How to Make Cheaper SEO Decisions

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a popular topic for the best, but no more than when you need to set the budget of key assignments. At the outset, determining the amount of return on the investment of SEO is, at best, a calculated estimate. Then the finance manager asks what is the payback period. Based on all these questions every online marketer fears; "How do we know that we're getting value for money from our SEO budget?" With SEO, like any business decision, It helps to start with the basics. As a result of being systematic about SEO strategy, it is easy to navigate and increases the opportunity to make cheap SEO decisions.

The first step is to define the objective.

This sounds obvious, but many SEO managers jump directly into keyword research without first revealing the requirements of the business. Higher search engines are just one way to end the rankings. It is important to set the end goal first. For example, a media website may want to increase traffic to raise the quality of media. An e-commerce website will be interested in increasing conversion or setting an income goal. Once the purpose is clear, it is much easier to make keyword decisions that can achieve the stated goal.

The second step is to understand which search terms (keywords) are most likely to deliver the targeted purpose.

It is easy to lose the possibility of making more economic referencing decisions at this stage of the process. For example, picking up only high-volume keywords may not be a cheap SEO decision, if the competition for those search terms are too high, or if the search term is so common that it's not going to drive good-quality, targeted traffic. Spending time evaluating a comprehensive keyword list and evaluating the amount of search, competition, and growth trends are essential for making the best SEO decisions.

The third step in the process is to make sure that the target website is found by search engines.

The best keyword research is useless if search engines don't index target web pages. Again, it's not rocket science (unless you're NASA's SEO manager). The Google Webmaster Tool is a free resource for webmasters that helps search engine spiders crawl a website to the best shape and index pages. Don't forget to write down mandatory and relevant page titles and meta descriptions to help search engines do their job.

In the fourth step, content is used to make cheap referencing decisions.

Without relevant content, search engines won't rank your pages. Keyword Research is the beginning of enriching content on the target website. Keeping the content updated is also important so it is useful to think of planning resources for this. Keep in mind that the purpose of search engines is to return the most relevant websites for a given search term. To this end, content is king!

Finally, but somehow at least, search engines need to rank websites not just by relevance but by 'importance' or 'authority'. There are a number of factors that affect the domain including the age of the domain (and the time it is registered in the future), the speed of page loading, etc. However, the website can be easily influenced by the webmaster without having to do more' is important for a given search term.

Search engines have therefore created a shipyard to measure the importance, making it more objective. Search engines effectively use links to other websites as 'votes' for destination websites. Simply put, the more websites are linked to a site, the more 'important' it will be in the eyes of search engines, and as a result, the higher the ranking. When starting link building, there are some key points to keep in mind to ensure the best SEO decisions.

In the beginning, don't try to lose the system with 'spam' links in forums, etc. These practices are referred to by search engines as 'black hats' and will have a negative impact on your ranking. Stick to the 'White Hat' techniques, which are basically based on the relevance of the content to develop links. Websites will link to other websites if the content is good and highly relevant. To speed up this process, it is wise to identify and interact with important websites based on keyword research.

Creating unique contacts is very important and many websites will be happy to publish unique articles that link to relevant web pages. The directory is also important. Selecting a directory that is relevant to the target subject/keyword is particularly useful, but there are a number of common web directories like Dmoz that are highly valued by search engines.

Finally, find sites with high page rank values (the metric that Google uses to determine the importance of a web page). Links to websites are not a democracy. A link to a high-page rank web page is much more valuable than a link to a low page rank page.

Following a systematic and considered process for SEO, it is much easier to make decisions that reduce the cost of search engine optimization and increase returns on investment.