Just last year, Cyber Monday online sales increased 19.4%, pushing the average order value up from $180.03 in 2009 to $194.89 in 2010, according to an IBM Coremetrics report.

This year, many retailers are anticipating an even higher increase in sales. So, for all of us looking to make the most out of this opportunity, it is time (or never too late) to start preparing.

My advice to you: get your products listed on e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, if you haven’t already.

As many of you know, Amazon is arguably the most popular e-commerce site in the world. Thus, it provides the perfect platform for retailers to place their products in front of tens of millions users.

However, like all good things, Amazon has its drawbacks.

For instance, Amazon’s high user level means an even higher level of competition amongst its sellers. Simply uploading your inventory onto Amazon’s catalog will not give you the results you are looking for.

Instead, your products will never get seen and you will not achieve an increase in sales. For the best results, you must learn how to fully optimize your product listings for Amazon.com.

Here are some of the optimization practices that I have found to be most beneficial to improving performance on Amazon.

Get Reviews

Amazon.com has a strange (and at times, frustrating) algorithm, in which customer reviews seem to play a large role. Products with reviews add credibility to the seller and are often placed higher up on Amazon’s search page, meaning more exposure.

Encourage customer reviews by reaching out to consistent and recent consumers. Politely ask them to post a review about the product on Amazon.com – what they liked about it, how it worked, would they purchase it again, etc.

Create Parent/Child Relationships

Another drawback to Amazon.com is that the catalog is flooded with sellers who create separate product detail pages for products that are essentially the same – differing only by size or color. Some sellers believe that creating separate product detail pages for related products will increase their visibility. However, in my opinion, it greatly deters from the user experience.

Customers do not want to sort through ten different detail pages of the same product in order to find the size or color they are looking for. I recommend making parent/child relationships between products (Amazon provides detailed instructions on how to do this).

These relationships allow related products to be grouped together on a single detail page. This helps reduce the number of search results and helps customers more easily view and compare the different sizing and color options that are available for a product – creating a much friendlier user experience.

Here is an example of an EmpireCovers.com item listed with a parent/child relationship on Amazon:

As you can see, our v-hull boat covers come in a variety of sizes and styles. Opposed to having a listing for the Premium V-Hull Boat Cover: Size 12’ to 14’ Long, 5.6’ Wide and a separate listing for the Standard V-Hull Boat Cover: 17’ to 19’ Long, 8.5’ Wide, all of our v-hull covers are listed on the same detail page, with varying size and style options.

As a result, the consumer can choose a premium, standard or deluxe style cover and can choose these covers in the proper size that is needed to fit the boat.

Choose Strong, Relevant Keywords

Amazon’s search relevancy is based on the information that is provided in product feeds, specifically in the Search Terms, Title, Brand, Manufacturer, MPN, and UPC fields.

In the Search Terms fields, sellers are given the opportunity to provide 5 key terms or phrases. More often than not, sellers choose words that already appear in their Title, Brand and Manufacturer fields. This is not necessary. Amazon’s system automatically includes Title, Brand and Manufacturer when determining search relevancy.

Instead, come up with new and inventive words that relate to the product at hand.

If you are struggling to come up with search terms, contact Amazon Seller Support and ask for suggestions. Or, if your company has a Google Adwords account, use the Keyword Tool to see what the most commonly searched words are for your product. You can then apply these words or phrases to your Amazon search terms – this practice is based on the notion that Amazon’s search pattern will likely be the same or similar to Google’s.

Include Rich Product Descriptions

This should speak for itself. Today, online consumers are much more tech savvy and detail oriented. If a consumer is not given an accurate and detailed description of what they are purchasing, they will not buy it. Make sure your descriptions are clear, accurate and typo free.

Be Prepared For Competitive Pricing

If you are not willing to lower pricing on Amazon.com by at least 10%, then you are probably using the wrong e-commerce site. Amazon.com users are bargain hungry, looking for the best products for the lowest prices.

Getting marked as a low price seller (a.k.a getting that beautiful green check next to your price listings on your inventory page) typically means getting more exposure on the Amazon search page.

