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.

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.

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.

Everyone today takes the existence of SEO companies for granted, but few people remember just how easy SEO was back in the early days. Before we had Google, the monster powerhouse that was determined to produce the best possible results for the searcher, there was a plethora of search engines that were rather content to just show people whatever page had the most backlinks and happened to have the search phrase on it.

SEO in the ’90s was a very fast and unclean affair, with major companies swapping links and starting linkrings and sometimes outright buying placement (before the existence of the now-ubiquitous “Sponsored Links” blocks!). In many cases, if you were an Internet startup competing with another Internet startup for a keyword, it literally came down to which one of you could find more directories to submit a backlink to. SEO companies were named things like “Yahoo”, and they did things like sell you places on their highly-ranked directory — which virtually ensured you a first page placement, even on search engines that didn’t belong to Yahoo.

Then, along came Google. A simple, clean search engine that focused on exactly two things: speed and accuracy. Google came up with results that were completely different from it’s competitors, and amazingly, most people found that the results Google gave were less commercial and more of what they wanted to see! Within three months of the company’s formation, when it was still operating out of a garage in southern California, PC Magazine recognizes the search engine’s “uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results.”

Suddenly, the game was afoot. SEO companies scrambled, because Google’s algorithm was proprietary, so no one knew exactly how it worked, and it was consumer driven, meaning that Google deliberately spurned the usual SEO techniques of the day and relied on information outside of the ken of the then-modern SEO company.

Since then, as Google’s market share grew from “lots” to “overwhelming”, they have continuously updated their algorithm to account for every clever new move the SEO community has taken to ‘cheat’ their way onto the front pages of the popular search engine. In a way, it’s been good for the SEO experts, because without Google, we’d all still probably be searching for new directories to add to our list.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, one of your websites that’s been pulling in regular money for some time simply stops. On the extreme end, it got sandboxed, but often it’s something less than that. Perhaps a competitor managed to outrank you for a crucial keyword, or maybe an ad that’s been bringing in a lot of traffic is against the ad hoster’s latest TOS. Whatever the reason, when a website unexpectedly stalls, there’s one easy way to get it profitable again quickly: an Adwords campaign headed by a talented PPC management team.

Many webmasters are scared sockless of pay per click advertising, either because they had a bad experience with it or they’ve had some guru tell them horror stories. What no one will admit is that, with correct PPC management, Adwords (or any of the equivalents on the lesser search engines) can be the only way to pull profit out of a profitless site.

You still need conversions, of course — if your website stalled out because you changed something that dropped your conversions from three percent to half a percent, change it back — but if you’re converting well and what you need is fast, targeted traffic, PPC is your cash cow. Many people will tell you to avoid it because you don’t want to pay “that much” for traffic, but the truth is that a talented PPC management team can keep the costs down (even given their own fees) while keeping the traffic up.

You can improve the situation even more by improving conversions with a Web Presenter or a carefully organized Targeted Email Marketing campaign — after all, traffic from PPC is just like traffic from any other targeted source.

Just remember that PPC is like health care: you do, eventually, want your website to be walking without the Adwords crutch. For that, you’ll need to pursue an aggressive strategy of organic SEO and make sure that your natural traffic starts to flow again. Until that point, however, you’re far better off with a solid PPC management crew driving profits than you are letting your website languish on the bed, slowly dying.

If only there was a traffic fairy. No, not the kind that would give you a quarter if you put a car under your pillow, but the kind that could wave it’s wand and suddenly give your website a thousand visitors per hour until the clock struck midnight, and then leave you with some ruby slippers that could repeat the process when you clicked them together three times.

Sadly, there is no traffic fairy, so those of us in the real world are left to find a good SEO company to guide the good people of Internet-ville to our little corner of that vast metropolis, and hope they buy something before they click off into the sunset.

The SEO services offered by such a company are literally invaluable. Many novice webmasters are intimidated by the thought of spending a few hundred dollars on some SEO work for their website, but in the end, SEO is like a Lego set. Once you have some, you can build quite a bit — and as you buy more, the things you can build only get bigger and better. Only unlike Legos, SEO gives you money back just for having it done right. How cool is that?

To put it another way, SEO work is kind of like sinking a few hundred dollars into a high-yield savings account. You have to put up a lot of money in order to make the minimum deposit, but as soon as it’s in, you start making cash, and as long as you keep reinvesting the profits, the amount of cash you make each day only gets bigger. It’s like Benjamin Franklin said, “The most powerful force on Earth is compound interest.”

Of course, for your interest to compound at the best possible rate, your SEO needs to be done right — and that takes expertise and experience. Those are a couple of things that you probably don’t have at this point in your career, and that’s exactly why you need an SEO company. Compound interest may seem like magic, but in the end, Virginia, there is no traffic fairy.

