There are search [engine] optimization experts who want to take your money. They want you to believe that understanding how search engines work is so difficult that you must hire them. Before you invest any money paying someone to optimize your website for the search engines first consider what is search engine marketing?
Your real goal with search [engine] marketing is to target search engines to create traffic for your website or blog. Today that is more easily accomplished then it was a couple years ago.
The reason I say that is more and more websites are using blogs to get their fresh content online. As long as you targeted individual keyword phrases the blogging platform will build your web pages for you.
Certainly you have to put the content online, but you’re really targeting search [engines] by marketing a specific keyword phrase within the title, and within the introduction and closing of your blog article. This is known as search engine bait and is an excellent way to create a marketing plan using the search engines.
Along with those lines, you should be social bookmarking your blog post to the top social directories which create more search [engine] bait. Now you have taken your search [engine] marketing efforts beyond your individual blog and are reaching out to the directories that are spidered consistently daily by the top search engines.
Another thing you can do to practice search [engine] marketing would be purchasing pay per click advertising. This form of advertising has been around for several years now, but today Google AdWords really dominates that market.
You can quickly set up a campaign on Google and be on page 1 in a matter of minutes. A word of caution though is take your time to learn the ins and outs of Google AdWords before you invest your money with them. Surprisingly today more campaigns with them lose money than are actually profitable.
You can also purchase less expensive traffic on various other search [engines] including Yahoo and MSN. And there are many other forms of search [engine] marketing with pay per click advertising including 7Search, Kanoodle, Bidvertiser, and many more.
One final thing we want to mention in regards to search [engine] marketing is submitting your website to search engines and directories. You can get organic listings for your website and create back line links by utilizing this method of marketing to search [engines.]
If you want to spend the money you can use companies such as Search [Engine] Blaster, which will automate the whole process and do the submissions for you. This can be a big time saver as there are literally thousands of search [engines] and directories to submit to.