Another important aspect of achieving selling success on Amazon is to strive to win the buy box.

A seller must compete for the buy box when he or she is selling a product that is already listed on the Amazon catalog – again, this is because Amazon does not want to flood the catalog with numerous detail pages of the same products.

The seller who offers the product for the lowest price will generally win the buy box and will thus, win the sale. However, this can mean being forced to cut your prices by 20% or more.

I suggest monitoring your Buy Box % on a day-to-day basis via your Amazon business report, located under the “Report Tab” on your merchant account home page.

Make Use Of The Amazon Selling Coach

Finally, all Amazon pro-merchant sellers are given access to the Amazon Selling Coach.

Here, sellers are given tips on how to best maximize their performance. These tips are targeted specifically for the individual seller and are displayed in the order that Amazon feels will be most helpful.

The Selling Coach will point out missing product images, product descriptions and features and other critical information. This is a great way to make sure that none of the products in your inventory are incomplete or lacking.

Amazon’s Seller Central also has great Seller Forums which include a seller support blog, discussions and success stories. I highly suggest reading these in order to maximize your seller performance.

Although we are still relatively new to the Amazon market, I hope that you have found our tips to be both helpful and practical. With Cyber Monday and the holiday season right around corner, it is crucial to get your products listed on as many e-commerce sites as possible and I believe that Amazon is a great place to start.

Special thanks to Claire Salmons, an employee at Empirecovers.com who works on product feeds and Amazon, who helped write and research the article.

All of the examples below are great ideas that any link builder can use at an agency or in-house. In my experience, my business (empirecovers.com) has shown to benefit from each of these tactics and we’ll touch on each in the following.

Empire Covers has consistently targeted keywords such as boat covers, motorcycle covers and car covers, and ever since we moved link building in-house, we’ve been in the top 5 for all keywords we target.

If you know anything about Search Engine Optimization, you know there is a correlation between building text links and higher rankings. These are the steps we go through in order to build links.

The first thing we do is search through Twitter to find people with active followings and who are also engaged in the blogging community. We follow these Twitter users because they seem to be more willing to respond to tweets.

We also send mass emails every month in efforts to get people to review our product, but we have actually found Twitter is a much better tool in reaching out to people.

Also, Twitter seems to work faster in a sense, since people respond to a question much faster on the Twitter platform than via email or even Facebook.

Here are some more things to think about when engaging people:

1. Try to enter or sponsor any contests they may be having.
2. Do not talk about links or text links right off the bat. Try to engage them in their company or something that they are interested in.
3. Even if it’s a YouTube video and not a text link, be happy with what you get. I have used many of the YouTube videos that people have produced for me  on our site and it is a great for the social side.

Using Product Reviews To Get Links

The most valuable and effective way to build links is to offer to send them a free sample of your product to review. I’ll note here that I was once at a conference and talked to someone from Bing that was in charge of their spam and SEO, he explained product reviews are a sort of grey area, but in my mind, any grey area is a green light.

Product reviews are an easy way to obtain publicity and feedback regarding your product or brand. We have averaged around 40 to 60 quality links per month via reviews and that seems to be working well for us.

Here are a few of my favorite example reviews and contest sponsorship links which we’ve obtained in this manner.

Video Review

• http://www.rvwithtito.com/2011/09/i-dont-have-rv-garage-i-have-rv-cover.html

This guy was extremely happy to find an RV cover that fit his abnormally large RV. The video he created was just the icing on the cake. Also, notice how we strategically asked him to add RV cover and empirecovers.com to the video. All in all, he created excellent review for us and gave us an SEO boost to boot.

Simple Step-by-Step Review

• http://aquaskier.com/reviews/empirecovers_silvershark.htm

This is a great review for a boat cover that just happens to be very interesting.

Contest Sponsorship

• http://www.travelwithkevinandruth.com/2011/05/contest-giveaway.html

This is a contest we sponsored last month for an RV cover, which generated a lot of community interest as well, since  RV people love to comment on links. It was extremely cool to do, but honestly, also extremely hard to put on, taking three people to manage the contest.

