental sites, you've hit the jackpot. These sites are some of the most respected on the internet, so if your link is on their pages, the search engines know it is coming from a reliable source.

One of my favorite ways of achieving back links is by posting comments on blogs. Now while some of the blogs may have no follow tags for their comments, most don't. So what I do is in my search I type "blog: my keyword." From this, blogs that focus on my keyword will come up. I search around and see if they have a good PR and will comment with a deep link to my specific article on my site. Another method would be to set up Google Alerts which will email you any time they find a blog that has a post on the keyword you've asked for.

Cheap Search Engine Optimization: Deep Linking

Deep linking is important to search engines because it allows the searcher to further pin point what they are after. Basically, a deep link is when a one way link is pointed to a specific post or page of your site outside of the homepage. This is important because if a search engine notices you have a specific page about say Phillips 50" LCD televisions and a searcher is searching for them, they can easily be directed to that page.

So, when linking on blogs, forums, or anywhere, make sure the link is a deep link that has relevance to the page.

Cheap Search Engine Optimization: Robots.txt file

Your robots.txt file contains certain codes in it that directs the search engines. It basically gives permission to the search engine to crawl and index your site. This is important because if you have a no follow code on your robots.txt file, your site won't be indexed. There are many codes available for your to use on your robots.txt file to help specify which folders, sub domains, or search engines can be indexed.

XML Sitemap

A sitemap is an outline of your page. It gives search engines a more straightforward look at your site, sort of like an RSS feed. Every time your site is updated with new content, your site map is updated and will alert the search engines that new information is present on your site.

Keyword Density

This may be one of the most over looked aspects of cheap search engine optimization. Your keyword for the article should occur enough in the article so the search engine knows that the page is about your keyword, but not so much that its flagged as spam. Your keyword should be present in the very beginning of your article, about 3-4 times in the body and once again at the very end of the article. That way its the first and last thing the search engines see. Also remember to either bold or underline your keywords once or twice in your article.

Cheap Search Engine Optimization

Now while there are millions of methods outside of what I've presented to achieve cheap search engine optimization, these are the most effective for the sites I currently own. All of the time, policies are changing regarding how search engines rank your site, but if you stick to these basics, you should have a solid foundation that will be easily able to adapt to new procedures.