There is a ton of different search engine optimization software packages out their that basically claim to be a miraculous solution to every advertising problem you could be facing, and we all know this is so far from the truth. Pay per click marketing is all about the copy and the keyword research.

The tools on the web like SpyFu will allow you to actually look at a competitors URL and analyze it. The tool will bring back a list of keywords the competitor is bidding on, how many clicks he has a day, what the average amount of money spent per day is.. and so much more. SpyFu is of course limited unless you want to pay for a membership. Most of these tools are like this, where they give you a teaser, then want you to pay for more results. If you truly are using pay per click marketing to generate most of your revenue, you might consider trying one of these tools.

What this article is really about though, is the problem that comes to most of us mentally when we resort to using tools like this. Studying your competition is a good idea for market research, it is a good idea to study his keywords and see where is customers are coming from, it is a good idea to mimic what he is doing to an extent. Here, though, is something bad. You don’t want to simply rely on the information these tools give you and do no research on your own. That it what will ultimately make your business stand out from the next, doing something your competitors are not.

So in short, if you are serious about finding a valueable search engine optimization software, you might consider a spy tool, however, I would highly suggest you just use it to extend your other optimization and research efforts. Do not simply copy what they are doing and cross your fingers. You would likely fail.

The root goal of a search engine optimization strategy will ultimately be to generate targeted traffic and monetize that traffic through the use of organic search. This can be done via on-page and off-page search engine optimization, the use of videos, images, and a constantly updated informative blog. As more content and products are created, newly optimized pages can be created to house that content and those products.

Stage 1: Infancy

The very first thing in our strategy is keyword research. Using popular and effective keywords on your website will help to assure that it will be visible in the search engine results instead of being buried under thousands of other websites in the search results. In order to gain a better understanding for how potential customers will find our website, we look at what keywords are related to our product/service, and try to decipher which ones have the highest number of searches. We use Google as a tool to do our keyword research because Google holds a very large percentage of searchers in comparison to other engines.

Once we’ve done some extensive keyword research, we now know what to use in our title tags, image’s ALT tags, meta data, as well as what to name our files. When deciding what keywords to use where, one thing that must be kept in mind is relevancy. We want to rank for our keywords, but we do not want to over-use them, or use them in an irrelevant fashion. By understanding what keywords we are trying to rank for, we now have a decent idea of what types of content our potential visitors are searching for. This leads us to the next stage in our website business plan.

Stage 2: Design and Implementation

It’s good to understand design and seo implementaion before you start your site. That way, instead of updating an existing site for search engine optimization, your site will be created from the ground up with search engine optimization as a priority. Your site potentially could have easily become a flash website, but instead will become a XHTML/CSS based site. All your web pages will contain 100% unique content, and will target different keywords. Visuals should be kept relatively simple, although hopefully aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Every link needs to have been carefully placed with intended anchor text and destinations. Every image should be tagged and every bit of information should go through a personally conducted “relevancy test”.

Stage 3: Traffic Driving

Every aspect of search engine optimization boils down to a methodology to obtain more traffic from search engines. Traffic can be converted into money, and we want traffic! We have developed a checklist of operation to complete after your site goes live. You don’t have to do every little thing, but you should consider most of them.

• Site will be submitted to the major search engines.

• A press release will be submitted.

• Video content will be submitted to Youtube and various other video sites.

• Industry related articles will be written and submitted to EzineArticles and GoArticles, as well and any additional article services that are found to be credible.

• Small-scale testing will begin with pay-per-click campaigns.

• Multiple social networks will be explored, with a link back to our site in each profile.

• Questions will be answered on message boards with links to relevant information our website provides in the form of tutorials.

• Images will be submitted to image-based search engines.

• Website will be submitted to relevant Google Directory listings.

Stage 4: Ongoing Maintenance

We’ve come up with a weekly regimen that will help both build traffic over time, and keep the site maintained:

• Write and submit one article.

• Make 1-2 Forum postings containing a informative post and a relevant link back to your website.

• A new blog post will be posted or new page created on your website.

• A request will be sent to another reputable and relevant website for a one-way link.

Conclusion

With the help of search engine optimization, quality content, constant updating, and the viral nature of video, your site could take it’s first successful step within your search engine optimization strategy. This year, your website could be on the correct path to generating many potential customers and a working business model.