Kids Demo How To Use Product on YouTube

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5RteIc1aTU&feature=player_embedded

You’d likely have to pay an agency top dollar for that review. Everyone in the office and the Web loved it and we got a lot of hits because of it.

Blogger Creates Social Proof

• http://half-throttle.com/post/6039003719/this-cover-is-from-empire-covers-i-have-the

This is a review we absolutely love and use on our site. This guy lived in Panama during the monsoon season and used our covers. Once we put up the video on our motorcycle page, our conversion rate went up by about .5% to 1%, so from that perspective alone, it was pretty amazing.

I believe this method of link building is beneficial in many ways, since it’s good for the customers and also helps with everyday content on your site. This stuff is priceless when it comes to free advertising, and if a cover company can do it, why can’t you?

However, the reality is, these conferences are expensive. In fact, the average cost of attendance is around one-thousand dollars, not to mention the cost of transportation, hotel and food expenses. The typical person employed in the online marketing field probably cannot afford the luxury of attending these seminars. I personally can only afford about two conferences a year, but I’ve recently found a solution: local meetups!

Most of my friends are lawyers, doctors and teachers and therefore not accustomed with the work I do. This is a major frustration of mine. So, attending a conference is the only time I actually get to mingle with Internet marketing specialists that aren’t trying to sell me something.

Most of the best conferences are not in the Philadelphia region, where I’m currently located, and so I have to travel to either NYC, Chicago or Seattle to find an amazing convention. I do travel to New York often, but sometimes it seems the best speakers favor the West Coast conferences.

Monthly Meetups Fill In Conference Gaps

About six months ago, I was looking over my wife’s shoulder and saw that she was on the website Meetup.com. My wife was looking for a meetup for new working moms that liked to hike and be active. It was an interesting website with about 2.2 million unique visitors and seemed to have a very active user base.

I have to admit that my first impression was that most of the website is for new moms looking for something to do or fitness gurus that are looking for people to workout with.

However, there was an extensive section on a variety of technologies. I was very excited to start looking around for a meetup and have tried out a bunch since then. I came across groups spanning SEO, Search Engine Marketing, SQL and analytics.

The gatherings ranged from incredible to god awful, but I learned the trick to finding the right meetup is to research the leader of the organization and find out what credentials they have or if they’ve received sponsorships for the events.

One of the best meetups which I now attend every month, is run by a manager at GSI Commerce who manages the search engine optimization program. This is absolutely the best meetup I have ever been to. My favorite part about these gatherings is that those who attend are just as great as those who run the meetup.

Usually people attend from many of the top firms in the Philadelphia area. These include agencies like Seer, Razorfish, TPG and many others.

One of the best parts of the meetup is that you can be engaged as much as you like or sit back and listen to what everyone has to say. A lot of people go to learn and ask questions. Some days, I sit back and just listen and some days I try to speak as much as possible. However in this specific group, there are plenty of teachers and people that want to learn.

How Do Small Meetups Compare To Big Conferences?

When comparing the topics discussed at conferences with the meetup, they seem to be equivalent. One of the major benefits of attending a meetup rather than a conference, may be your ability* to be more involved.

For instance, I may email the leader of the meetup and suggest topics that are of interest to me, or if I happen to have a major question, I can just ask by simply sending an email or making a phone call.

For example, I once had a question regarding link building, looking for some new techniques to create links. At the next meetup, our leader gave a presentation on link building and all of the members had a chance to talk about their favorite tricks. I found this type of learning very beneficial.

Additionally, when major events happen in the Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing world, we are able to discuss them immediately at the meetup whereas a conference may miss these topics or be delayed in addressing them.

For example, when Panda was first announced, the meetup discussed and dissected Panda. I found it incredibly refreshing and it eased a lot of my anxieties surrounding the update.

