The search engine optimization, or SEO industry, is a huge online business, with a bucket load of books to be bought on the subject, and money to be spent on others providing the service for you. But is it all worth the hassle?

Aren’t the big boys always in control of the top rankings, so we should focus our time on other things?

Let’s take a look at the argument from both sides…

There are plenty that are in what I call the ‘paid traffic club’.

They get all their traffic via paid methods, because they know that, for example, every single visitor is worth $1.50, which means they can spend $1 on every visitor, and make a huge amount of money by just repeating the process.

That’s all well and good for those that have reached that stage of sophistication, but for others, the paid traffic route can be a way of losing a lot of money.

This is the appeal of the SEO side of things, and it’s not hard to see why - you do a good job of optimizing your site, Google gives you a good ranking, and lots of free traffic comes to your site.

Of course it’s not quite as simple as that, for 2 reasons.

Firstly, because the theory sounds so good, and does indeed work if you can get good rankings, the savvy marketers spend a lot of time and money trying to work out how to get good rankings, so you’d better make sure you know what you are doing if you intend to compete.

You will never be the first to discover any tricks, believe you me they will all have been tried and tested

Secondly, Google in particular has a strong ethos about providing genuine results to their users, and does not want to see page after page of adverts. As a result, they frequently ‘change the goalposts’, using different criteria to rank sites, and not telling people what the criteria are!

This means that the marketers at the cutting edge start all over again with their tweaking and testing to get the good rankings.

Reading all that, you may think I’m in the ‘paid traffic’ club that SEO is too much hassle. In fact, that’s not true, not only is it *indeed* worth the hassle, it doesn’t have to actually be that much hassle anyway!

If you pick your keyword phrase properly, meaning there is a favorable balance between the number of competing pages and the number of people actually searching the phrase, and then design your site so that Google ‘likes’ it, you will get good ranking results as long as you are providing good content. (more…)

  Posted By tyna     Jul 10, 2008       1 comment  

Success online almost always involves generating high quality, free traffic to a website.

Anyone with even a small amount of experience online already knows that building a website is the easy part; the real mountain to climb is getting traffic to that site. Although PayPerClick methods are viable possibilities, my favorite online traffic is the free kind!

However, free online traffic comes in a multitude of flavors. Some are excellent while others can actually hurt success! New website owners have to understand the differences between the many methods of sending free online traffic to websites.

First, let’s start with a method or two which will actually hinder success. John Doe Newbie sees an offer to rent a million email addresses. Along with it comes an autoresponder he can setup in his own host account. He gets it all for less than a hundred bucks. Besides the fact that a list like that is completely worthless, his ISP quickly bans his email account for spamming. Plus, the big ISP’s around the world all flag his domain for spamming. His free online traffic method just destroyed any chance of future success his site had. (more…)

  Posted By tyna     Jul 10, 2008       2 comments  

Back links may sound like a foreign term to those just starting a home based business. If you are not familiar with back links, I highly recommend you learn what they are all about and make them a daily priority. Let me explain what exactly back links are, how you can get them, and why they are so important.

A back link is a one way link or url that is on someone else’s website or blog. They call it a back link because it is pointing back to a different website. If I were to leave a comment on someone else’s blog, I would leave my website url on that blog so people can find my website. That url that I left behind would be considered and counted as one back link.

Now that you know what a back link is, let me explain why they are so important to your home based business.

We are all familiar with the major search engines on the internet, i.e. Google, MSN, Yahoo, and the like. Those search engines rank websites for keywords (search terms) based on the authority of the websites. The websites with the most back links are considered more authoritative and will ultimately rank higher in the search engines for their selected keywords. (more…)

  Posted By tyna     Jul 9, 2008       2 comments  

By the time you are reading this I will not have a computer to work on.The moving company are coming this morning to take our belongings.I have to pack up my PC and laptop because am planning on getting a new laptop,I don’t want to be dragging too many luggage.I am just hoping that I can use my husband’s laptop although I don’t like it much when I am writing in English language because the keyboard is in French.I decided to download some of the photos on my PC then I noticed they were in thousands,when did i take all these photos I kept wondering all night.I have to go catch some sleep now,it is 5.02am and Joel just came out of the room.Will he be able to sleep again?

  Posted By tyna     Jul 8, 2008       3 comments