Do It Yourself Cheap SEO

Cheap Search Engine Optimization. SEO can be as cheap or expensive as you choose, it is entirely up to the individual. The cost of SEO is totally relative to the amount of effort required to optimize a page. Much of this effort can be outsourced, while this is the easier option it makes for expensive SEO or you can do it yourself, which although time consuming, is the Cheap SEO option.

SEO Steps to Success SEO is easy. If you follow these simple steps, you will have your page ranking in no time.

• Keyword research ( The keyword must have sufficient traffic, but is a realistic target to rank for)


• Assess market competition (Be realistic, I will cover this in greater detail later)


• Carry out on page optimization


• Carry out off page optimization(Absolutely essential for SEO success)

The very first place to start your SEO is by doing keyword research. Keyword research is the foundation to all search engine optimization and is the basis of every individual web page (not web site) you make, whether it be a landing page or one of a hundred blog posts. If you want to attract targeted traffic, then every individual page must be optimized around one keyword or one keyword phrase.This is absolutely essential and it is imperative that it is done first, as it is the basic building block of your web page and should be the theme to which your content is based around.

1. Total search volume - we need to identify keywords that have sufficient search volume so that once we achieve page 1 rankings and ultimately position 1on page 1, we will get plenty of traffic to justify the effort spent in dominating your keyword niche.


2. SEOT - This is the volume of traffic that we can expect once we have attained a No1 Ranking in Google. This is our ultimate goal and is further highlighted by this eye tracking study which displays the distribution of clicks on Google SERP's (Search Engine Rankings Page) . .

   Source:
   http://www.seoresearcher.com/distribution-of-clicks-on-googles-serps-and-eye-tracking-analysis.htm

   As you can see by this picture, positions one, two and three receive 80% of the traffic, so it is imperative that you ultimately achieve these rankings.



3. SEOTC - This is the last thing I look at when analyzing my keywords. This is the total number of web-pages globally, that mention all the words in a keyword phrase, in the Title of the page. This is important because anyone that has the keywords in the title of the document is optimizing the page around these keywords and therefore, are your competition. Obviously the lower this number the better, but don't be deterred if it is a high number, as they may not all be your direct competition and we can ascertain that in the next step when we do our SEO competition analysis.

Once we have identified some keywords that meet our criteria, it is then time to determine which ones have the least amount of competition and give us the best chance of achieving our desired No1 ranking. For this we utilize the SEO competition module of Market Samurai. This module assesses both the on page and off page competition for the chosen keyword phrase.The module breaks these competition areas down into the following categories:

Off Page

• Domain Age


• Google Page rank


• No of pages indexed by Google


• No of Backlinks to the individual page


• No of Backlinks to the domain


• No of Backlinks from .edu or .gov sites


• Does it have a DMOZ directory listing


• Does it have a YAHOO directory listing

On Page

• Do the keywords appear in the <title> tag


• Do the keywords appear in the URL


• Do the keywords appear in the <description> tag


• Do the keywords appear in a <heading> tags ie: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 tags

Market Samurai displays this in the form of a grid matrix and identifies each category by color. Each color signifies a different level of competition:

1. Red - This is generally indicative of a high level of competition and best to be avoided unless you are someone with a very high level of skill in the SEO arena


2. Orange - Indicates a moderate level of competition and will be challenging


3. Green- Indicates a low level of competition and is indicative of an ideal niche opportunity

This makes it quick and easy to identify low competition niche market opportunities.

The following video demonstrates this module clearly.

After doing all this research, how do you know if getting to No 1 is being realistic when you are new at SEO? Simple; BACKLINKS. Backlinks are the grease or the lubricant that keeps the web rolling smoothly and Google regards them highly. If your page has no Backlinks then you have absolutely no chance of achieving the highly coveted number one ranking you are seeking. Backlinks are links linking from other sites back to the page that you are trying to rank for. Its not only about the number of links though, it is also about the quality of links and the Anchor Text used for these links..

Quality, when we are talking quality links, we are talking about pages that have a high Google page rank. If you don't know what the page rank is of a page, simply download the Google toolbar or the SEOBOOK tool bar. The SEOBOOK tool bar delivers lots of great SEO tools as well as the Page Rank. When targeting Backlinks the higher the page rank the better.

Anchor Text is the text we use for the links that we leave on internet sites, that lead back to our web page. This is the most important part of SEO in my opinion and if you take nothing else away from this page, take this: Target ONE keyword phrase for each web page and use this exact phrase in ALL your Anchor Text. I have personally found numerous web sites ranking for a keyword phrase on page one of Google, with absolutely no content what so ever. The only thing these sites have had is lots of links using the target keyword as Anchor Text. This demonstrates to me just how important Anchor Text is and that it is far more important than all on page SEO combined.

