Many small business owners often misunderstand the nature of the Internet and always think they can match or edge their competitor by some basic and quick SEO work.

But the fact is that the reality is far from that. One of my clients keeps pressing for finding shortcuts to get his website ranking up there but I keep telling them, look at search engine optimization like body building. If you are overweight, first you need to lose weight. That takes sometime and hard work. Then you need to build muscle which takes more hardwork and patience. Of course there are shortcuts, such as taking supplements including illegal supplements for short term gain at expense of your long term health.

Same is the true with search engine optimization. You can do some black hat and gray hat practices to build traffic, you can even drop a ton of money to buy an established website at a very expensive price, but at what cost?

I advise small business owners to think ROI and also think long term. I recommend then spend their money wisely, put a long term SEO goal in mind and in short term, invest in PPC, Email Marketing, affiliate networking to build some traffic for short term until your SEO efforts kick in.

Also keep in mind that many websites with good organic rankings still invest in PPC and all the other SEM methods because organic traffic simply isn’t enough specially when it comes to conversion. Today’s success in the world of Internet is a collective of online marketing campaigns and efforts and not necessarily SEO so it is important for small business owners to realize that building a successful Internet business is like building an empire, it takes work, planning, heavy investment, continuous refinement, and patience. As history’s greatest empire “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, neither will be your online business.

I use all these “keyword optimization” tools or “SEO tools” who tell me my sites aren’t 100% optimized. Basically the way they work is that they crawl your website and check for keywords density, keyword prominence, and keywords total and count and tell you if you are optimized or not.

And many SEO’s follow those tools step by step, increasing or decreasing their keyword density, count, and etc. And for big sites they can spend hours, weeks, perhaps even months to “optimize” these keywords except they end up coming up with getting no or very little result.

My advance is Always think about return of investment (ROI) on your work. If you spend hours of work on something with little result, then that is a loss. And keyword optimization while is necessary, is not the deciding factor for your SEO. It is collective of what you do on and off your website.

Also think conversion! What is the point of bringing traffic to your website without converting. If your content is not pleasant to your visitors’ eyes, then chances of you making them your customer or client is not so great.

When it comes to content, I personally like the natural content writing which is better. People like it so do Google and other modern search engines prefer that method as they now use advanced AI pattern recognition linguistic algorithm.