Blog posting doesn’t sound like a terribly difficult task on it’s face — you have something you know about and love, and you write about it. Right? Well, to be honest, when you’ve had a blog for several weeks or months and you post on it daily (or even weekly), finding some new angle to write about can be a royal pain in the butt.

Now, wait — what does this have to do with SEO?

Glad you asked. This is one of those times when SEO techniques can help you in your non-SEO exploits. We don’t talk about this much, but it’s good to occasionally branch out a little. So here goes.

You’re probably familiar with backlink analysis tools — there’s a few popular ones out there. SEOMoz and SEOBook have good ones. You use them to look at all of the backlinks that are coming into a website. You can use it on your own website, but it’s generally a lot more profitable to use it on your competitor’s sites so that you can mimic their most effective backlinking strategies. They’re great tools for traditional website SEO geeks.

Here’s the trick for all your bloggers out there — you can snag a backlink analysis tool and use it on your competitor’s websites (or your own, in a pinch) and you’ll end up with a huge list of sources. Sites that are like yours, but have information and angles yours don’t.

A quick example. Let’s say you run a website about Victorian-era fashion designers and their most famous sketches. (Hey, it’s a niche market, what do you want?) You’ve been blogging about Charles Frederick Worth and Sons for the past few weeks, and you really need to get out of your rut.

You snag a backlink analysis tool and run it on your own website, looking for anyone who’s linked to you that you didn’t pay to do so. You find a guy at www.TheyHadNoFashionSense.com that’s been blogging about the absurdity of Maison E. Minangoy’s enormous bicep ruffles, and suddenly you realize he’s right! Rut broken, you join in mocking the dead Russian designer and make a new friend in the process.

Lots of people make a big deal about how you can make serious money by monetizing traffic, and it’s pretty obvious how it works. If you can convert every hundredth visitor into a $35 affiliate sale, you can make $.35 per visitor. All well and good, but what about the traffic that visited you last November? Are you doing anything to monetize them?

Some of you are nodding and smiling, and others are wondering if there’s some hidden function to the WayBack Machine that they don’t know about. The truth has nothing to do with time travel, digital or otherwise — it’s all about targeted Email marketing.

How It Works

1. Someone comes to your website, where they encounter some form of offer — get a free XYZ; just put your Email in here.
2. They put in their name and Email address, and immediately, they receive a confirmation Email. “Did you really want this? (By the way, you’re also giving us the right to Email you in the future whenever we please.)”
3. They confirm. “Yes, I do!”
4. They receive a link to whatever XYZ they were offered — and they’re also put on a list of Email addresses for future mailings.
5. Some days later, they receive an Email from you. It may or may not have a sales attempt in it. It also has an offer to unsubscribe.
6. They keep receiving Emails from you indefinitely until they unsubscribe. Some or all of them will try to sell them something.
7. Some people will come across a new Email a year or more after they first landed on your page, and they’ll be attracted to your offer, and they’ll buy.
8. Congratulations, you just converted traffic from a year ago.

Of course, you still need traffic in the first place. You’ll never make money without some source of traffic, be it organic SEO, SEM, or something else entirely. But with a tool as simple and powerful as targeted Email marketing to help you take advantage of that traffic in an entirely new way, you’ll squeeze more money out of each visitor than you possibly could otherwise.

The internet is overloaded with internet search engine optimization services selling their expertise to an incredible number of website owners. You can instantly be lost in hunting for an ideal service provider to assist you with your company. The 2 points that you should look for are authority as well as good position in the search engines. Since you are searching for a company that can help you rank in the search engines then clearly you’ll need a provider that’s got their own website ranking good for their search phrase. Next you should also check for their recognition and good reputation. Try looking for any review website about their services or a recommendation on their former customers. This way you have a great idea if the provider you are focusing on is worth shelling out for.

If you have a company that’s on the internet and you think that exposing your online business to thousands of targeted clients would benefit you then SEO is very important to your success. Using a website is just not enough. Regardless how pretty or modern your site is, if nobody views it then it’s only as good as a book in a library that nobody borrows. SEO company services have been booming due to this particular difficulty that website business owners encounter. As these companies are professionals in ranking your website in SERP’s then this is the best opportunity to be promoted to thousands of monthly prospects. You will find countless SEO companies providing their services in the internet, just look for one which most closely fits your needs and your financial allowance.

If you’re a small business in a small town, getting a website up online and having an SEO company do some local internet marketing for you is almost a no-brainer. The benefits are significant — you can make sure that any time anyone from (or visiting) your town searches for a term related to your business and includes the town’s name, they see you first. It’s an easy way to get dozens of extra customers though your doors every week — if not every day.

But when you live in a big ol’ city like Los Angeles, SEO can seem like a much less valuable deal. After all, when there are hundreds of businesses just like yours within a hundred — or a dozen — miles of your front door, chances are one of them is already working hard to dominate the local search engine results pages.

Right?

Not really. There’s a lot about SEO that isn’t immediately obvious to a small business owner, and this is one part of it: your business’ website doesn’t just ‘rank on Google’, it ranks for specific keywords on Google. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking general, broad-spectrum SEO or locality-specific SEO; there will always be keywords out there that no one is really working hard to dominate. They can be yours.

For example, let’s say you’re a florist. You know that “LA florist” “Los Angeles florist” and all the similar keywords are sewn up tight. But get just a little creative, and you can find dozens of keywords like “LA floral bouquet” that are untouched. Design a few websites to attract a dozen of these less-competitive keywords, and you can get just as much traffic as the site that has one highly-competitive keyword dominated (and often for less cost.)

The second trick to winning the local internet marketing contest is to control just how local you’re getting. For example, let’s say you live in Hazard, California. Hazard is just outside of East Los Angeles — toward the west. You could market your business under “Florist LA”, but you could also compete for “Florist East LA”, or even “Florist Hazard” — the smaller the pond you play in, the less you have to worry about big fish.

Affordable SEO is one of those services that’s kind of like a holy grail: lots of people pursue it, but most of them (and lots of people that don’t bother) think it doesn’t actually exist. That’s because of almost anything you could buy in this world, SEO seems set up to cause buyer’s remorse. You pay for it, you don’t really see much — maybe a summary of activity from your SEO company — and when the results do come, there’s nothing really concrete that you can attach them to.

Would you have ranked without that last month of SEO? Was it really necessary? If you don’t pay for it next month, will you slip off the first page? The entire world of SEO is nebulous and abstract to a webmaster, and that makes it very hard to know what SEO services are ‘affordable’.

The succinct answer is this: if you can make more at the end of the year by paying for SEO services than you would have without them, they were affordable. Ironically, that means that two more-or-less identical people can purchase the same SEO services at the same price — and it will be affordable for one guy and not the other. The first guy will buy the SEO, work his butt off making killer content for his site, and monetize it to hell and back. The second guy might miss out on one or both of those steps, and end the year making less than he spent on his website’s SEO.

In the end, it’s really up to you. Do the research and get the best price you can for a company to build you a natural link profile and do your on-site SEO. Then, commit to your website’s success, and push it. The more you put into your site, the more you will make from the traffic that the SEO company drives your way.

To paraphrase an old maxim: laugh maniacally with the rush of victory, and the world laughs with you. Sulk in the corner because you didn’t crush it, and you sulk alone.