No one is arguing the fact that you need traffic in order to be successful online. End of story. But where you get your traffic from; now that’s a debate that will rage for ages. Proponents of organic SEO claim that the cost per visit in the end is much less than from a more direct form of traffic purchase, primarily pay per click marketing. PPC management firms, on the other hand, claim that SEO is hampered by high entrance costs made worse by a lack of return.

The truth is, they’re both right.

Cashflow or Cash Efficiency?
The two competing economic drives for any entity — but they are particularly pressing for small businesses — are cash flow and cash efficiency. Think about it like a grocery store: you can buy a small package today for a small amount, but the cost-per-pound will be high; or you can by a big package today for a bigger amount, but the cost-per-pound is lower, so you actually save money in the long run.

In this scenario, pay-per-click advertising is like buying those small, high cost-per-pound steaks. You purchase 1.5 lbs. of meat for $4.98, and you’re happy to do it because you only have $10 in your pocket, so you can’t afford to pay less than $2.99 per pound. SEO is like buying a Family Pack — you buy 12 lbs. of meat for $15.78, and you’re happy to do it because you’re only paying $1.49 per pound.

Traffic Now or Traffic Later?
This works because, in PPC, you only pay when someone clicks through. That means, if your conversions are decent, you should make a sale for every 50 or so times you have to pay for a click — in short, you make your money as you spend it, so you have better cashflow even if your cash efficiency sucks.

With organic SEO, however, you’re essentially investing — you pay $400 this month for 3000 visitors that trickle in over the next three months. Your cost per visitor is quite low, but the cost is all up front and the income is all a long ways off. If you don’t have the financial backing to stay in business for those few months, SEO simply won’t work for you.

In short, the answer is that SEO isn’t actually better than buying traffic — not for everyone. Different business in different circumstances will find one preferably over the other, but neither is clearly superior overall.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of Bum Marketing, it works something like this: you have no website, no money, and no nothing except a computer, an Internet connection, and a basic understanding of the English language. You go out and find a product that has an affiliate program and an article directory that will allow you to post affiliate links. You write articles about the product, include your affiliate links, and post them.

At some point, someone reads your article, follows your affiliate link, and buys the product. You make money. It’s article writing and distribution at it’s most primal and unpolished.

The thing about Bum Marketing is that it actually works for some people. To figure out how this relates to SEO, we have to look at which people it works for — and more specifically what they do to make it work.

What they do is simple: they write a strong article. Then, they spin it on both the sentence and the word levels. Then they take the spun articles and they distribute them across hundreds of article directories. They link all of the spins to one ‘main’ article, and then they attach their affiliate link to the ‘main’ article.

This works, and it works well — because not only are they weaving a wide sales funnel to guide visitors down, but the linking structure makes that ‘main’ article look very nice to the search engines, so it’ll get maximum natural traffic and exposure.

We SEO nerds would do well to look at this humble, grassroots practice when we build our backlinks. If we take the time to identify the best pieces of off-page content and build link structures around them, we could end up benefiting our clients even more in the long run than if we had simply built those structures around the parent site.

It might run contrary to some people’s ideas of SEO, because those secondary links obviously don’t help the main page achieve first page placement. On the other hand, if the off-page content is good enough to drive traffic and get conversions, will the client really be that upset that there was an extra step between Google and his pocketbook?

Some of you are smirking right now, and some are wondering what happened to my spellchecker and when I could have meant to spell when I wrote ‘Stig’. All I can say is, look it up. The important thing to know is that he’s fast. So is the traffic that hits your website when you find a good PPC management firm and drop some cash on pay-per-click marketing.

There’s a lot of people disrespecting PPC right now, and the numbers appear pretty dire. Studies say that 80% of the money spent on search engine marketing is spent on PPC — the other 20% is spent on SEO. Then they tell you that 80% of search engine traffic comes from SEO — the other 20% comes from PPC. Sounds like someone’s been studying the Pareto Principle, doesn’t it?

Here’s the thing — the numbers are right, but the interpretation of the numbers is flawed. The basic assertion is that each visitor from PPC costs about four times more than each visitor from organic SEO, and that’s absolutely true. But look at the difference between the two.

When you pay for SEO, you’re paying now for visitors that won’t come for months. It’s not a purchase, it’s an investment. And yes, you’ll get a few visitors for the cost that you’ll pay for a single click of PPC. But the biggest problem that startup web businesses have isn’t cash — it’s cashflow. Your income has to be greater than your outgo on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis.

PPC doesn’t give you cashflow problems the way SEO does. SEO demands a few — or several — hundred dollars right now, and doesn’t give you a shred of payout for as much as half a year. In fact, it demands that kind of investment month after month with no payout until the victory bell rings and you score that coveted first page placement.

PPC, on the other hand, gives you your traffic the same day it takes your money. Your conversions happen immediately, which means (if your PPC management team has set things up correctly), you’ll make more money than you spent — and in modern web-based business, that’s the definition of success.

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.

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.