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.

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.

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.

Website SEO is often thought of in highly technical terms, and it’s easy to write a highly technical piece about it — but when you really get into it, there is as much art in the SEO field as there is science. Let’s talk for a little bit about the four non-technical cardinal rules of SEO — the art behind the techniques.

Different Searchers Have Different Needs
The so-called ‘buying keywords’ are used by users that intend to purchase something today, so it makes sense that they’re the first keywords targeted by a website that’s trying to sell something. But if you ignore all of the other keywords, you lose out on potential future customers.

There are four kinds of relevant surfers: those seeking broad, generic information; those seeking brand-specific information; those looking at the terms of a possible transaction; and those looking to perform a specific transaction right now. If your website offers landing pages for all kinds of surfers — — you can take advantage of a much broader diversity of relevant searchers.

Humans Experience, Search Engines Access
This is possibly the most artistic part of the art of organic SEO. In order to maximize a website, you have to please two very different clientele: the humans that are reading the site, and the search engine spiders that are crawling it. The spiders don’t see things like flash banners, fancy graphics, or password-protected content. The humans, meanwhile, don’t see things like inbound links or site speed. Maximizing both angles will lead to the best results, but too many SEO gurus focus on either one or the other.

Internal Links Matter
90% of SEO gurus out there — particularly the freelance kind — are interested in exactly one metric: the number of inbound links from unique root domains to your site. That’s a good metric, but it ignores a very powerful on-site SEO tool: internal links. Internal links are great for telling the search engines what each specific page on your site is all about.

The Best External Links Come On Their Own
Making backlinks appear is the easy part of SEO — but the best backlinks are the ones you don’t have to create on your own. The key to getting unsolicited backlinks from other people’s sites is simple: top-tier content. Unique content that has information you can’t find anywhere else, and that is worthy of outside attention, will get it.

Newbie web business owners have a lot on their plate — figuring out how to turn a decent profit off of their project is only the beginning. At some point, however, they all face a decision about how to drive traffic to their sites. There are all kinds of gurus telling them all kinds of methods of driving traffic, from clever ways to scam CraigsList to dumping buckets of money into unmanaged pay-per-click campaigns.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: none of these stunts holds a candle to the shining light of organic SEO. The reason why is simple: SEO is the most cost-effective method of driving traffic, period. That isn’t to say that there aren’t some downsides — SEO takes some time to kick in — but once it does, you’ll never regret having put that time in.

There’s two parts to doing proper SEO for a web business. You have to make sure that your webpage does everything properly — the on-page SEO — and you have to make sure that other pages link to your webpage in a friendly manner — the off-page SEO. Most on-page SEO is simple enough that a dedicated business owner can learn it and do it themselves, though it’s only really cost-effective if you’re going to be running several websites at once.

Off-page SEO, however, is almost impossible to do cost-effectively within a business. Major corporations often have an in-house SEO department, but many — for example, Travelocity — outsource almost 100% of their SEO, including their content, to outside companies or even teams of freelancers.

If you’re an online business owner and you need traffic that will sustain your business for years to come, you need SEO services. Most times, you’ll be best off forging a long-term relationship with a respectable, affordable SEO company. The work that you do together might take a while to take effect, so have faith. Once it does, you’ll see that what you’ve created together is a pump — a beating heart that drives traffic like bright red blood into the veins of your web business.

Let’s assume that you have a website, and you’ve also got a list of keywords that you’re trying to get your website to rank for. You may or may not realize this, but it’s much easier to get each page on your website to rank for a few keywords than it is to get your entire site to rank for an entire list of keywords. That’s where the power of internal linking — specifically, organized on-page blog posting — comes in.

People assume (correctly) that getting a link from Page A on Site A to Page B on Site A doesn’t do a thing to help Page B’s authority in the eyes of the search engines. No amount of internal linking is going to make your page rank for a keyword if your site doesn’t also have solid incoming keywords from as many different root domains as possible.

But what people don’t realize is that the total authority of your site can be manipulated so that Page A ranks for different keywords than Page B — through the power of internal linking. This is the deepest levels of organic SEO, but it’s worth learning.

Let’s say, for example, that you have a site that’s all about nutrition. You’ve got a bunch of solid incoming links from a bunch of other root domains, but right now your site is all over the place in terms of what page is showing up under what keyword. If you have a blog in a subfolder or subdomain of your main page, you can easily produce a bunch of content that is strongly bound up in a small cluster of related keywords. Then, you link each content page to the specific page of your site that you want to rank for those keywords.

For instance, you might write a blog post all about low-carb dieting, and pack in keywords like “Atkins”, “South Beach”, “low-carb”, “low carbohydrate”, “Gary Taubes”, and so forth. Then, you link the blog article to your site’s page about the effects of low-carb dieting and how it works.

Essentially, what you’ve done is to tell Google that, while your whole site is about dieting, that specific page is really all about low-carb dieting. As your site builds authority as a whole, your individual page about low-carb dieting will score higher than the rest of them will regarding those chosen keywords, and the searchers will go to the page most relevant to the terms they are actually searching for.

That gives you a boost in conversions as well as a small overall boost in rankings (because each page on your site is specific to a certain cluster of related keywords, it will rank more highly on those keywords than an identical site without the solid internal linking structure that your on-site blog provides.) As if there weren’t already enough great reasons to have a custom blog created for your website!

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.

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.

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.

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.