Perseverance pays off in the online world, and marketing is not the exception, but your efforts must be well targeted, very specific and focused on your optimization subject. One of the perfect examples for this concept of perseverance is the fact that search engines, like Google, will give consider old websites more relevant than new websites. That is, if you have registered a domain name a long time ago, it will be easier to position it, than if you have just registered it yesterday.

Everything you publish online must be optimized for search engines: News, blogs, articles, forums, comments, it does not matter what you write if you write it the right way and you optimize it for search engines. There is no real limit for optimization, only your creativity. You can use your targeted keywords when uploading a video in YouTube, or Google Videos. People searching your targeted keyword will find the video and get to know of your services.

Even RSS feeds can be optimized since the titles you utilize will determine the interest, or lack of interest, in the published article or video.

Search engine algorithms determining which results are at the top of search listings evolve constantly, aiming to provide us with more relevant results and listings. Building highly optimized, relevant and unique contents can guarantee you that when we reach the top results, you will stay there for longer and you will just have to worry about random ranking factors caused by the search engine algorithms evolution.

Given the high prices for publicity in other media, demand for search engine optimization service has notably increased, up to becoming an indispensable activity for every website wishing to become a stable business with an affordable budget.

The main business models for professional SEO nowadays are described below.

In-House SEO

The main benefit for having an SEO professional in the office is that he/she must dedicate exclusively to optimize the website and position it at the top rankings. The SEO professional will familiarize with the project and will clearly understand the goals of your business and the needs of the potential customers. As the man in charge for SEO, his main task will be to improve rankings, increase targeted web traffic and optimize the website to increase convertions.

The bad news is that, if you are a professional SEO, the growth of your expertise will have a limit, without any more challenges than applying your skills to the particular project you are working on full-time. This tends to be boring in the long run, you end up always repeating the same analysis and using the same tools over and over. However, those who just love the peace of a stable job, find this one very attractive.

Professional growth at the hierarchical level is practically zero when you are dedicated to an In-House SEO job full-time. Nonetheless, you can improve your economical situation by agreements based on positioning goals, so the company will not deplet your enthusiasm and will keep you highly motivated.

Search Engine Positioning Agencies

These companies are usually comprised by programming teams, analysts, link builders, copywriters, etc. That is, a group of individuals capable of jointly create and build everything necessary to achieve the customer goals. For many of these companies, time is spent more on generating monthly performance reports to track progress and quality, than doing the actual job.

One of the good reasons for working at one of these companies is that you learn teamwork, and you increase your expertise by learning from others about optimization and positioning. These companies will also send their employees to conferences and events (excellent opportunities for networking and link building), so you will incorporate collective knowledge and probably meet important people in your business area.

The problem of being part of an SEO company, is that in most of them, you have a strict deadline and budget, and many times the success of such companies depend on the success of their customers’ companies (and customers’ companies will not always work the way we want).

Working for a search engine positioning agency is very demanding and requires a special ability to track the progress for several projects at the same time and in an organized manner. Benefits for the SEO professional are usually the fixed salary income and a commission for achieving certain goals.

Independent SEO Consultant

In this model, you are your own boss, you have your own schedules, and you impose your own rules, your limits, logical working process, etc. Just remember that you need a great ability to interact with the customer and his development department, specially when the website modifications are not implemented by yourself.

When you are an independent SEO consultant, you are responsible for the success or failure of the website. This can be great for a customer and for you, if you succeed you build a name in your business area … or it can be totally lethal for the client, and at long last, for yourself.

The good thing about being an independent SEO consultant is that benefits can be abundant and the production costs can be low. On the other hand, you do not have support or critic eyes to evaluate your work and help you. You also need to do the everyday work, the nice work, the nasty work… all the work.

You should not forget that there are related financial and legal aspects of the business that you, as an independent SEO consultant must do yourself, and that requires a certain knowledge on the financial and legal fields. This also takes time and costs money.

Education, Training , Courses and Events

SEO professionals who give conferences or lead events usually earn a lot of money. Internet driven courses or program studies can be very profitable, however you need to build a name for you in your market niche and you need the acknowledgment of your colleges if you really want to succeed. You do not want people to remember you as the guy who screwed up the rankings of one hundred customers by giving the wrong advice in a course or in a book.

SEO professionals who give training are usually experts in the subject with several years of experience and hundreds of successful projects. They feature an army of scripts and tools developed over time, with the sole target of analyzing and storing data, and taking conclusions based on real cases.

Do It Yourself SEO

You are the owner of the website you are trying to optimize. You can be very creative in this regard and you are at the same time, the owner of the concept, so you know where to invest your efforts and when to accomplish a strategic turnaround if it becomes necessary.