This meetup group which meets once a month, has been a blessing for me. It seems, most Internet marketers feel the same way. I have attended meetups such as Web Analytics Wednesday. People from Vanguard and Comcast were arguing about which analytics software I should use for my small business. Of course, one of their answers was to just buy both Webtrends and Omniture. I was little shocked by that answer, but it was worth the information.

The truth is, everyone wants to give their opinion no matter if it is right or wrong, but the great part about these meetups is that there are always people to share ideas with. And the best part is that it’s free!

The only thing it may cost you is your time and commitment. I actually bring a lot of my employees to the meetings and I find it helps them relax and learn at the same time. It doesn’t hurt that most of the meetups are at bars either.

If you are in the Philadelphia or Southern Jersey region, contact me and I will be happy to tell you more about the meetup or how to attend.

As of recently, I am researching the power of Twitter and I encourage you to follow me @jakegoldblum and or come say hello at the meetup. The first two people to do so will be given Empire t-shirts.

*Editor’s Note: Search Marketing Expo events typically do a call for Session Ideas on the SMX Blog prior to finalizing the agenda and putting out a call for speakers. Anyone can suggest session ideas, and  it doesn’t mean you have to volunteer to be a speaker at the session.

I am a big advocate of bringing all aspects of your online business in-house. It’s common wisdom that you can ”save” money by outsourcing, because you get experienced people working 24/7 on your company. However, for my business, outsourcing repeatedly cost more and delivered poorer quality work.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one area that I strongly advocate managing internally. The tips and figures I’ll be sharing should be helpful to small or medium size online businesses considering the advantages of bringing PPC in-house.

Just for a little background, I initially managed the PPC advertising, along with running the rest of the business, until the campaign grew to where it required 40 hours a week to be managed properly. I still look at the analytics, big picture and once in awhile tell the manager to change some bids but I am not the primary person running it anymore because I have to run the entire business. I have a lot of experience in both hiring a PPC manager and running an effective campaign.

Cost Perception

The biggest obstacle preventing in-house PPC for most businesses the perception of the cost of hiring a full time PPC manager. I have found that perception to be pretty inaccurate. When I researched salaries and costs on websites such as glassdoor.com, and from interviewing other managers in the North East, the average salary range turned out to be 45 to 65 thousand dollars a year.

According to the recent SEMPO salary survey, this is not unreasonable for a person with 0-5 years search experience:

Salary Ranges By Experience From SEMPO.org 2011 Survey

Now let’s put that into perspective. When I interviewed a handful of PPC firms, the average rate was 12.5% of your total advertising budget. If your PPC advertising budget is near $400,000, it would work out to be the equivalent of a $50,000 yearly salary.

Even if your budget is greater, your PPC management costs won’t increase; it’s linked to an individual salary instead of a percentage of the total cost.

Time Perception

When I interviewed potential companies to take over my PPC campaign, the average time they gave me to spend managing our account, per week, is about 5 hours: for a total of 20 hours per month.

If you hired a PPC manager full time, they will spend far more time and look a lot deeper into optimizing your campaigns. Remember an in-house associate knows the industry, knows the product, and knows the customer. Outsourced PPC account managers do not know your industry or your customers the way you and your employees do.

Automation & Software Solutions

Most SEM firms tried to sell me on software that manages PPC keywords and campaigns automatically, with systematic adaptation to adjust and refine its own effectiveness over time. Most software programs that I have researched cost about 3% of ad spend to 5% of ad spend.

I am now generally apprehensive about software for PPC management, because of my own recent experience. We found, in our business, that the software could not do as well as the human interaction, when we watched the conversion rate on our website go from a very good conversion rate to a 1.5%.

It was a harsh reality, but we quickly rebounded once we stopped using the software and brought in our own person.

The PPC Management Position

The right person for PPC management on your team does not necessarily have to be an expert in PPC. I have found that it is better to have personnel with the right skills sets (strong copy writing, math, analysis, and research skills) which broadens the job pool and decreases expert leverage for salary requirements.

I have hired three people to do PPC management for my large campaigns. None of them had PPC experience. There is a learning curve, of course, but it worked out better and saved money in the long run. Another thing to think about is what a PPC manager actually does. Obviously, one of the things that a PPC manager does is setup campaigns and creates ads for the campaign.

