The main purpose of this post today is to cut through the maze and lead you directly to the key drives of Search Engine Optimization or SEO, thereby providing you with a toolkit of Low Cost High Impact tactics for your website.

Tapping on Authority Sites

One low cost SEO approach which gets you results is through link exchanges or linking to and from other web sites. Certain links exchange activities cost next to nothing, if you know how to do it correctly. Before you even contact the webmaster of the website you wish to exchange link with, use a few key criteria to evaluate whether the link exchange will benefit both of you mutually.

Check the Alexa Ranking, the Google Page Rank, Links, Search Ranking, Authority Level of the target website. Alexa Ranking tells of traffic, the lower the number the better the traffic, although some would rebut that this benchmark is useful more for the internet marketing fraternity and that page rank is less critical nowadays. Google Page Rank is defines the importance Google places on the web page or site. Search Ranking of the target site should be in first page for the main keywords that both your sites share, hence allowing leverage for your site. Inbound Links of the target site is key to indicating the Authority and traffic, and the greater number of links the better exposure the site has seen. Finally, whether the site is an Authority site depends much on all the above factors combined. Successfully Linking to a high PR and Alexa Authority site is could eventually help you gain improvements to your page ranking and hence, traffic optimizing your site.

Article Marketing For Backlinks, Exposure Over Prolong Periods
Article Writing with keyword rich great content should be a key approach of all webmasters. You may choose to write your own articles or outsource the writing. But key to the concept of article writing is to ensure that you optimize each and every article for maximum SEO leverage. Take additional care to optimize your title, meta, keyword tags, anchor tags, resource box. Take heed never to keyword stuff your articles as this has become taboo in the white hat SEO fraternity.

Article Marketing, the next step after having written your articles helps to generate extend and long term exposure and visibility for your Internet business sites which is also an excellent effective approach to generate back links for your website too. Essentially, Article Marketing is article submission to the major article directories. This is rather manual and you may consider getting someone to assist you in submission, hence freeing up your time to do more critical activities.

Navigate The Reader To Your Destination, Subtly
Key to a good navigation system is ease of use. Navigation must be simple, your website should be clean and easy to read, not cluttered. Never use dark or black background with reverse white as it is very taxing on the eyes. Include a site map in your tabs for the human readers and for the cyber search bots, install a sitemap plug in.

For better control and routing of traffic, there are also tactics which subtly guides the reader through to where you wish to lead them. This is done by intelligent navigation, utilizing routing buttons and prominent anchor texts.

Now that you know, off page optimization such as making slight adjustments to your website or some research on potential authority site linkages and more hard work on great article marketing could all contribute to your enhanced net traffic. It is however, critical to note that SEO tactics are not limited to the above but entails much more.

Low Cost High Impact SEO is in fact not simply for the low budget internet marketer or internet marketing for small business, but also utilized for business or corporate sites as well.

Look hard enough and you will find out that you too can improve the conversion rate of your website, be it selling a service or product. Understand that web marketing is different from physical selling and the aggressive tactics that I will be showing you will help you achieve higher sales conversion in time to come. You may not see the real effects immediately but like all businesses, you need to harness and leverage on what you have and what you can do to the maximum before you see the results.

So let us start right here.

How Search Engine-Compatible Is Your Website?
There are about 10 major search engines online and the top 3 are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Some sites rank well in SEO with Google but not MSN and some better with Yahoo than Google. You need to fully tap the potential of at least all three in order to ensure SEO. Some webmasters tap on the loopholes that MSN has and fully optimize their sites with this trick, but understand that the algorithm that each major search sites differ slightly and you need to be able to strike a balance for all major search sites for optimization. Never risk swaying to one and ignoring the other, this could be detrimental to your SEO strategy.

If you have little or no money to spend and are simply starting out, sign up for Google Analytics. It is free and it tells you tons of information on visitors, referrals, search keywords and much more. Armed with these information, you could run a “diagnostic” on your site and zero in on what needs to be improved. Learn to analyze deep into meaning of the figures.

Do You Have Strong Enough Keywords In Your Website For Search Engine Optimization?
Note the operative “do you have strong enough keywords” and Not “do you have enough keywords”. There is huge difference between strong keywords vs the number of keywords” you have on your website. If your website talks about everything under the sun, and if you populate it with any keyword that you can find, how then do you expect to rank with SEO? Focus is the key. Zero in on what your website theme is all about. Then write articles and posts focusing on a selected appropriate keywords or keyword phrases that describe what your website offers. This will make a vast difference to for searches and search engines picking your site up when people search for related keywords.

