• Information & Content- This is probably the most important feature because it is what is going to attract an audience to your site.  Stock your website with information and content that is relevant and interesting.  However, don’t go over the top! No one wants to have to read an essay to understand what your website is about.  Keep it simple and informative. Break up your content so it is not overwhelming to the eye.
• Navigation- Make sure it is easy to navigate around your website.  Include a menu that enables the user to easily go from page to page.  If possible, put the menu on the top of the page and include drop down menus if necessary.  About and Contact buttons are extremely important.  Users want to know what your site is about and how to contact you with questions or concerns.
• Accessibility- You want current and potential customers to be able to find you easily, right? Most users will use search engines and directories to find you online.  Because of this, you want to market yourself accordingly.  Apply SEO or PPC tactics to your website so that you can be more readily visible online.
• Website Speed- This may seem like a thing of the past, but a lot of users still have dial-up service and if your website is crammed with unnecessary junk, it may slow down the website and the user may leave the page in frustration before it even loads. Factors that may affect loading speed include image size, page size, flash features and excessive code installation.
• Smart Links- Links are important not only to make your users experience more favorable, but for your website’s benefit as well.  Links will connect to other pages within your site and to the outside world as well.  Make sure your links are functioning! The last thing you want is for a user to come across a broken link! This not only makes it impossible for the user to access the link, but makes your website look unprofessional.

• Make Sure They are Ranked on Search Engines- An SEO Company is supposed to get you ranked on search engines, right? If you can’t find them on the first page of any search engine for vital keywords like SEO Marketing then they probably don’t know what they are doing.  Why would you want to do business with a company that can’t even do for itself what it promises to do for you?
• Look For Client Feedback & Testimonials- True, testimonials on a company website can be written up by anyone.  However, people leave feedback all over the internet! Be a detective and hunt online for information on the company. Type in the company’s name on a search engine and see what you can pull up. The results may surprise you!
• Do They Practice White Hat SEO?- White Hat SEO are any and all legitimate SEO techniques used to get a website ranked online.  There are many layers to this technique and trying understanding it all may be overwhelming.  In general, you are looking for a company that promises quality traffic and inbound links, increased profit and a method of attracting potential prospects to your website.  For a more descriptive outline of what White Hat SEO consists of, search online.
• Are They Making False Promises?- Be wary of any company that guarantees a #1 spot on a search engine or instant SEO results.  No one can guarantee #1 placement on any search engine and SEO NEVER works instantly.
• Ask For Proof of Their Work- Why not ask for some examples of the work they are proclaiming they can do for you? Maybe they can show you a website they have successfully worked on in the past or a portfolio of their products and offers.

• SEO Can Be Self-Taught- While SEO isn’t exactly rocket science, it isn’t easy either. There are so many components of SEO that trying to learn it all on your own and apply it would be extremely time-consuming and difficult.  Not to say that it is impossible, but if you want it done right the first time, free of mistakes, you may want to hire an SEO company with years of experience to help you out.
• SEO Works Instantly- This is a common myth that scam artist SEO companies claim to provide to their clients.  Effective, profitable and long-lasting SEO takes lots of time to provide results, but if done correctly, can be extremely worth it.  Be patient!
• Number of Visitors Affects SEO Rankings- Many believe that if you don’t have a plethora of people streaming into your site daily, you won’t be ranked at all on search engines.  This is not true! Google and all other search engines have no way of judging how many visitors you get on  a daily basis and do not use this as a determining factor as far as ranking goes.
• Meta Tags Make a Difference- Meta Tags used to be a big deal but now search engines don’t give them a second look. Don’t bother trying to optimize them, in other words.
• SEO Is a One-Time Application- Many believe that SEO is a one-time application deal and you’re set for life.  This is not the case! SEO algorithms are continuously changing and therefore, your website has to keep up or you will be left behind for sure.
• It’s All About Rankings, Not Users- A lot of times, website owners will be so obsessed with getting their site ranked, they forget about their current and potential clients.  While ranking is important, if your site lacks appeal to visitors, they won’t be coming back to your website anyway.
• Guaranteed #1 Placement- Bottom line, if an SEO company is guaranteeing a #1 spot on Google or any other search engine, they’re lying.  No one can guarantee this, not even the top SEO companies out there!

Organic SEO is very much like organic food for your website. Websites don’t get hungry, of course, but all websites compete for space in the search engine results pages (SERPs) in the same way that living creatures compete for resources in the wild. The difference is that creatures evolve very slowly — but every organic backlink your website gains is like a new boost of energy it can use to climb up the SERPs and obtain alpha status.

You might be asking what the alternative is — if organic SEO is like homegrown tomatoes, what exactly is a McNugget in this increasingly tortured analogy? There are actually a few different answers.

Pay per click advertising is the equivalent of going out to a high-end restaurant to eat every day. You’ll probably see good results, and (especially if you get a good PPC management team) you’ll see them fast — but you’re paying an awful lot for that success.

Traditional advertising is like generic supermarket food. You’ll see good things…eventually. But it’s nothing special, and everyone is doing it. Email advertisement, banner ads, and similar tactics are everywhere — you’ll never get ahead using tactics like these.

Black Hat SEO is the worst of the worst. You know those companies that put stuff like hydroxypropylmethylcellulose and bisphenol-A in their food? That’s these guys. Their “nutrition” might sustain you for a few weeks apparent online dominance, but when it fails you, you’re out of business for good.

