Cheap SEO Search Engine Optimization

There is free SEO and Cheap SEO and there is bad SEO.  Keep in mind bad SEO can be expensive, cheap or free.  The goal of this hub is to provide you the information and tools to do your own cheap SEO work and in some cases free SEO.

Search Engine Optimization is big business. Some firms charge tens of thousands for their services, and in most cases are worth every penny. Smaller companies cannot possibly compete head on with these large budgets of these large SEO firms. The good news that by using smart strategies and a few free or inexpensive tools, you can beat out even fortune 500 companies for SEO keywords searches that can bring your company increased business and profits.

What is SEO? It used to be that SEO mainly consisted of making sure your keywords were found in your content and headers and meta-tags. And that used to be enough, those were simpler times indeed.  Today the Internet is much more competitive and it takes a much more focused and aggressive approach to ensure your site ranks well in the search engines (hint... when we say search engines, we really mean Google).  Today SEO consists of all that on-page SEO stuff, but also, and more importantly off-page SEO.  The most important off-page factor is the number of backlinks coming to your site.  Every page that points back to your site is like a vote for your site.  Unlike election votes, not every backlink is equal. Google ranks sites using pagerank (PR), the higher the number, the more important and authoratative a site is considered.  Rank starts at 0 and ends with 10.  Some pages may not merit any rank at all "n/a".  A website like the Smithsonian Museum is a PR 8, if the Smithsonian Museum creates a page on mummies, they will like go straight to the top of the search engine rankings.  If the Smithosonian decides to put a link to your site on "Do it Yourself Mummification", guess what?  Your rankings will likely go up as well, how is that for clout?  Getting lots of good quality backlinks will not only get you ranked well, it will eventually give you a strong PR, which in turns helps you rank for more keywords.

Free SEO.  The best free SEO is from Google themselves.  If you do not have a Google account - stop reading, bookmark this page and go signup for one.  The first thing you'll want to do is add Google analytics to your webpages.  Google analytics will tell how many people visit your site, what keywords they used to find your site, and what other sites directed them to you.  This information is very valuable in creating any SEO strategy. 

Google Places.  This is also free.  If you have a business, get listed here.  The competition is much less among Google Places, and Google Places show up even before organic search engine results.

Blogs and forums.  Make relevant and useful posts on as many blogs and forums and you can, adding a backlink to your site each time.

Backlinks How to make them. There is a right way and a wrong way to create a backlink. this is the wrong way is to add a link that looks like this - http://www.myawesomesite.com , no one is going to Google and searching for your domain name. Let's say your site talks about Shiba Inu dogs, then you want to use what is called, and "anchored link" in other words you use your keyword as a hyperlink, like this. I love Shiba Inus. This lets Google know that the links back to your site are relevant.  People that talk about Shibas are pointing to your site.