This is the part where Market Samurai really shines. If you have assessed your competition for your keyword and are still unsure, the next step is to reverse engineer your competitors Backlinks. By being able to do this, we can evaluate if your competitors are really targeting this phrase or are they there because they are the most relevant thing Google can find. If you find that there anchor text is not the same as your target keyword phrase, then it is just a matter of getting lots of links with that Anchor Text back to your page. Now if they are targeting that phrase, then it is just a matter of getting more links than they have and if possible, get better quality links than they have. How and where do you access these links? Market Samurai does all that and more.

In this example, I am using the well used dog training niche. You would think it would be impossible to find a micro niche where the competition is small, but I found four in no time. For this example I will use Dog Training Courses. In the following image you can see that beside the URL's there is a little blue drop down menu.

When you click on one of these drop down menu's, it opens up another menu with a list of options.

• PR Analysis - This gives you a breakdown of the Backlinks by Page Rank. In the left field it shows Anchor Text, the number of links using that Anchor Text and their corresponding Page Rank. In the right field all links are displayed by Page Rank from highest to lowest, all these links are clickable and will open in a new browser window when selected. All data can be extracted to an excel spreadsheet by selecting either of the buttons on the lower right corner of the page.

• Google trends


• Whois information


• Quantcast


• Alexa

These are all external services and when selected will open a new browser window and load the URL into the service provider automatically. It will display the relevant information of each particular service. All these services supply a variety of relevant and useful information when assessing the competition.

As you can see with this one piece of software you can carry out all SEO tasks and Cheap SEO becomes a reality. I have only touched the surface of what Market Samurai is capable of, it also has many other modules.

• Rank Tracker - This module will track all your keywords and URL's and monitor their progress in the SERP's


• Domains - This module will locate high quality, keyword optimized domain names available to register


• Monetization - This module helps you find products and services to promote from Amazon, Click bank, Commission junction and PayDotCom


• Find Content - This module will research articles relevant to your keywords


• Promotion - This module will help you find high quality backlinks from Forums, Web 2.0 and Blogs relevant to your keywords

There is other software on the market that does a similar job to Market Samurai. Two of these are SEO Spyglass and Micro Niche Finder. I feel Market Samurai offers far superior quantity and quality of tools as well as exceptional value for money.

In summary to achieve Cheap SEO we need to complete the following tasks.:

1. Keyword research


2. SEO Competition analysis


3. Carry out all on page optimization as described above and ensure all tags contain your target keyword phrase


4. Get Backlinks and use your target keyword or keyword phrase as Anchor Text

Backlinks need to be constant. Once you have attained the highly revered number one ranking, you will need to continually build links to your page as this appears to Google that there is constant interest in your page and looks natural. You won't have to build as many as when you started your Backlinking campaign as you are now considered an authority page, but Google still needs to see new links as this demonstrates continued interest in your page. Only you will know how many links are needed. You will need to monitor this regularly. If your rankings drop, you will need to add more links. Monitoring this is a simple task performed by the Rank Tracker module of Market Samurai..

Remember the most important thing is make sure you use your target keyword phrase as your Anchor Text for all your Backlinks. Getting Backlinks can be quite time consuming and can be extremely boring. Doing it yourself is definitely the Cheap SEO option and if you are happy doing that well stick with it, but also know that there are a plenty of quality providers out there that can do all the backlinking for you. Now these providers definitely deviate away from the Cheap SEOoption, but they do free up a lot of your precious time so you can concentrate on other parts of your marketing strategy.

A couple of these providers are SEOLinkVine and NeuroLinker, both these services while expensive can get great results without you even lifting a finger. It completely depends on your time and money constraints and whether you are prepared to put in the long and arduous hours required to build a constant supply of new links to maintain that incredible traffic producing number one spot. This is something only you can decide. It may be something that you do to start with then once you are generating an income from your online enterprises you can begin to delegate some of these tasks out to these quality service providers.

Once you have attained all the backlinks there is only one more challenge you will face and that is getting Google to find and index your Backlinks. Just because you have placed a link somewhere, there is no guarantee that Google will crawl and index your link and thus get the Google credit you so desire.
You have two options in this situation, the first is just wait patiently and pray that your hard earned links eventually get found or, do what they call in SEO circles; 'boost your backlinks'. There are numerous pieces of software about that will do this for you and are very reasonably priced. One that I have had a lot of success with is Backlink Energizer. I have been using it for a while and have been having great success at getting my links indexed quickly.