What’s in a name?

Bronze?  Gold?  Silver?  Platinum?  Do those words mean anything to you?  Well, if you’ve been searching for cheap SEO packages, you’ve probably run across these words.  Let me tell you something.  They mean NOTHING.  But they’re everywhere.  Typically, SEO services will rank their services in a certain amount of tiers based on the amount of money you’d like to spend each month.  The higher the tier, the more money you’ll end up shelling out.  But the funny thing about this whole process is that the difference between the “metals” tiers on different websites is like night and day.  Here’s an example:

                        Bronze             Silver                 Gold                 Platinum            Diamond

Site #1:         None                $175                  $250                   $350                 $500

Site #2:         None                $500                $1000                $1500*             $2000

Site #3:         $250                $500                $1000                $1500                None

*This site indicated “Best Value For Your Money”!  Can you imagine paying $1500 a month to optimize your website for search engines?   Best value?  How about rip-off?  It’s amazing that business owners would actually pay these types of prices after typing in “cheap SEO packages” into Google!

What services do cheap SEO packages offer?

Typing “cheap SEO” or “cheap SEO packages” into any search engine will come up with tons of different companies competing for your money to market your website on the internet.  There are a lot of different options for SEO packages that SEO services provide.  Some provide back linking services.  Others deal with keyword research and article writing.  Still others specialize in social media and bookmarking your site on social sites.  All of these services have their plusses and minuses, but in order to really understand what you need for your website, you need to know your website.  Good SEO services will provide a service where they analyze your site for search engine optimization and optimize your homepage so that search engines can find your site easily.  You can’t rank well with search engines if they can’t find your site in the first place.

What are some reasons not to purchase a cheap SEO package?

There are plenty of reasons not to purchase an SEO package.  But if you do purchase a package, don’t worry, because at least something is getting done to market your website.  If you’re the owner of a business, you want your business to have a good reputation.  You want your products and your name to have a positive influence on people.  Don’t you think that marketing a website too fast or too slow, or targeting improper keywords can have an effect on your reputation?  It sure can.  Many SEO services who sell cheap SEO packages often market websites too quickly.  They build back links and bookmark your site too fast.  They will often black hat their marketing of your website by targeting irrelevant keywords.  The best way that you can save money and do your marketing the right way is to do it yourself.  That way, your articles are of the highest quality possible, and you’re not linking to your website too fast or too slow.  Everything is done your way and you save money, which is always the right thing to do.

Now you know some useful information about cheap SEO packages, and how to find the best deals that are out there.  Make sure you do some research into each package that you come across, and make sure it’s the right deal for your website.  You don’t want to break your budget giving that hard-earned money to someone who can’t get you the search results you deserve.  Use it to your advantage, and get everything you can for every penny you spend.  Even marketing your website yourself is a very good idea because you know exactly what you’re getting out of it and it’ll save you time and money in the long run.

Doing research when writing your articles that link back to your site can work wonders in your cheap search engine optimization efforts.  Research is the first step toward doing anything in life.  If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.  I’m sure you’ve heard that somewhere.  Planning is all about gathering information about your “niche”, or subject, and using that information to market your website and write some awesome articles.  Buying a car without doing the planning and research to find the car you want, with the best quality, for the best deal is not smart.  You wouldn’t buy a house the same way either.  So how much is your website worth to you?  If it’s your livelihood, or your business, and puts food on the table, it should be priority number one.  Do your research write high quality articles.  You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches in the long run.

Posting to sites that have a high page rank and an aged domain benefits your website more than you would think.  If you built a beautiful wooden birdhouse – sanding, building, painting, and polishing it for hours – you probably wouldn’t put that gorgeous birdhouse in the middle lane of a busy highway in Los Angeles, would you?  I would hope not.  It wouldn’t last long out there.  All that hard work would be gone down the drain because of the bad decision on where to place it.  It works the same with your articles.  Using cheap search engine optimization correctly means that you need to pay attention to where your articles are going.  Submitting to an article directory that has a pagerank of 1 is not going to be as effective as submitting a high quality article to a pagerank 5 blog about your article’s subject or “niche”.  When doing cheap SEO, it’s very important to not ignore the link juice that your creating from getting links.  The more quality your backlinks have, the better your site will look to search engines because they will assume that your site has some good quality as well.  Don’t underestimate the power of a good backlink.  Think before you submit.