I have also found that when your ad spend reaches a certain threshold, representatives from Bing (Microsoft Advertising) and Google Adwords will assist you in creating your campaigns. Google was willing to help after I reached $10,000/month in ad spend, however, Bing was willing to assist regardless of my campaign size.

There are no limits to the complexity of the campaign your account representatives will assist you with, either. I worked with my Google representative to make campaigns segmenting all of my power keywords by state. All of the campaigns had different ads, keywords, and negative keywords based on the state. This would have taken me weeks to complete alone, but they were happy to do it for me and give me some trending statistics to help make decisions as well.

I must note that my representatives from Google are especially friendly, helpful people; I cannot say a bad word about them. They do rotate all the time, and I have a new person working on my account every 6 months, but that is what you ought to expect with a giant company like Google.

Negative Keywords

Adjusting negative keywords are an important part of the PPC manager’s role. Negative keywords are one of the greatest ways to optimize the campaign, however, they can also be very time consuming to implement. We currently run over 40 campaigns. One campaign for June spent over $15,000 generated over 8000 clicks with 3536 unique Google searches.

After sifting through the thousands of searches, we were able to create negative keywords to filter out poorer quality traffic. Our efforts in negative keywords resulted in savings of 19% of our ad spend. Because the results are so positive, and because the method is so time consuming to implement, it is best done in-house.

It took my specialist 20 hours to optimize our 40 campaigns; to put that into perspective, that same amount of time would have been all of the hours an outsourced PPC company would spend on your campaign.

Power Keywords

If you manage a large campaign, you have probably noticed that despite having thousands of keywords, less than 5% of them convert consistently. These few strong performing keywords are sometimes referred to as power keywords.

In my experience at our company, many of my keywords convert, but only about 10 to 15 keywords have more than 10 to 15 conversions per day. Those few power keywords seemed to be 65 to 80% of the total cost of all campaigns.

I surveyed other SEM professionals in my local area, and found that they had experienced the same trend. This begs the question: does an outsourced PPC manager only manage ten keywords?

My advice to those outsourcing their PPC would be to identify and remove the ten power keywords from their outsourced PPC management: at 65-80% of the total cost of your campaigns, as this could save you a lot of money.

I would also recommend removing all of the branded keywords in your campaign from their management. (Branded keywords are terms that include your company name or your product names.) These, of course, are going to have a very high conversion rate, and these are easy wins for any PPC company, and not a true measure of their skill or performance.

Caution: Content Networks & Mobile Customers

Mobile users are notoriously poorer converters than their on-PC counterparts, and if you’re not prepared with a good mobile experience, you had better be prepared to waste ad spend on mobile users. One of the hard lessons I have learned about PPC is that if you do not have time to do PPC in-house, then you do not have time to make a mobile site.

A mobile site is a totally different experience than a website and, in my experience, has different goals and different things that can go wrong. Make sure you make different campaigns for your mobile site than your regular site, or turn it off all together. It will save you money in the long run, and when you are prepared with a mobile site, then you should try it.

To say I am not a fan of Google’s content network is an understatement. I have never wasted so much money in my life on the content network.

While at a conference, I cornered my Google representative and asked his take on the content network, and its effectiveness. His take was that content network is great for branding, converts very poorly for sales. I am sure that with the right strategy (probably with branding goals) you can find success with content networks, but everyone I’ve surveyed has had a similar experience to mine.

If your PPC agency is steering you towards advertising on content networks, make sure that they have demonstrated success in this area and have a specific, thoroughly vetted strategy for your campaign.

Beginning Step: Exact Match

If you are apprehensive about running a PPC campaign yourself, or are perhaps just starting out, begin with using the exact match term in Google Adwords. To do exact match, put brackets [ ] around a keyword in your Adwords account.

Google explains exact match as “Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively.”