To perfect your skills on keywords strategies, there are great tools out there for you to analyze and plan your next steps. Work on how to optimize long tail keywords, not simply broad ones as they would be very competitive to rank for SEO.

Micro Niche Finder 4.0 A Great Keyword Research Tool
One great keyword tool I have been utilizing from the start is Micro Niche Finder, a very unique keyword research tool which reduces my research time by almost 70% with its unique SOC.

The Micro Niche Finder not only helps you research to optimize keywords, it makes it very easy to create Adsense Content pages in a jiff, teaches you how to fully utilize PLR materials for quick profits, helps you set up Squidoo Lenses fast, lets you create eBay feeder pages and much more.

Check out the Micro Niche Finder & Free Videos Here for more information. The 5 Free Videos will run you by step by step how to do all the above.

Know Who Your Competitors Are

How many times do you simply run searches only to find many websites ranked high above yours? Wonder how they do it? Mystery Shopping is one very common activity webmasters do nowadays to find out what their competitors are selling, advertising and keywords they use. Analysis and evaluation of the competition is critical to figure out your shortcomings and it will help you get that advantage over them. Here again, you will find that Micro Niche Finder is the tool to use.

The demographics and psychographics of an internet user tend to deviate from that of the traditional consumer, although the profile gaps have greatly narrowed in the recent 3 to 5 years, thanks to recent years’ extensive proliferation of the internet. These differences have given rise to an entire spread of marketing-based activity in cyberworld to generate income.

The unique characteristics of the Internet gives rise to new approaches to bring internet marketing to the next level. The internet has the unique ability to receive and provide response. In addition, it works very hard for you, 24 hours 7 days a week. Customers from all over cyber, of all time zones, are hence exposed to your products and services. By the same token, your potential customers can be reached round the clock, 24by7, enhancing go-to-market strategies. Hence, the internet has a global appeal which is capable of immediately expanding your target segment exponentially worldwide.

So how does one manage such an open market place? The traditional marketing rationales still apply, with additional internet-specific marketing strategies to boost. Both traditional and internet marketing strategies synergize to support the overall business model. A broad internet marketing model would include namely, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), display advertising, behavioral marketing, email marketing, newsletter marketing, affiliate marketing, blog marketing, viral marketing, CRM marketing etc.

Search Engine Marketing includes broadly keyword search, search engine optimization (SEO). I would consider keyword search and SEO as trend-mapping marketing model. By maximizing the exposure of certain related keywords, the internet crawlers and search engines would be able to better locate your site and materials and you are able to maximize your website profile and increase traffic for potential business generation.

Display advertising, namely CPA, PPC, is simply the internet version of your press ads and they cost less. There are ways to help you further narrow down your specific target segment. This is not to specially advertise for Google Adwords, but to highlight how display advertising works at a more efficient level. You create display ads, choose your relevant keywords, and when netizens Google search using one or some of your keywords, your ad may just appear in the search results. So you are effectively advertising to a very focused and interested target segment.

Behavioral Marketing tracks a user’s surfing or searching content & path on the web. Essentially, it bears resemblances to LSI, latent semantic indexing. They are then provided with relevant predefined categories of information which might interest them.

Small Business Email Marketing is all about list building, email delivery and tracking to help you keep in touch with customers, drive traffic to your site, sign up for newsletters or buy your products. With an active and high quality email list, you manage run email marketing campaigns. Should you intend to utilize email marketing as one of your tool, be reminded to apply permission marketing which lets you politely ask your customers to opt-in, which positions you as a considerate marketer who does not engage in spamming. Small business email marketing, when done correctly, could multiply your business many folds.

Affiliate marketing is the web-based version of physical network marketing. Affiliate marketing essentially leverages on the various online marketing approaches to maximize sales revenue, namely, search engine marketing, online display ads, email and newsletter marketing etc. The beauty of Affiliate marketing is that if done correctly, you can generate a comfortable income with low cost model and of course with a lot of hard work as well.

Viral marketing is essentially word of mouth marketing leveraging on the latest craze in social networking sites and Twitter. Social networking potentials or SNPs are members of such social websites which has great word of mouth marketing power.

To formulate successful Internet marketing strategies requires certain level of internet understanding, whilst not necessary IT-in depth. Such knowledge is easily acquired. More significantly, you must retain the primal creative instinct of a marketer.

For brick and mortar businesses, the Internet Marketing serves as an additional tool which adds ammunition for you to drive your revenue generating goals. However, if you run an online e-business, you will surely need to adopt a very focused Internet Marketing business model which utilizes much of the above tools mentioned.