Cheap search engine optimization is not a one shot deal.  Don’t expect to get the results you desire by simply buying an “SEO package” from someone who doesn’t know you or your website.  Cheap SEO doesn’t work that way.  Every website is different, and every site has it’s own unique needs.  Some sites rely heavily on customer feedback and company response in order for them to succeed.  Others rely on shear volumes to traffic and the high amount of visitors are what they need.  Don’t fall blindly into the trap of believing that an SEO package or even SEO software is going to be your “magic button” that will bring you customers.  Real world SEO involves quality.  Quality articles being posted on quality websites getting high ranking backlinks back to your site.  It’s not a one shot deal.  It takes constant monitoring.  Monitoring what works and what doesn’t.  And then when you figure out what works, duplicate it and make it better.

Now you know how to do cheap search engine optimization the right way.  It doesn’t include buying a “package” or accruing “points” or buying a sales pitch from someone who will offer you tons of traffic to your site.  No, the key to doing SEO cheaply is research, hard work, and quality content.  If you’re not posting articles to sites that have a high page rank and are with an aged domain, you’re wasting your time.  Google specifically says that the number and quality of links pointing to your site has a lot to do with the search results you’ll get from search engines.  So don’t just write articles for EzineArticles and expect tons of traffic from Google, because it’s not going to happen.  Do your research, write some quality content, and don’t spam.

 Different packages, different prices… what does it all mean?

 When looking into hiring an affordable SEO service, many companies will give you “package” deals.  Using different methods and different strategies at the same time to boost your search engine ranking is what SEO services call “packages”.  This means that they tell you how to set up your website in the most search engine friendly way possible and then they take care of the promoting for you.  Packages can involve a variety of different things including article marketing and social media marketing.  Prices can vary from $100/month up to even $1200/month depending on what you want.  Packages are very rarely on a “one-time” fee basis.  They’re usually a subscription.  Bundling these subscription services together, SEO services can then raise the rates because they fool you into thinking that you’re getting a lot of stuff bundled together. 

 What does an affordable SEO service offer me?

 Good SEO services should be designed to offer you many different things, based on your website’s needs.  If you have a product-based website, they might tell you that article marketing is the best way to get your website at the top of search engine rankings.  If you have a website or blog, they would probably tell you that social media is the best way to promote your site because it allows you to interact and communicate with your customers.  Some SEO services will even offer a combination of different things including forum signatures, video marketing, social bookmarking, and other things.  SEO services can offer you many, many different things but the thing to remember is that you have to know your website and what works for the sales your website will get.  That’s the whole reason why you want to hire an affordable SEO service, right?

 Should I buy packages or do I need to customize my SEO service?

 The truth is that every website on the internet is different.  No two websites are the same.  Hiring an affordable SEO service that only deals with “package deals” is not a good idea because you want something that will benefit your website and something that’s customized for you.  It’s always a good idea to get a professional to take a look at your website and give you some pointers on what works and what doesn’t.  Most of the time, this consultation is free.  If it’s not, look elsewhere for your SEO service needs.

 As stated above, search engine traffic is the best kind of traffic you can get.  In the USA alone, searchers used search engines 14.5 billion times in February of 2010 alone.  Of those searches, Google accounted for 9.5 billion.  So if you want traffic to your website, Google is where it’s at.  But optimizing your website for Google takes a lot of time and energy, right?  That’s where hiring an affordable SEO service comes in.  They can help you set up your website and determine what type of marketing and promotion best suites your needs.  Just make sure that you do research into finding an affordable SEO service, because some services balloon their claims to gain huge numbers of traffic.  You don’t want to get caught in a scam and lose your hard earned money.