Using exact match to start with will reduce the amount of negative keywords you have to work through, and make it easier to find your power keywords. Note that even if you use exact match, Google will still often times use unrelated keywords, so be sure to take a good look at your campaigns and filter out any irrelevant terms as they come up.

Ultimately, the decision to bring your SEM in-house should weigh all the costs and benefits to your specific situation. Hopefully some of the anecdotes and experiences I’ve shared will help you make that decision for your company.

While I always advocate managing all aspects of your business internally, that doesn’t mean that it is the best solution for everyone. Be cautious and thorough if you decide to outsource your PPC, and always remember that you know (and care) more about your business and your customers than any hired firm will.

Once upon a time, I had a lot of faith in SEO firms. I sought out top companies in the industry and paid thousands of dollars. What I got in return were minimal results, and what turned out to be minimal effort.

If you’re an e-commerce manager, you might be surprised to find out how easy it is to save money on the “low hanging fruit” of SEO by shifting part, or all, of your SEO efforts in-house.

There are 5 major parts of SEO that you can move in-house, and save your company between $20,000 – $120,000 dollars a year.

Keyword Analysis

When I used an SEO firm, I was charged between $200 to $500 dollars a month just for keyword analysis. Looking back, it seems wasteful: especially considering the free and inexpensive resources available online that help you select an optimal list of keyword phrases, like Google’s keyword tool. This tool is part of the Google AdWords suite, but it is just as useful for SEO.

Let’s say you have a business that sells real estate. You enter “real estate” into Google’s keyword tool and you will see huge traffic levels. By default, once you enter your keywords, the tool does a broad match. Click the box in the top left-hand sidebar that says “exact match.”

After that adjustment, the column that says “local monthly searches” (this really just means searches in your country) shows 301,000 searches per month for the exact phrase “real estate.”

If you try a more specific phrase, say “Philadelphia Real Estate”, you’ll see that the volume drops to 3,600 searches a month. Play with the tool a bit more to get comfortable, and then you can begin expanding your keywords.

Another good place to start expanding your keywords is by glancing at your competitors’ websites. Although meta-keywords are often times viewed as worthless by the SEO community at large, having meta-keywords is still a common practice. Your competitors are likely to have their targeted keywords for each page exposed to you in their HTML code and you’d be a fool not to take a look.

Simply right click on the page, select view source from the context menu, and your browser should load the HTML of the page. Once you’re looking at the HTML, press ctrl+F on your keyboard to activate the ability to search the text. Search for: “meta name=”keywords”", and if your competitor uses the keywords meta tag, your search tool should jump to it.

While you’ve got that HTML open, take a peek at your competitor’s title tags (“meta name=”title”). Make sure you don’t copy their tags. If you look at the top three ranking sites for the keywords you’re analyzing, you’ll probably see that they have the same (or strikingly similar) title tags.

Once you have a good list of keywords, you’ll want to use Market Samurai, a tool you can purchase for $99. This tool will allow you to determine how heavy the competition is for each keyword phrase and select keywords that have both a high volume of traffic, but also a low level of competition. Do your best to put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and think of how they’d approach looking for your product.

Competitive Analysis & Reporting

Competitive analysis is a service most SEO firms provide (I was charged $100 monthly, on average) to provide you reports on how well your competitors are ranking for the keywords you’re targeting. There are a few tools, paid and free, that will also provide you with similar reporting, namely SEOMoz and SEO Quake.

For about the same price as I was paying just for competitive analysis, SEOMoz (about $90 monthly) will allow you to enter three competitors and a list of keywords you want to examine. (It has a host of other tools I’ll discuss in a bit, too.) When you run the comparison, SEOMoz will show you how you rank for each keyword compared to your competition.

Another free approach to examining your comparison would be to use a tool such as SEO Quake, which is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to instantly view an array of statistics. This plugin will display a website’s Google page rank, the number of pages they have indexed in each of the major search engines, Alexa rank, the number of inbound links, even the age of their website.

I also recommend plugging your website and your competitor’s websites into Compete.com to get a general idea as to how much traffic they receive each month (but be sure to keep in mind that this is just an estimate). When examining your target keywords, be sure to logout of Google and erase all of your cookies  in order to get more neutral results.