To improve page rank, you simply need people linking to you. Even though the concept is pretty simple, there is a tad bit more to it. Google gives every website that it indexes a score from 0-10 called its “pagerank”. This can be thought of as a quality score in Google’s eyes.

In order to boost your pagerank from say 2 to 3, you would want to acquire some dofollow backlinks from pages that are rated a PR 3 or above. It could be done with a larger quantity of lower PR links, but I want to stress to you quality over quantity. This is why you will find some services on the web require a fee to submit your URL to, most of them have a higher pagerank, or a “more important” list as far as Google is concerned. Does this mean that your 200 backlinks from PR 0 and PR 1 sites are useless? No.. The lesson here is that it is not the number of backlinks you have to your website that will help you improve page rank, but the QUALITY of said links.

• So how do I see what a site’s pagerank is?

Do you use firefox? If so, look for a “pagerank plugin”. There is one I use called “SearchStatus”.

Alternatively, if you do not use firefox, try this free pagerank tool.

Traditionally, it is the pagerank that plays a big part in establishing the overall value of a website. All websites start from PR 0, and eventually rise to the top, i.e. PR 10. The increase of your page ranking depends on how well you market your site in your chosen niche, and be gaining more incoming traffic to your site. You can get more traffic by following the different SEO techniques such as link building, keyword optimization and the like. If you have an ecommerce website, then tracking your stats and pageranks greatly important since you need more clients to serve and support your business.

• So where should I start?

– Making A Deal With Other Webmasters

One method of spreading links is to contact other Webmasters and ask them to put up a link of your site in their page. It would be best to contact them first via email and explain the benefit of exchanging links. Be professional and polite if you want them to approve of your request.

– Publishing Articles

Article publishing is a good way to spread your links on the Web. This involves coming up with informative and quality content and publish them on submission sites online. Like blog sites, you can place a link of your site as a signature or directly embed it to one of the keywords on the content. As an added bonus, you can also submit the same post to blog sites as well. You won’t have to worry about copyright issues since you will be publishing them under your name — so no worries.

– Social Bookmarking

A fast way of populating your links on the Web is through the use of social bookmarking. Web surfers and spiders tend to frequent social bookmarking sites to find quality links for information, business, or just simple fun. Create an account in one of the bookmarking sites on the Web and publish them. Just make sure that they are set to “public” so other people can see your bookmarks and add it to their list for a wider coverage.

Economical search engine optimization, some say it doesn’t exist. It does, though. Have a read. It’s happening everywhere now, people are paying $5 per article to freelance services all over the web, then submitting the original content these ghostwriters make to various article directories across the web. As I populate my website with content, this is a question that strikes me personally.

Does article marketing work? And if it does, are there any best practices I should know about? Is there something I should avoid?

With this question in my head, I did a couple hours of reading and came to these conclusions:

• How do I optimize my articles for search engines?

Exactly the same way you would for a web page. Use your target keyword in the title, use the target keyword in your first and last paragraph, and somewhere in the middle of your article, or anywhere relevant (just dont overdo it). If this does not full answer your question read “SEO Copywriting”and “Website Content & Keywords”.

• Where should your articles be submitted?

Alot of people claim EzineArticles is the best place, but I believe it really depends on your topic. You might find you get better results from one directory over another simply because the “crowd” that could potentially be interested in your product resides heavily in one network. So the answer to this is to experiment. See which service gets the best results, and then focus your efforts on one or two (a list of submission sites is below this article.)

• The numbers game.

With so many different aspects contained within marketing and articles, from differences in writing styles to hundreds of submission services, it really can be a hit and miss operation. I would not overlook article marketing because of this, but I wouldn’t let my business rely soley upon it either, Instead, article marketing should be a small part of your overall internet marketing process.

Here are a few article submission services for economical search engine optimization:

1. http://www.ezinearticles.com
2. http://www.goarticles.com
3. http://www.articlecity.com
4. http://www.a1articles.com
5. http://www.ideamarketers.com
6. http://www.searchwarp.com
7. http://www.isnare.com/
8. http://www.amazines.com
9. http://www.articledepot.co.uk
10. http://www.articledashboard.com
11. http://www.easyarticles.com
12. http://www.articlebin.com
13. http://www.articlebeach.com
14. http://www.articlehub.com
15. http://www.articlegarden.com
16. http://www.articlesphere.com
17. http://www.articlealley.com
18. http://www.articlesfactory.com
19. http://www.articlewise.com
20. http://www.articlegeek.com