For years, participating in online bulletin boards relevant to your business’ subject has been a habit that internet marketing gurus have encouraged almost every webmaster to engage in. Quite some time ago, the habit of regular forum posting was very powerful SEO. Forums have a tendency to gather quite of bit of authority on their given subject, and with that authority they can get some decent PageRank as well. A backlink from a relevant, authority site with a high PageRank is the best backlink you can get, so it was considered worth quite a bit of effort to obtain.

But is forum posting still worth the effort?

After all, forums have changed a lot in the past several years. Administrators generally ‘caught on’ to many of the most common forum marketing ploys (for example, preventing people from linking to off-forum site in their signatures). Not only that, but many forums have switched to no-follow links and other SEO-killing tactics. It’s also a lot harder to become a recognized and celebrated member of a large forum these days; the signal-to-noise ratio has become so bad that you have to be excellent in all ways just to be noticed as someone who isn’t ‘noise’.

But for all of that, the answer is “yes”. Forum posting is still worth the effort; you just have to apply your effort in a slightly different way. For example, check to see if a forum’s links are dofollow before you register. Look for forums that are smaller and more specifically focused. Rather than a Warrior Forum that has two million users, look for a Mobile Website Design Forum that only has a thousand. That’ll keep the signal-to-noise ratio more respectable.

Watch out for the pitfalls going in, and you’ll find that not only is it easier to establish a presence and plant a few quality backlinks, but it’s also easier to enjoy the process of doing so. With the right forum, you’ll probably even learn a few things along the way — and which of us couldn’t benefit from a bit of extra market research?

When you’re a novice webmaster, sitting in your living room in your PJs and looking over the (probably nonexistent) traffic flow to your website, it’s hard to consider dropping a few hundred dollars on SEO services provided by an established SEO company. After all, you’ve done some research — you know how easy it is to write a backlink. You’ve seen the forums where they tell you a dozen easy ways to write a backlink to your site. You’re even on a mailing list where a charming lady from Western Washington State tells you a bunch of high-Page-Rank sites you can get backlinks from all by yourself and very easily.

Why do you need to spend that kind of money? After all, if you can understand how to get a backlink written, you can surely find some experienced Indian or Filipino gentleman to do it for you for a couple of bucks an hour. That’s real value, isn’t it?

Not really.

You see, there are several things that an SEO company will do for you that a freelancer cannot. It’s true that if what you want is backlinks written, a freelancer can do it cheaply — but if what you want is an organized backlinking campaign planned and executed, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone on ELance or Craiglist who can do that for any less than a real SEO company would charge.

Backlinking campaigns require several elements that simple backlink writing doesn’t. You need to have a long list of fully-researched keywords. You need some short, high-traffic, high-competition keywords that you’re willing to commit large amounts of effort to dominating, knowing that they’ll be the core of your traffic. You need dozens and dozens and dozens of low-traffic, low-competition, long-tail keywords that you can rank for easily and take advantage of the numbers game on, knowing that no one is terribly meaningful but the synergy they generate will be.

You need tracking — you need to know which backlinks are driving traffic that actually buys, so you can make more of those. You need to know which backlinks are driving tire-kicker traffic so that you can make less of those. Without that kind of value, your SEO money is just being tossed down a hole — and what kind of freelancer is going to be able to do all of that for you?

Whether it comes in the form of article marketing, custom blog creation, or social bookmarking, there’s a lot to be said about the power of organic SEO to drive traffic. But some webmasters don’t seem to get the fact that traffic doesn’t equal profitability. Ask anyone who’s gotten fifteen million hits on YouTube for a video that didn’t link anywhere or ask anyone for anything — you can get all of the hits you want, but without a solid endgame, all of your SEO efforts don’t mean a thing.

There are a lot of powerful SEO endgame strategies out there, but only one of them is so powerful that it’s been adopted almost universally by everyone from internet marketers to small businesses to major corporations: the power of targeted Email marketing.

Targeted Email marketing basically amounts to three things: you get someone to give you their Email address (and agree to let you send them Emails), you send them an Email with a strong call-to-action, and they click the link and (hopefully) buy stuff. It sounds so simple, but as with any aspect of trying to get someone to give you money, there are a lot of pitfalls.

The first pitfall is that word ‘targeted’. That means that you have to collect the emails of people who will be interested in your final offer. Anything else and you’ll get a 90% unsubscribe rate the first time you send out an email with an offer in it. Generally, you can successfully target by offering a free information packet about the same subject as your product in exchange for their Email address.

The second pitfall is that word ‘marketing’. People don’t like to be sold on stuff, and unless you’re Ron Popeil, you shouldn’t try to sell people something when you first ‘meet’ them. Arrange an autoresponder to send them information-filled emails for a few to several weeks, without asking anything of them. Only once they’re sure that what you’re sending them is worth reading should you pop the sales link.

Done right, targeted Email marketing not only builds sales, but it builds a solid list of satisfied customers that will look forward to your new offers — and who doesn’t want a crowd of people just waiting for another chance to give them money?