I personally like to track ongoing rankings using Web CEO, although Market Samurai works as well. Web CEO will provide you with a report each month that shows any increase or decrease in your ranking. If you want a very basic overview of how your competition is doing, try websitegrader.com and woorank.com. These sites will also give you some helpful tips on how to improve your own SEO.

Content Creation

One of the most essential parts of a good SEO strategy is content creation. Most SEO companies charge around $100 for a piece of content, and often, unbeknownst to you, outsource the writing anyway. Content, in this case, includes any written articles targeting specific keywords being generated for your website, newsletter and blogs.

Why would you have someone else pay someone else to write about your business? When you think about it, who could write better content than people who know it best—your own in-house team? Be sure to focus on keywords when writing any articles or blogs. Using your target keywords 3 or 4 times in the article and hyperlinking them to the appropriate page on my website.

Writing content for your website and product isn’t very difficult or time consuming, so I recommend bringing content creation in house as much as possible. If that’s not possible, however, use a service like Content Network. This website will allow you to pay a fee per word for copywriting. I was able to find someone with a master’s degree in English from University of Michigan who charged 5 cents per word for their services.

Markup & Standards

Be sure to follow coding standards, and use your markup semantically. Basically, this means using only one ‘H1′ tag per page, and making sure your content is using the appropriate markup for what the content is. The web has millions and millions of free resources on basic HTML markup, and my personal favorite is the W3C, or W3Schools.

What is the relationship between markup and SEO? Spiders use your markup to determine the significance of the keywords it finds; a ‘H1′ tag, for example, means ‘This is the most important content on the page–this is what the page is about!’

According to SEOMoz: “Although employing targeted keywords in the H1 tag does not correlate well to high rankings, it does appear to provide some slight value. It’s also considered a best practice for accessibility and to describe a page’s content, hence our recommendation.” That’s just one example, but each piece of your code helps to tell the search engines the importance of the content on your page, so it’s critical to make sure that you use markup properly.

Link Building

When it comes to SEO, I’ve found two factors to be most important: strong content and good links.

As I mentioned above, content can be handled very effectively in-house, though content creation and proper markup.

The second portion is link building. A significant portion of link building methods employed by SEO companies today are frowned upon by Google. Some of these questionable methods include spamming blog comment sections, buying links through link farms, submitting your website to 1000 directories, and so on. These methods are risky and can cause you to lose ranking or even get blacklisted.

Amazingly, plenty of SEO companies use exactly those old-school tricks to get short-term results for their clients. SEO Book wrote a great article on 101 link building tactics. If you have a low budget, this is a good way to get started.

Link building, however, is a complex and constantly evolving game, requiring time and dedication. I’ve found a number of ways to get quality links for little or no cost. One of the best methods that i can give you is to give away your own product to bloggers and get reviews from relevant websites. In exchange for reviews get text links for the reviews.

It can sometimes be frustrating and annoying to wait so long for links but it is the cheapest and easiest way to get links. I have also had confirmation from some of the top link builders in the industry that this is the best way to start.

Network Locally & Getting Support

If you’re considering bringing your SEO efforts in-house, you don’t have to do it alone. There are resources online, and in real life, in your local area, where you can get support and discuss your issues.

Some of the best advice I have ever gotten was in SEO related Meetup.com gatherings and SEO blogs and forums such as the High Rankings forum, the Seer Interactive blog and the SEOMoz Pro Q&A forum. All free advice. Their tips alone could help save you up to $20,000 – $30,000 dollars a month.

You don’t have to do it all at once, either; start off slowly, maybe focus on content creation and markup optimization, and continue paying for Link Building until you’re ready to take it on.

Ultimately, you know your business, your customers, and your keywords best, so try to bring your SEO efforts in house whenever possible. You’ll not only save money, you’ll get better quality content, and learn more about your website and your customers.

If you have questions or want some advice–just ask! Let me know your thoughts or questions in the comments below or contact me directly.