There’s a reason why first page placement, or more specifically top-three placement for any given keyword, is the goal of every legitimate SEO company in the world. Simply put, if you can’t get your website listed in the top three entries of any given keyword, you’re not getting the traffic that keyword could be giving you — not by a longshot.

Lots of SEO companies offer a first page placement service. Some of them advertise that they’ll get you there through pay per click marketing (sponsored placement) and others by a massive organic SEO campaign (backlink building). Either way, you’re literally spending money in order to get traffic in the hopes that the traffic you get will earn you more money than you spent.

The difference is in timing and amount. If you go for PPC marketing, you’re going to spend a lot of money all at once, and you’re going to get your traffic instantly. You’ll have to make more money per click than you spend in order to show a profit, and depending on how you choose your keywords, that can be surprisingly difficult.

If you pull it off, you’ll be right back on the wire again next month, as the next month of marketing budget gets put up on the PPC lottery. This process continues for as long as you choose to stick with the instant-traffic, constant-risk model of pay per click marketing.

The other option, organic SEO, is the turtle in the turtle-and-the-hare story. You pay money, and nothing happens. You pay some more money, and nothing happens. You may some more money, and you see a trickle of traffic. You pay enough money over enough time, and suddenly you have top-three rankings for some badass keywords. More traffic than you can handle descends upon you, and you’re rich. All you have to do is live long enough for all of those payments to kick in.

Of course, if you have the cash, you could do both — both is definitely the best bet. But not all of us have that kind of funding hanging around, so it’s up to each of us to decide which route to success is going to be the easiest for our lifestyles to support.

Directory submission is one of those everyday SEO activities that most people think they have pretty much down pat. You find a directory that accepts websites, you turn in your link, and then you find another directory. It’s almost the most idiot-proof, dead-simple kind of website SEO you can imagine. But there are complexities to directory submission that many SEO novices might not imagine; one of those complexities is the difference between free directories and paid directories.

Why would you ever pay to have your website listed in a directory if there are free directories out there waiting to be submitted to? We’ll explain that in a moment. Before we get there, let’s look at the things that make one free directory better than another.

Age — Obviously, Google values links from older domains more than links from newbie domains.
Relevance — There are lots of generic directories out there, but there are also plenty of niche-specific directories that will earn your backlink extra ‘juice’ for their relevance to your site’s subject.
Static Links — Directories with dynamic links are pointless for SEO; your link might not be listed on any given crawl of the Google spider. Static links are a must.
Dofollow Links — Should be pretty obvious.
Controllable Anchor Text — You can’t focus on a specific keyword if the directory forces you to use something like your URL as your anchor text.

So, now you know what makes a good free directory. When you discuss paid directories, you have to take all of those rules into account as well, but you also have to add in the extra factor of “cost-per-juice”. It might be worth it, for example, to spend $300 for a year of listing on the Yahoo! Directory — it’s got a cubic boatload of all of the attributes mentioned above, and it’ll be a powerful link.

It’s probably not worth it, however, to spend $300 to get listed on the Alive Directory. They’re trying to become as authoritative as Yahoo!, and they think that charging the same amount will lead to the same quality — but they’re far from worth it at the moment.

So, paid directories can be totally worth the cost it takes to get listed, but only if they’re everything a good free directory is and then some — so be cautious, but don’t hesitate if you find a few good ones.

Sometimes, you know you’ve got a great website, but the world just doesn’t. Maybe you don’t know how to get on Google’s good side, or your choice keywords are dominated by powerful websites that you won’t be able to upset without months of organic SEO that you can’t afford. Whatever the reason, you might be on the verge of giving up — don’t. There’s one more route you need to explore before you throw in the towel: pay per click marketing.

Some of you just read that and very nearly clicked away. There’s a good reason for that — pay per click marketing has a horrible reputation as a place where profitable webmasters go to throw thousands of dollars down a hole, never to be seen again. There’s a good reason for that, too: PPC marketing is an extraordinarily complex subject, and if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, it’s easy to get it incredibly, absolutely wrong.

PPC Management
That’s why many highly qualified experts have taken to offering PPC management services. These talented individuals know the pay-per-click market inside and out — most of them advertise on one PPC platform or another — and they are willing to put that expertise to use for you, for a fee.

Wait? A fee?
Of course, a fee. You didn’t think this was going to be entirely without cost, did you? No, you’re going to have to pay the PPC manager, and you’re going to have to pay ‘per click’ as well. But don’t panic! Even if you don’t have a lot of cash at the moment, if you’re website really does turn visitors into money, a skilled PPC manager will make you back his cost and then some within a month.

The Benefits
You see, PPC traffic is instant. You set up a PPC campaign, and you start getting hits the very next day. So long as your website is turning visitors into money at a greater rate than the PPC costs are rising, you’re gold — and one of the things that a PPC manager does well is keep your PPC costs down without impacting the quality of traffic.

If you’re website is on the verge of collapse, don’t walk away — at least not without giving it the best chance you can to turn around and become a performing asset. That means finding talented PPC management and letting them do their things.

If you own a website that’s more than a week old, you’ve probably read something about how hiring an SEO company is a great thing. Depending on a few factors, you’ve probably either decided you should and you’re trying to figure out how to pay for it, or you’ve decided you’re going to do it all by yourself and you’re trying to find the time. Here’s why, if you’re that second guy, you ought to be trying the former.

