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.

Custom blog creation is one of the greatest tools that a small business can purchase from a qualified SEO company. The reasons are legion, but the greatest benefits can be encapsulated in a few short concepts: content, control, conversions, and character.

Content
Anyone who has even looked sideways at the world of Internet Marketing has heard someone say “CONTENT IS KING”. That’s because it’s true — Google loves fresh content more than just about anything else. In this more than anything else, a blog is a great source of Search Engine love, because by it’s very design, it gives Google what it loves best on a regular schedule of goodness.

Control
By the same token, what SEO experts love more than anything else is a backlink that gives you complete control over all of its aspects. Specifically: the anchor text, the page linked to, the position of that backlink within the content, and the content of the content that surrounds the backlink. It’s very hard to get precise control over all of those aspects of the backlink, but blogs do it nicely.

Conversions
In succession, let’s look at what webmasters love most: to make sales. In most minds, the most important parts of making sales are traffic and conversions — but there’s a factor that seems to slip most people’s minds. Most gurus act as though it’s the landing page alone that determines conversions, but that’s just not the case. A good portion of the ‘convertiblity’ of a given visitor has to do with their state of mind before they get to the landing page — and with a blog, you can set them up to be in a buying state of mind before they reach the page, priming the pump as it were.

Character
And at last, it’s time to pay attention to the surfer. Surfers love to read things that are fun, outrageous, titillating, and zany. Blogs, because they’re expected to be one crazy person’s take on the world, are perfectly allowed to be any or all of those things.

And right there, you’ve got the reason why custom blogs are the best SEO this side of a massive spurt of article writing and distribution — because everyone, from the surfer to the search engine, loves them.

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.

Social bookmarking might sound like a strange ritual that little Midwestern housewives do to one another’s copies of Tony Morrison’s Beloved or a strange Mormon ritual that has something to do with a Pearl of Great Price, but in this instance, we’re talking about SEO. Social bookmarking is a common enough activity for backlink building: you go to a site like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or GoogleBuzz, and you create a backlink that points at your stuff.

Sounds quick, simple, and effective. Except that the effective part isn’t really all that effective. Google — and we have to talk about Google because they have an 80% market share of searches — Google, in it’s endless quest to thwart internet markers, has developed a few easy ways of eliminating 90% of internet marketers’ social bookmarking efforts.

The first method is to ignore any social bookmarking account that only points at material from one or two authors. Their algorithm automatically does a WhoIs query on every website they get linked to, so they’ll know that a given bookmarking account only points to your site unless you manage to come up with different identities for each of your sites. That alone eliminates almost every solo webmaster or outsourced backlinker in one go.

But beyond that, they also examine the timestamps on the various backlinks that point to your site — and if they see that your incoming links are coming in ‘bursts’ (like, nothing for 18 hours and then 170 links from 170 different sites over the course of 4 hours), they ignore that, too. That prevents all of the backlinkers who think they’re going to be clever and use software to build dozens of links at a time from getting anywhere.

So what is ‘Real’ social bookmarking? Simple: it means that you use social bookmarking the same way that you use blog posting — you do it often, you do it about different subjects, and you act like a real human being. The truth is that Google loves social bookmarks — as long as they look and feel like they’re from real people who are really interested in what they’re doing. If you can do that, you can make Social Bookmarking really work for your site.

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?

It’s actually fairly likely that you’ve never heard of a web presenter, but if you have, it’s actually fairly likely that you’ve only heard glowing things said about them by people who want to sell them to you. Web presenters are still fairly new in the world of online marketing; they don’t have the credibility that tools like custom blog creation or targeted Email marketing have. Like Email marketing, Web Presenters aren’t a part of your SEO strategy — they’re the second stage, a tool used to increase conversions.

The basic law of making money online is mathematical: the number of visitors you get times your conversion rate times the sale price of the product minus your costs equals your profits. Increase the visitors (with SEO), and you make more money — but increase the conversion rate (with a Web Presenter), and you make more money as well. At some point, improving your conversion rate becomes more profitable than pushing more traffic onto a low-conversion page, and that’s when tools like Web Presenters come in handy.

A Web Presenter, for the record, is a full-body or head-and-shoulders image of a person who pops up on your screen and talks to you about the content of the page. The benefits of a Web Presenter are intuitively obvious: they talk to you, they have posture and gesticulations and all of those secondary elements of communication that text lacks, and they’re hard to stop watching once they get started, so they increase stickiness as well.

But there are pitfalls to be found when hiring a Web Presenter. You should be careful to choose a Web Presenter whose image matches that of your company. Hiring a conservative-looking older gentleman for an agile young SEO company might not be the right fit, for example. You should also make sure that your Web Presenter is comfortable with your content. Having a Web Presenter that pronounces ‘SEO’ as a one-syllable word that rhymes with “Rio” will immediately throw suspicion on that company’s site, for example. Make sure that the image and the content come across clearly, however, and you should find that a Web Presenter has very positive effects on your bottom line.