Alright, listen up, because I’m about to tell you the single most important secret to success in literally any field of endeavor, online or off, and it’s only three words long: focus through failure. I’ve had websites — they failed. I gave up on them because they didn’t ‘pop’ like I thought they should. I put 5-8 hours of work in every day for months only to waste all of that time because I lost focus, and I decided that I had failed.

I was, in a word, stupid.

But the next time I tried, I decided not to invest my own time. I hired an SEO company and risked my money rather than my time. I thought I was being stupid again, and sure enough, when there was no ‘pop’ a few months later, I almost backed out and gave up. But then, I talked to this guy at the SEO services department of this company I had hired, and he told me not to give up. He said “You see the new Karate Kid movie? You know, where Jackie Chan says “Your focus needs more focus? What they don’t tell you is what ‘focus’ means – it means Follow One Course Until Success. Don’t give up — because until you give up, you haven’t failed yet.”

Of course, I let him talk me into sticking with the company, and guess what? He was right. It took another few months — long after I was past my comfort level. I kept looking at my dwindling savings and going “this can’t be it.” That’s hard for a person to do. But I stuck with it, because some gurus I talked to basically agreed with the SEO guy, and I figured I didn’t want to throw away my money like I had thrown away my time.

Eventually, we hit pay dirt. It happened all at once — Google did a PR update, and suddenly a bunch of the pages I had backlinks from went up in PR, and my page benefited. I got ranked on the first page — a few cases, in the first spot — for my keywords. It was a long and worrisome phase, those dark days, but I focused through my failure, and in the end, the SEO companies came through for me.

There are three basic levels of website SEO in the modern Internet Marketing game. There’s the basic, low-level SEO that offshore companies are famous for performing quickly and accurately — simple, repetitive tasks like commenting on submitting your site to directories and pinging RSS aggregators. Then there’s midlevel SEO that involves keyword research; things like social bookmarking and forum posting fall into that category. Then you’ve got the top level of SEO, where you actually create content that you expect real people to read and respect. Article writing and submission, custom blog creation, and similar activities are top-level SEO.

Each stage of organic SEO is important, because each one fills different goals for your website:

Low-level SEO
Low-level SEO forms ‘background’ of your site’s link profile. Each one of these links is quick and inexpensive to create, which means that every site in the world that’s serious about SEO has hundreds of them. You can’t safely ignore this level of SEO, because even though Google doesn’t give any one of them that much credit, if you’re several hundred backlinks behind a competitor, you can’t catch up, no matter how powerful your few good backlinks are.

Mid-level SEO
The search engines give quite a bit more credit to midlevel backlinks, but they’re still relatively easy to create. If you’re just starting to build backlinks, it’s a good idea to start with midlevel links, because they’re less expensive but more powerful as a whole than high-level or low-level backlinks, respectively. In other words, mid-level backlinks have the best RoI in terms of ranking-per-dollar than the other levels of SEO — and that’s worth a lot.

High-level SEO
This is the gold mine. High-level SEO should take an hour or so of work for each backlink you get. That’s because you need the content associated with your site to be good, or you’ll miss out on lots of potential customers that would otherwise have clicked through to your landing page. Done right, however, high-level SEO drives traffic, which means sales, in addition to skyrocketing your page upward in the SERPs. What more could you need?

First page placement for some high-volume keywords: that’s the bread and butter of every single business online. But it’s a lofty goal if you’re a novice webmaster; it can seem impossible to obtain for any keyword worth having.

Of course, that’s why keyword research is the most important part of any website’s functional lifespan, but that’s neither here nor there. The point here and now is that any website can achieve first page placement — it’s just a question of whether you have time, money, or both.

Time
Having time means you can afford to wait a while for your first page placement. It means that you can invest time in creating your own backlinks, and then wait for months while those backlinks slowly build your website up further and further on the SERPs until you reach the front page.

Money
If you have money (and no time), you can obtain instant first page placement using the Sponsored Links section of any given major search engine. In order words, you hire a decent PPC management team to get your website onto the first page of the search engines by bidding on keywords and putting up sponsored advertisements.

Both
If you have both, you can pursue both plans at once — get a pay pre click campaign going for instant money, and then sit back and work on your backlinks and other SEO until you start getting some significant organic traffic flowing. Once you’ve achieved that, you can choose whether or not the PPC management is bringing in enough money to warrant keeping it up, or if you want to drop it and run with just the organic traffic.

Of course, it goes without saying that there is no “neither” option. If you’re a typical startup entrepreneur that’s already investing all of your time and money into your website, you’re going to have to sacrifice something in order to get onto the first page. It might hurt a bit up front, but once you commit to doing whatever it takes to achieve that front page placement — and you succeed — you’ll find that it was well worthwhile.

You can talk to any SEO company in the world, and they’ll all offer you the same basic concept: they’ll build backlinks for you, and raise your page’s ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). But that’s a very simplistic idea, because it leaves out the complex truth behind what Search Engine Optimization does — and doesn’t — do.