You do not need anyone’s approval and you can dedicate all the time you want to the project, and you know that the project’s profitability is proportional to the success of your SEO implementation.

It is important to bear in mind that search algorithms change very often, so this little advice is only about overall guidelines you should follow, the best way to make sure you get an effective and permanent search engine positioning is having valuable information in your web portal, and this information must not only be valuable for spiders, but also for regular users. Relevant contents will turn your website attractive for linking from other relevant websites.

In summary, the goal of your website’s optimization is to increase incoming web traffic for targeted keywords you optimize your website for, and for other relevant keywords search engines will find out themselves.

31% of people over the Internet search two-words keyphrases, 25% search three-word keyphrases and only 19% search one single word when utilizing a search engine

Needless to say, search engine optimization is not about optimizing your website for keyphrases your competitors are too strong, and obtaining good results on this can take a long time and cost a lot of money. You must start the optimization process by optimizing keywords with far less competitors and which can drive the same incoming web traffic to your website.

The keywords you utilize to optimize your website, must be somehow related to your website. To find which of these keywords are also being actively searched by users you can utilize several tools, like KeywordDiscovery and Overture.

While you are creating contents for your website you must avoid the use of generic keywords which are not relevant to your website or have no reason to be included, this is because you do not want your website to attract traffic on those. If you can summarize a keyphrase in one single keyword it is ok to leave it at that, unless you have specific reasons to promote a longer keyphrase (more targeted, less competitors, etc).

You should try to name the URLs and images using targeted keywords, but you must not abuse on them or in the use of punctuation characters (dashes, points, etc.)

For the optimization of URLs you must avoid the use of cryptic names or names using URL parameters (URL query strings) at all costs. On the other hand, using URL rewriting is highly advisable, because it can convert ugly URLs in search engine friendly URLs and still keep most of your code untouched.

Ugly URL: http://www.example.com/about.asp?id=150
Search Engine Friendly URL: http://www.example.com/florida-web-services

One of the highlighted methods for web traffic generation is the creation of structured contents in separate pages. Each page can be optimized for a maximum of three keyphrases, though the exact number depends on the size of contents. Optimal results could be obtained by optimizing each page for one single keyphrase.

You should never publish your website without finishing the optimization, and always check every link (internal or external) to make sure none of them is broken. You must have a sitemap for the optimization to become really effective. A breadcrumb navigation is also good, mainly, for regular users.

Breadcrumb navigation
Home > Section > Sub-Section > Page

We have put toguether some specific guidelines you can use while building your website in the HTML editor of your choice:

Title

• It must not be longer than 70 characters according to Google and DMOZ (including spaces).
• It must not start with the domain name (can be considered spam).
• It must contain the keywords you want to be ranked on.
• The character must be capitalized.
• It must not be all uppercase.

An example of a nice title: Data Recovery and Hard Drive Repairing Service

Description Meta Tag

Not all search engines check the description meta tag, but it is still an important part of search engine optimization. This tag should not be longer than 100 characters (Google can read up to 200), but most importantly, it should actually describe each page effectively.

Keywords Meta Tag

• It should not be longer than 300 characters.
• It should only utilize keywords present in the website contents, using keywords not present in the website contents could be penalized.
• It must be all lowercase.
• You can use keywords or keyphrases, but you must separate each keyword/keyphrase with a comma.
• Do not repeat a keyword/keyphrase or overload the tag with too many variations of the same keyword/keyphrase. That will surely be considered spam.

Website Contents

• Targeted keywords should be included inside important tags, like H1, H2, H3 and strong. Search engines will assign a higher weight to those.
• Targeted keywords at the start of a paragraph are usually assigned a higher weight than keywords near the end of a paragraph.
• Never abuse of keyword density, do not repeat a keyword/keyphrase over and over, since this is usually considered keyword spamming. Though there is no certain limit for repeating a keyword/keyphrase you should try to keep the density to a maximum of 15% of contents.
• You should use targeted keywords for the link text on internal or external links. Never use “click here” or other aberrations for link text (unless you really do not care about the target page).
• Multimedia: Try to keep image sizes to a minimum, image search engines have size and timeout limits. Search engines will either not parse flash files, or assign a very low weight to what they extract from them. A full-flash website is highly discouraged.
• Alt Text: You can use alt text not only for images, but also for links and media objects. This information is relevant to search engines. Images have the alt attribute, links have the title attribute for the same purpose.

Always check the validity of your code against the w3c validator.  This will at least give you the certainty that search engines can parse and read your HTML code properly. Using Flash, Javascript and AJAX is not discouraged, but you have to take precautions if you implement one of these technologies in your website.