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SEO at a low cost is extremely hard to find. This is why some people opt to do it themselves rather than spend thousands of dollars for an SEO firm to do it for them.

Regardless of which option you take, you know that SEO is one of the absolute best ways to drive traffic to your site. The well-optimized site will yield far better earnings for you as the website owner if it’s done properly. But if you want it done right, you’re going to have to invest your time as well as a little bit of money using some kind of software.

You can find nearly all of the information you need on the Internet but it’s difficult to ascertain if the information you’re receiving will actually help you out at all. There are hundreds of different methods suggested by just as many people it’s often hard to put it all together. Here are some tips that are guaranteed to get you started in the right direction.

1. Participate in Link exchanges

One very low-cost SEO method you can use is to participate in link exchanges with another website. This will get you those links back to your site that are absolutely needed for proper search engine optimization. This costs you nothing at all out of pocket but will cost in terms of the time you spend on the project. If you find a website that is complimentary to yours, send them an email or check to see if they already have a links page. Simply asking them if they would like to exchange links is one method you can begin to use today.

2. Start writing or buy keyword rich articles.

When you write articles pertaining to the content of your website, and they contain a keyword or keyword phrase that is geared towards your audience, you have an extremely viable way of getting that ever-needed traffic. You can either write the articles yourself, hire someone to do it for you or purchase articles.

4. Your site’s navigation

When you provide a navigation that is easy to use on your site, it will make it easier for the user to find the information they’re looking for. You don’t want folks heading to your site and then turning right around and leaving. Give them a way to find other useful information that they may be looking for by making it easy to find.

SEO at a low cost doesn’t come without its price - even if it is in time alone. There are many effective methods that can land you on the front page of a Google search result. Using these methods above will certainly help you in the long run when you’re trying to optimize your site.

This should have already been drilled into your head if you’ve been online for some time but in the event it hasn’t…

Write keyword-rich articles for your site as well as article directories

It’s extremely important that when you write content for your website that you make sure it focuses on one or two main keywords per article. This is also true if you are writing articles to submit to ezine directories.

If you’re unsure of how to start writing a keyword-rich article, here’s a great way to start…

Two of my favorite places to get keywords that people are searching for right now are A) Keyword Discovery and B) Wordtracker.

While both of these sites provide paid versions, their free versions are good for those who are just starting out. As your site evolves, you’ll want to invest in the paid versions of either one of these programs as they’ll give you tons of information you can use that you don’t get for free.

If you head on over to one of these services and enter in a generic one-word phrase about your topic, you will then be presented with an entire list of phrases that people are using right now in order to find the kind of product or service you offer.

Pick one of these phrases and start to write an article about it. Keep your article around 300-750 words, and place the main keyword or phrase your referring to in your title. You’ll also want to scatter this phrase (and variations of it) throughout your article. Oftentimes this will happen naturally which is exactly how you want the article to read. Natural.

If you don’t want to take the time out to do all of this work, consider outsourcing it and hiring someone like a Virtual Assistant or a freelance writer to do it for you.

Additionally, you can flat out purchase keyword-rich articles through sites that offer these kinds of services. The only downside is that you can’t choose the topic. If you intend on creating many websites on various different topics in order to create affiliate income or AdSense income for yourself, these kinds of services are absolutely ideal.

One of my favorites by far is InfoGoRound

Search engine optimization is one of the best ways you can use to get your website ranked highly in the search engines. To get the most out of your efforts, you need a well optimized site that will bring in lots of visitors for you but if you’ve ever taken the time to check out the prices of some of the larger SEO firms, the costs can range in the thousands of dollars.

Thankfully you can get information about how to optimize your website yourself from many places on the Internet, one of them right here at SlingBrain.com. Here’s a few that can get you started right away. (For free I might add).

1. Exchanging Links. While this used to be a big favorite amongst a lot of online marketers, it’s not as important as it used to be thanks to some well-known search engines penalizing sites that went over the top with this technique. That being said, there are still benefits to exchanging links with other websites in order to help your page ranking. You just need to follow a few guidelines first.

First, be sure that the website you want to exchange links with hasn’t been barred by the search engines. You’d be surprised how many people overlook this simple but very important step. You can do this by heading over to Google and in the address bar entering site:www.thesiteyourconsidering.com. If nothing shows up, they’ve been blacklisted so don’t even think of trading links with them. You’ll go downhill faster than a snowball on ice.

Second, be sure that the website you’re exchanging links with is on a related topic as yours. You don’t want to trade links with a site about Pizza if your site is about flowers.

Third, keep the link trading at a minimum. Be sure you’ve got some natural incoming links as well that aren’t requiring a link back to you. You need to keep the two balanced out.

Fourth, be sure that the page you want to link to has a PageRank. Obviously the higher the better, but any kind of PageRank means that they’ve been around for some time; at least long enough for Google to know that they’re online.

Fifth, don’t be shy. Find out who is listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo and simply ask if they’d be willing to exchange links with you. I don’t recommend you doing this until you’ve had your site up for quite some time, and have plenty of good, relevant content on it. You don’t want to be spamming these sites either. Send a simple and polite request to the webmaster, if they don’t respond in a week or so, then wait and do it again in another month.