By Michael Fleischner

I'm often asked by companies how much they should be spending on search engine optimization. As you can imagine, the answer to such a question depends on a variety of factors. An SEO budget could be based on the number of web properties under your management, how much work there is to do, and who will be doing the work for you.

Whether you are focusing on search engine optimization or pay-per-click marketing, you must make an investment in time, resources, and dollars to achieve you goal. Often times search engine optimization is compared to PPC. This is an unfair comparison because pay per click marketing has an immediate and direct cost. The costs associated with SEO are more indirect but can be expensive. Consider you time, effort, and work associated with any optimization effort.

You begin incurring costs as soon as you start spending your time reviewing your site from an SEO perspective. Beyond the initial site review are efforts related to keyword analysis and taking a closer look at each of your competitors. As a result you are incurring costs that related to the value of your own labor. You could also outsource these functions to a third party and applicable fees would be incurred. The key is to consider your time as money. Each moment you spend could be used towards something else.

Be sure to calculate the value of your time and the time spent by others on your team who are focused on SEO related efforts. Each of us can calculate our value by taking an annual salary and dividing it by two thousand hours. This is based on working 50 weeks per year, 40 hours per week. How much is your time worth? Consider this factor before determining the true cost of your search engine optimization efforts.

Once you have completed a thorough review of your web site, completed the necessary analysis, and have determined the keywords you are going to optimize for, the optimization process begins. And this work can be very costly. Again, you have to consider the time you are spending on SEO related activities and how much its costing you by not focusing on other, more challenging opportunities. The process of link building is an arduous one and can be outsourced to expedite the process or simply lower costs.

Online tools can also be helpful in determining or prioritizing tasks. Once you have specific tasks defined, locate a resource that can save you money. This may be a software application that helps you submit your website to directories. It could be an article writing service that can do the heavy lifting for you. It may even be an outsource solution for finding link partners and managing link exchanges. Link building|All of this link building takes work and requires a good deal of time. So consider your options and choose the one that is most cost effective.

The truth about SEO is that it doesn't come cheap. If you want to ramp up your search engine optimization efforts quickly, you will need to make an investment. The choice you need to make is whether or not that investment will involve your own valuable time. If so, that's fine, just make sure you are getting the biggest bang for your buck. Consider outsourcing those activities that can be done more cost efficiently elsewhere.

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