How To Build Income With Your Website - Even In Tough Times

I recently took a trip to Fry's Electronics which is like Disneyland for computer and techno geeks. My eyes always glaze over upon arrival at the nearly 30,000 square foot store that's packed from top to bottom with technology and tools I LOVE to have for my business and my websites. In past times I would wander through the aisles collecting goodies that I would take home and "try-out." Sometimes they were expensive, sometimes affordable, but more often than not they were things that I wanted to have but not necessarily things I needed to have.

Although instinctively I know the difference between want and need, but never had it been clearer to me than when the economy began to shift and people began to get nervous about keeping jobs, finding income (forget about building a savings account!) and spending money. I found myself faced with some tough decisions about where to focus my attention dollar-wise. What I once spent money on, I now had to figure out how to find alternatives for little cost or *free*.

Last week I received an email from a client that had me downright frustrated. My client is a wonderfully intelligent and hard working gal who has been diligently building her business. With the economic setbacks in the US she is struggling as her client base is shriveling up. As I read her email I was near tears. All of her hard work and dedication would be lost if she were to virtually close her doors due to the economy and the drop-offs in sales. Times are so tough that she cannot even afford to continue with her current paid marketing efforts.

Does this sound like you? Many of you are also entrepreneurs who might be facing similar worries about your business. You might also be considering cutting back on things like advertising or little freebies for your customers in order to make ends meet. Worse yet, you might be closing up shop altogether.

During this tough time I've begun to go back to basics with my client's websites. Specifically, I've gone back to recommending that sites be optimized organically for the search engines. What is Organic Search Engine Optimization you might ask? SEO is an "on-site" marketing technique that was extremely popular before anyone had even heard of social media.

Back in the "early days" of the Internet (before blogs, podcasting and social media) webby gurus focused a majority of their marketing effort time on search engine optimization. We worked on building a list of keywords for your site which relayed information to the Search Engines on all the special products and services you provide. The search engines then use these keywords to determine how to feature a site in the results list when a user performed a search. Your overall placement was determined using an algorithm that takes into account the keyword search the user completes and your keywords and content. Specifically, you could influence where in the list your site showed up based on where you placed your keywords (meta-tags) and also where you used them in your content. The best part is that unlike Pay-Per-Click you don't pay to have your site featured in their results list.

With the invention of social media however I've seen a sharp drop off in SEO - a lot of marketing efforts have been shifted towards "off-site" marketing techniques (blogging, podcasting, social media) to build incoming traffic to websites.

Ideally, you would combine both methods to have a complete marketing system in place. If you're not already doing so, I want to encourage you to consider Organic Search Engine Optimization as an option for getting your website seen in these tough times.

Just in case you need a bit of encouragement, here's some reasons organic search engine optimization is well worth the effort:

• You don't pay a per-click "fee" to the search engines for visitors to your site which means it can potentially have a higher ROI than pay-per-click search listings.
• When done properly it has an advantage over Pay-Per-Click since PPC allows anyone to increase their bid for a search term you use thereby passing you in the results listing.
• Software makes it easier than ever to track your results and to influence your search engine position.
  

If you'd like information on how to get started with SEO one of my favorite companies, Wordtracker, has launched a step-by-step instruction toolset (complete with videos, reports and guides) to help you learn Organic Search Engine Optimization - and best of all it's FREE. Checkout Wordtracker's Top 10 Free SEO & Keyword Tools And Reports From Wordtracker for further information.