SEO Companies Have People
The legends say that back in the day, a determined loner working all hours of the day and night out of his parent’s basement could do enough SEO to get his company from zero to Twitter in a matter of a few short years. The legends are lies, or at the very least aren’t true anymore — today you need an army of talented workers, each exercising his own from of backlinking magic, if you hope to compete for any keyword that could sustain a small business.

SEO Companies Have Time
Running a business on your own is already a more-than-full-time job. If you intend to add the hours and hours of SEO you’ll need on top of your existing workload, caffeine won’t be enough.

SEO Companies Have Resources
The idea behind doing easily-repeated work like directory submissions or blog comments is that it’s easy to type the same stuff in over and over. But what that doesn’t tell you is how difficult it is to find a sufficiently long list of relevant blogs or directories — but SEO companies already have them.

SEO Companies have Experience
There are always details, and in SEO, it’s inevitably those details that can turn an afternoon’s work into a complete waste of time and money if you don’t know how to properly attend to them. SEO companies work with people who already know those details and won’t have to fuss over getting it done right the first time.

Long story short: Don’t try to do it yourself — that’s planning to fail. Hire an SEO company to get it done right the first time, and save yourself some stress, some time, and in the long run, a huge chunk of money.

Sometimes, SEO isn’t enough — you can have mountains of traffic, and if your website simply isn’t able to turn that traffic into buyers, you need to stop focusing on SEO and worry for a while about your conversion rate. There are several tricks websmasters use to improve conversions — from targeted Email marketing gimmicks to flash banners — but two of them work on a different, more fundamental level than all the rest. The best part is that the two can be used together.

Priming Words
Like it or not, science has proven that the human mind works in large part on a subconscious level. Researchers have been able to prove that introducing a set of words that all relate to a given topic, even out of context, cause the people hearing or reading those words to start subconsciously thinking about that topic. Here’s an example:

Jerry Florida was worried. It was a gray day out, and he was wondering how lonely his morning jog would be. He usually jogged alongside a few of his neighbors, but the threat of rain might make them “forgetful” of their morning ritual. Looking around his apartment, his eyes hit upon his old treadmill, now a place to hang his freshly-worn clothes before they were washed. Bingo! He’d get his morning jog despite the possible moisture, and catch Regis at the same time.

Believe it or not, right now on a subconscious level, you’re probably thinking about what it will be like to get old. Huh? Check out the priming words hidden in that little story:
old, Regis, worried, Florida, lonely, gray, bingo, forgetful
Scientists have shown us that after reading a story like that, people will walk more slowly, think less clearly, and even be slightly more fatalistic than they were before they read it.

Consider that the next time you start writing your website copy. How can you use the power of subconscious priming to get your audience thinking about the problem that YOUR product or service solves?

Web Presenters
A Web Presenter is simply a pop-up video of a person. They are generated dynamically on the surfer’s screen so that they follow the reader as they scroll. They offer your website the opportunity to have a “face” and a “voice” that are human, and thus hard to ignore. 90% of communication is non-verbal, and a Web Presenter brings most of that 90% back to the table. In short, a website with a Web Presenter will appeal on a fundamental level that a text-and-pictures website simply can’t.

Consider the opportunity that a Web Presenter gives you — not only can you add that extra layer of communication to your website, but you can have the Web Presenter deliver the priming words in a voice that the reader can’t easily skip over. That’s some top-tier converting power!

Rentacoder. Elance. Odesk. The number of places it’s possible to go hire some ardent Filipino, Indian, or Bangladeshi keyboard jockey to do “SEO work” for pennies per hour is ever-growing — but is that kind of SEO actually worthwhile? Sure, in terms of the amount of money you have to spend up front, it can seem like affordable SEO, but there’s a lot more to good SEO than a good cost-per-link.

If you spend a half-million dollars on a new Bugatti Veyron and then it breaks down and is unusable within a month, you kind of expect your money back — or at least for Bugatti to fix it for you. Hell, you’d do the same thing if you spend ten grand on a brand new Nissan Versa that broke down in the first few weeks.

Not to denigrate all freelancers — there are some superstars out there — but by and large, when you pay a few bucks an hour, you get your money’s worth. More explicitly, almost everyone who really knows the rules of SEO and has the work ethic to kick ass has already been hired by an SEO company somewhere and doesn’t have to work through Elance or Odesk to find clients.

Here’s what happens: you pay a freelancer to build some backlinks. They do. But then a few weeks later, you find that the backlinks they’ve built aren’t working. Maybe they built them to places that have simply stopped existing (blog posting to pages that weren’t maintained, forums where the admin came through and deleted an obviously marketing-oriented post, etc.) Maybe they built links that were deemed spammy by the search engines and your site is getting penalized for them. Maybe they wrote content in ‘Inglish’ and the clickthrough rate is zero. Whatever the reason, this kind of this happens constantly. It’s literally like spending your ten grand on a Reliant Robin and then being upset when the thing flips over every time you turn a corner.

If you want affordable SEO, you should start by talking to a full-fledged SEO company. You might pay a bit more up front than you would for a freelancer, but you’ll get results that stick — and you can’t have affordable SEO unless it sticks.