The idea of optimizing your website (a.k.a. Search Engine Optimization) so that it'll show up well in search engine rankings is all well and good. But is there such a thing as affordable SEO? If the quotes SEO companies offer were anything to go by, the answer would clearly be no. Thankfully though, as with many things in life, if you're willing to put in a bit of work the answer can be a very affordable yes. Let's take a brief look at how you can fairly simply do your own (and affordable) SEO for great search engine rankings.

Step 1 in affordable SEO is always content. How relevant is the content of your website to the searches people are performing on Google, Yahoo, etc? This includes the title, keyword tags and keyword density of each page (i.e. how frequently the word or phrase the search engine is searching for appears on that page). See the link below for how to improve each of these affordable SEO facets.

Step 2 in affordable SEO is the number of links to your website from other sites that are themselves optimized for relevant keywords or keyword phrases. These are called 'inbound links'. This will improve the respectability of your webpage in the eyes of the search engine. See below for help on doing this in an affordable and quick way.

Step 3 (though in truth I'd do this first) in affordable SEO: Take a look at other websites that show up well in searches for your niche. What kinds of SEO do they seem to have used? Take a look at both the above SEO factors (content and links) and follow suit.

Step 4 in affordable SEO: be careful! There are acceptable and unacceptable ways to perform SEO. No matter how affordable your SEO techniques, it will do you no good if you offend the major search engines and dropped from their listings altogether (as BMW Germany found out in February 2006!). Be sure to check out Google's guidelines on how to acceptably improve your rankings. The biggest illicit SEO practice to avoid is attempting to improve your rankings by making your site look more relevant to certain keywords or phrases than it really is (by using hidden text, keyword stuffing, etc).

Here are some detailed instructions on how to achieve step 1.

Here's one tool I have found to be particularly good value for money. It's very affordable, user friendly, automates a lot of SEO tasks (including finding and contacting high quality link partners and comparing your site to your competitors) and has a proven track record in enabling website owners to improve their search engine rankings themselves.

Greg Davies is a professional web consultant who specialises in improving traffic through search engine optimization and online marketing campaigns.

Source: www.a1articles.com