Everyone knows that having top 10 positions on the major search engines can bring all the traffic and visitors you can handle, and then some. But how do we get those top 10 listings and what should we expect to pay to get them?
Do a quick search on Google or one of the other leading engines, using a search phrase that people might use when looking for your products or services, and see what comes back. This will provide a simple way to approach this question by looking at your competition.
Here are some basic "rules of thumb" you should use to categorize your market -
- 100-5000 - ''low competition''
- 5001-25000 - ''medium competition''
- 25001-250,000 - ''high competition''
- Low competition with no previous ''search engine optimization'' - Expect to pay around $25 to $65 per month. Locate a good submission service who will give your home page a ''tune-up'' then submit your site ''manually'' to all the leading engines and directories.
- Medium to High competition on restricted budget - Not all search engines pay much attention to what is in your Meta tags, so look for someone who will make changes to the HTML on your key content pages to give them a boost. Try to locate a service that will go beyond basic Meta Tag revisions.
- Sites with high or extremely high competition - You will encounter various approaches at higher service levels. Pricing varies greatly at these levels, and almost always include a setup fee then ongoing monthly service fees. Think about Doorway/Hallway pages as pages that focus on a specific search phrase, each targeting a specific search engine. It is common to have sites with over 100 custom designed Doorway pages targeting multiple search phrases and multiple search engines.