Whether you like it or not, the day will come when you will need to use articles in order to promote your website.  Creating back links in your articles that point back to your website is what gets the search engine ranking your business website deserves.  That boosts your ranking in the search engines and builds the quality and reputation of your site.  Articles can be written and submitted to article directories for free if you’re willing to do it yourself.  This is a great example of getting high quality cheap SEO.  The only drawback when doing this task yourself is the time and effort it takes to type articles.

Depending on the type of website you have, social media may be the best way to promote your business.  These days, social media is everywhere and used by everybody.  It’s becoming almost as necessary as email, and it continues to grow every day.  Businesses can help themselves greatly by using social media because it gives them a platform to communicate with their customers and make their services and products better.  Promoting with social media can be relatively cheap – especially if you hire someone to do it for you.

Search engine optimization can be extremely time consuming, but there are solutions that can free up your time.  Hiring an SEO service to do cheap SEO for you is a real possibility, and it’s something that businesses do all the time.  Outsourcing your search engine optimization is a very smart decision.  Just make sure that you do some research and test the waters before you hire anyone.  SEO services sometimes claim false traffic and promote websites using “black hat” techniques that can cost you and your business a lot of money.  It’s important to make sure you know what you’re getting when hiring an SEO service.

Your business and your website need search engine optimization.  Search engine searches are the best free traffic that your business’ website can get.  No matter what kind of business you’re in, there are great ways that you can implement cheap SEO to get the results your business needs to grow.  Social media is a great way to promote your business website, and it’s one that can be easily outsourced at a great price.  Hiring an SEO service is a very smart decision to make because it can free up your time and put the job of getting to the top of search engines on someone else’s shoulders.

They’re out there by the hundreds – SEO companies and consultants promising you top rankings in major search engines.  They’re a dime a dozen.  When they’re tested and actually used you find out that their promises were nothing but talk.  Either they optimize you for bad keywords, keywords that don’t match your target market, or even worse – unethical means (black hat) by which to promote your site; all disguised as an affordable service.

Testimonials are an easy way to get hooked into what they’re selling you.  Everyone wants something that works.  Don’t give in.  They can be fabricated and falsified very easily.  Take a person’s picture off the internet, put a few sentences together about your SEO services and fees, and throw it on your homepage.  You’re done.  Easy.  Testimonials are very rarely true, and even if they are true the SEO company doesn’t normally put their website on the testimonial so how do you know it’s true?  You don’t know where the site started, and how they took them to the top of search engine rankings.

Here’s why most SEO services don’t work.  Most don’t work because the keywords that the service optimizes your site with either has poor traffic, or is not relevant to your website.  Here’s a basic fact that a lot of people don’t realize:  bad traffic keywords are easy to target and gain top search results for; keywords that have good traffic are a little more difficult, but certainly attainable with a little work and effort.  Keywords that have bad traffic are not keywords you want to build your site around, so why would you pay for an SEO service to get a top search engine ranking for that?  Hardly seems like a goal you want.  But lets face it, bad keywords are easy to optimize for because, well, they’re bad.  They have bad traffic, and are rarely focused around the same subject your website is about, but most SEO services boast that they can get you ranked for them.  That’s how they sell their services.  Don’t be fooled by this gimic.

What you need to do to find an affordable SEO service that really works is do research and don’t fall for the stories and stats.  The best way is to request a trial period.  Most SEO companies (that are legit) would be willing to give you two to four weeks to target a few non-competitive highly profitable keywords.  Most SEO services should know how to find those, right?  Non-competitive, high-profit keywords should be an easy thing to do for an SEO consultant.  If they don’t know what you’re talking about, or are unwilling to give you a trial period, then move on.  Don’t waste your time or money.

