SEO on a Shoestring Does Pay Off

Literally, millions of dollars are spent each month to have search engine optimization techniques applied to websites in the hopes of garnishing a top ranking.

These top rankings are obtained rather quickly, in some cases the site is recognized by the major search engines within a month. A top 10 ranking for the primary keywords are still months out, if at all. Yet, millions of dollars are still being spent in the hopes that a top 10/page 1 ranking will result.

SEO on a Shoestring

Then you have the little guy who creates his own site and has no marketing budget to speak of. His site looks good as he used one of the free shopping carts available on the Internet and selected an attractive template for his vertical market. His total outlay at this point is a big fat $0.

The great thing about the Internet is that it is truly a level playing field. A little guy such as the one described above can truly compete with the big mega sites for traffic if he approaches SEO correctly.

There are no tricks or gimmicks to being successful in obtaining top search engine rankings. "Black Hat" SEO will only get you blocked by the search engines so don't try any of those tactics. Stay clean, above board and you will be successful in a relatively short period of time.

Cover all of your Bases

SEO on a shoestring means that you are doing the work yourself and not paying someone else to do it for you. Fortunately, the work isn't hard and only requires a portion of your time.

SEO on a shoestring means that you gain favor with the major search engines by providing them what they are looking for. That is they are looking for relevant content to display in the body of their results so that they can then display their paid advertisements across the top, side and bottom of the page. It is as simple as that. They want to use your website to help them have a place to display their paid ads.

I have no problem with that. As long as I understand the rules I can play the game. I just have to make my site more attractive than the paid ads.

By all means, give them what they want! Give them relevant content that is optimized to rank higher than your competitors. If they are willing to send a software crawler/spider to your site to "read" your site then by all means give them something to read.

Make sure that your page title, keyword tag and description tag are also optimized for your keyword phrase. The first thing a crawler/spider will read is your page title. The keywords and description are next followed by the body of your page. Make sure that each of these has your keyword phrase as the first thing listed.

Also, make sure that your footer has your keyword phrase in it as well. In this case, make it the last thing on the page. This way the crawler will see your keyword phrase as the first thing on the page (Page title), throughout the body and then the last thing on the page. In essence, you are covering your bases.

By following these steps and keeping the keyword phrase somewhere around the 2 - 2.5% saturation point on the page the search engines will see your page as optimized. Do this over and over again on your site and the results will be an optimized site that is seen as very favorable by the search engines.

Nathan Lewis has earned a solid reputation helping small to medium sized businesses expand their reach through niche market websites such as My POS Printer New receipt printers from Epson Receipt Printers and Star Micronics Receipt Printers