If you want your website to succeed, give it the tools it needs to go alpha. Get some organic SEO under your belt, one way or another, today.

For example, let’s say your website is all about Venezuelan Criollo cocoa beans and the chocolate that’s made from them. You might be on the 4th page of Google if you search for “Venezuelan chocolate”, the 2nd page for “Criollo beans”, and the 23rd page for “Criollo chocolate”.

Anything that you can do to improve any of those ‘Xth’s up there falls under the desmesnes of SEO. Follow a variety of SEO techniques (on-page, off-page, backlink building are the categories, but there are a lot of specific items within each category. For example, on-page SEO means writing copy with an eye toward keyword density; it means watching the contents of your metatags, and it means adhereing to the customer-oriented philosophy of the latest Google requirements.

The result of a few months’ SEO work is the eventual ascension of your website onto the first page of Google for some of your choicest keywords. That, in turn, will cause an explosion of traffic to your site, which you can then turn into money using a variety of techniques from AdSense to affiliate sales to selling, say, Criollo cocoa beans through the mail.

Without traffic, you have no visitors to monetize. Without SEO, you can’t get respectable levels of traffic — unless you replace SEO with some other traffic system, all of which require significant upfront investment (advertising) and/or have a profound potential to fail and cost you a load of money with no real benefit (pay per click marketing).

So website owners who want to turn their sites into cash are left with two options: spend money getting professional <a href="There's a set of tools out there for everyone who wants to turn a profit with their organic SEO performed by a respectable SEO company, or do it themselves. Either way will eventually work (assuming in the latter case they do it right), but the point is that if you want to make money on your site, get to know SEO — it’s how websites turn into money.

But equally importantly, you need a press release service to disseminate your press release to as many different outlets as possible. Not only is it slow, repetitive work to try to submit a press release to a dozen different sites, but chances are you don’t know as many relevant sites as a press release service does. The more sites a press release is passed along to, the better the chances that some journalist somewhere will pick it up and run with — and the more backlinks it will earn.

But that’s far from everything. Check out some of the other reasons why you should use a press release service:

• A talented press release service will do basic SEO to your press release before they submit it, making sure it has the potential to rank well for business-relevant keywords.
• Between the plethora of sites they’ll submit to and the chance that the release will rank well for some decently-searched keywords due to their organic SEO efforts, a press release service will dramatically improve the traffic driving power of any given press release.
• Any decent press release service will make sure your story gets indexed on Google News, Yahoo News, Bing News, and so forth. That’s a very challenging task to accomplish on your own, and it’s worth it’s own small wave of traffic.
• Such a service will also make sure to have an RSS-friendly version of your press release available, adding an entirely different substrata of news readers who stick entirely to RSS feeds available to you.



• Finally, though this is admittedly a longshot, using a press release service dramatically enhances your chances of getting picked up and played by a major news source. It goes from “winning the lottery” to “being the seventh caller”. Still not terribly likely, but hey — every chance at that kind of exposure is one you want to take.

Then, there’s article writing and distribution. It’s both at once, and it works wonders.

In general, you can pay someone to write the articles, to distribute the articles, or both — though frequently it won’t be the same person doing both parts. That’s because the kind of people who find it easy to string words together with flowing eloquence tend not to enjoy sitting there and mindlessly clicking “submit” over and over on dozens of different article directories, and vice versa.

Once you find the people who can tag-team the job appropriately, however, you’re golden. Here’s why: when you have a well-written article and you submit it correctly to an authoritative article directory, you get the total package. Your article will likely rank quickly for it’s chosen keyword (assuming you did your keyword research correctly, of course). Once it’s ranked, you’ll start getting organic traffic through it as people click from it to your homepage.

That’s targeted traffic, and it’s worth quite a bit. Moreover, every article provides you with a context-controlled backlink with the anchor text of your choice, generally from a quite reputable source. (If you’re submitting to Jackopff’s Article Bucket, you might want to reconsider and see what it takes to get onto EZineArticles.com or another major article directory.)

Repeat the process, coming up with quality topics, solid keywords, and reputable directories every time, and you’ll soon find yourself with a quite functional web-based business. It’s a lot of effort, and it takes both creativity and technical knowledge, but once you know the game, it’s very very worth your while.

Let’s say you’re selling an ebook that doesn’t cost anything to produce, but you have to make at least $1200/month to pay your bills and whatnot. Every sale makes you $30. At this point, in order to make ends meet, you need 40 sales — or 8,000 visitors each month. Sound likely? Not unless you’ve got a lot of money and one hell of a PPC management team.

Solutions to the dilemma are obvious: get more visitors, or improve your conversion rate. Getting more visitors is going to get exponentially harder — but there’s an easy tool you can use to improve conversions; it’s called targeted Email marketing.

With targeted Email marketing, you collect Email addresses from the people who visit your site, and you send them Emails regarding the topic they visited about. For example, if your site sells a product designed to help them pick up men at a bar, you might send them Emails about common problems with bar patrons or how to drink without getting wasted.

At some point, you slip in a sales pitch for your product — and because they’ve had the chance to get to know you through your Emails, they’re a lot more likely to buy from you. The longer you wait to pitch them — and the higher-quality the material you send in the interim — the better it works.

The result, if done correctly, is a massive spike in conversions. Because after all, if you can convert a whopping 3% of your visitors through targeted Email marketing, you don’t need 8,000 visitors each month anymore — you only need 1,334. That’s an incredible decrease in the effort you need to put into marketing, all for just a little extra put into conversions.