 As stated earlier, there are hundreds of SEO companies out there competing for your dollar and the chance to optimize your site and get it to the top of search engines rankings.  But be careful because there are a lot of SEO consultants that will try to cheat you and either promote your site for the wrong keywords, bad keywords, or do it in an unethical way.  The best way to find an affordable SEO service is to do some research and hold that company to its claims.  If they claim they can get you to the top of a search engine ranked for a certain keyword in a month, ask them what they can do in 2 weeks and request a trial period.  Make them accountable and make sure you get your money’s worth.  Your website and your future on the internet is worth it.

 There are a lot of SEO companies on the internet, and if you do your research many of them can give you the results that you want.  The best way to find an SEO company is to do a Google search for them.  However, if you want cheap SEO, you’ll need to do more research into that company.  Figure out what they are going to do for you, and what other companies are charging for the same service.  Doing your research to find cheap SEO will definitely pay off in the long run for you and your website.  Do not be satisfied with the first SEO company you find – there is always someone out there that will do things better and cheaper.  The key is to get a good deal.

The next thing to look for to find high quality cheap SEO is to find out where to market your website.  Let’s say you find a company that markets websites via social media very well and they are very cheap.  Studies prove that promoting a website using social media doesn’t always work.  It depends on the site, and what kind of traffic is going to that site.  So cheap SEO sometimes means you’re going to get what you pay for, and sometimes it’s not much.

Studies prove that article marketing to get search engine traffic is the best cheap SEO that you can do.  It can get fairly expensive if you don’t do your research, but if you’re willing to put a little money into your business, article marketing can pay off in the long run.  The beautiful thing about article marketing is that if you are willing to put worth a little effort and time into your article-marketing plan, it can be something that you don’t need to pay for.  Submitting articles to article directories is free.  You just have to do a lot of them, and some people don’t have the time it takes to see it through.  So finding someone who does article marketing for you can be expensive because it takes time.

As I said earlier, finding high quality cheap SEO is not hard to find.  You just need to look.  Doing a search engine search and then researching SEO companies is always a good idea.  The bad part is that it can get pricey.  But if you’re willing to put forth the time and effort, cheap SEO is very affordable if you do it yourself.  Learning how to do it takes time, but if you try hard enough you will succeed with article marketing.

The first reason to use it is that once your SEO strategy is setup, you can rest easy knowing that you are dong everything you can to get quality traffic to your websites.  Good cheap SEO strategies involve the right mindset, and once those strategies are implemented, you will know that the awesome traffic will flood to any website that you put a little time and effort into.  Good quality traffic does not come overnight, and is not as easy as the push of a button, but it is well worth it to put in the work and effort to get that awesome traffic your site so gravely needs.  Imagine once your work is done, just sitting back and being rest assured knowing that your website is getting the traffic it needs to succeed. 

The second reason is because you know you are getting the best value for your money when you are using cheap SEO.  Whether you do all the SEO strategies yourself or you hire someone to do it for you, you are getting a good deal and you know that it is well worth it.  We all like getting a good deal.  SEO can be expensive, but why pay top dollar for something that you can easily do yourself or get a deal to have someone else do it for you at a cheap price?  Doing it yourself is always a good idea if you want to save money.  It won’t necessarily save you time, but your efforts will pay off in the long run when you know that you have done all you can by using cheap SEO strategies.

The third reason to use cheap SEO is that it works.  If you do your research and learn how to do SEO well, you can’t fail.  SEO is very important when setting up your websites and will ultimately determine their success or failure.  Just make sure you know what you are doing so that you won’t be disappointed in the long run.  Make sure you know what it takes, so you are willing to do what it takes to make it right if things go wrong.  Studies prove that search engine traffic is the best kind of traffic you can get, so why not do some research, learn the facts, and implement cheap SEO into your internet marketing strategies?

As I said in the beginning, cheap SEO really does work, and if you’re willing to do the research and work it takes to succeed to get your websites ranked high in the search engines you will build good quality websites that will stand the test of time and make you money.  You have to be willing to put in the time and effort, and if you so choose, the money to pay someone to do SEO for you.  Getting a good deal is something we all like, and getting cheap or free SEO is well worth it in the long run.  Don’t expect to make money overnight, but your long-term success is guaranteed if you do it right.