SEO, when done well, will absolutely get your page ranked in the SERPs, but you don’t rank “on Google”. You rank for a specific keyword or phrase on Google. If you just haphazardly build backlinks to your page, sure, you’ll end up ranking for something — but what exactly that ‘something’ is isn’t under your control. It’s dependent on a combination of your on-page SEO, your content, your anchor texts, and the content of the pages you backlink from.

On the other hand, if you find someone to do solid keyword research for you, and you understand that SEO is, in the end, keyword-centric and not site- or engine-centric, you can (re)build your pages from the ground up to focus on the keywords you’re SEOing towards. The next realization you need to have is that not all keywords are equal.

Most SEO companies will tell you about the stats of your keyword: how many daily searches, how many competing pages, etc. Some will go a step further and tell you about the competition in more detail, telling you how many backlinks and of what quality they have, giving you a chance to determine how difficult it will be to conquer that keyword. But that’s not everything either.

Keywords aren’t just entities that search engines use to determine SERPs rankings. They’re human language, and like all human language, keywords have their own inherent context. That context can have profound impacts on your business. For example, if you could go after “free aquarium construction” or “how to build a high quality aquarium”, which would you? Exactly — you’d avoid the word “free” because it’s a dead giveaway that that person isn’t spending money if they can avoid it.

Now choose between “affordable SEO services” and “backlinking campaigns”. It’s a little harder, but the word “affordable” is a sure giveaway that the person who typed that in has money and wants to spend it — if carefully — on some SEO. The other person is probably just looking for information.

It’s small but important things like this that separate a highly effective SEO job with a mediocre one. It all starts — it ALL starts — with the right keywords.

Custom blog creation is one of the greatest tools that a small business can purchase from a qualified SEO company. The reasons are legion, but the greatest benefits can be encapsulated in a few short concepts: content, control, conversions, and character.

Content
Anyone who has even looked sideways at the world of Internet Marketing has heard someone say “CONTENT IS KING”. That’s because it’s true — Google loves fresh content more than just about anything else. In this more than anything else, a blog is a great source of Search Engine love, because by it’s very design, it gives Google what it loves best on a regular schedule of goodness.

Control
By the same token, what SEO experts love more than anything else is a backlink that gives you complete control over all of its aspects. Specifically: the anchor text, the page linked to, the position of that backlink within the content, and the content of the content that surrounds the backlink. It’s very hard to get precise control over all of those aspects of the backlink, but blogs do it nicely.

Conversions
In succession, let’s look at what webmasters love most: to make sales. In most minds, the most important parts of making sales are traffic and conversions — but there’s a factor that seems to slip most people’s minds. Most gurus act as though it’s the landing page alone that determines conversions, but that’s just not the case. A good portion of the ‘convertiblity’ of a given visitor has to do with their state of mind before they get to the landing page — and with a blog, you can set them up to be in a buying state of mind before they reach the page, priming the pump as it were.

Character
And at last, it’s time to pay attention to the surfer. Surfers love to read things that are fun, outrageous, titillating, and zany. Blogs, because they’re expected to be one crazy person’s take on the world, are perfectly allowed to be any or all of those things.

And right there, you’ve got the reason why custom blogs are the best SEO this side of a massive spurt of article writing and distribution — because everyone, from the surfer to the search engine, loves them.

If there’s one complaint that webmasters have about article writing and distribution, it’s that it takes a long, long time to do it right. Not only do you have to know all of the rules that the biggest, baddest article directory (you know who you are) lays on its writers, but you also have to research and write articles relevant to your business. Then, you have to submit them — and if you don’t syndicate them over at least a dozen directories, you’re losing out on a lot of the potential of those articles. That’s several man-hours just in submissions!

So, how do the experts do it? The answer is “very much the same way that they do Forum posting.” That is to say, they start with a subject, they find a source that says something interesting, they rewrite that interesting thing so that it’s in completely different words, and they post it. Only with article writing and distribution, they add a couple of extra steps. The end result is the four-star method.

• First, they find a source. Sometimes it’s SGoogle News, sometimes it’s EzineArticles, sometimes it’s a cribd document. The point is that they choose source material that is clean, well-written, and of course relevant.
• Next, they rewrite the source material — often combining two or more sources — and they work in the keyword according to the rules of basic SEO (and EZA, of course).
• Then, they submit the article to those directories that manually go over all of their entries, and they wait for those to get approved.
• Finally, they go autosubmit to hundreds of less discerning directories, often after adding a backlink to a copy of the same article on the more discerning directories.

The end result, assuming the writer has a decent command of the English language and actually understands the topic at hand, is a few articles on a few powerful sites that each have dozens of backlinks to them from other iterations of the same article — making them much stronger to the search engines than if they were simple standalone articles.