As mentioned, it is important to first define your goals and evaluate potential of your website. A good internet marketing specialist should be able to help you go through this process and elaborate a solid strategy. He is expert, your consultant. This is why you are investing in him. Although, some companies will offer keyword analysis services as a seperate service. There is nothing wrong with this practice and it can actually give you more flexibility in development of your website. Not having service at all would be something to worry about!

After elaborating a strategy, your internet marketing specialist will get into development process. Can he actually build a nice looking website or will he just put a bunch of keywords together along with some html code in order to improve your website ranking? This is an important thing to know before hiring an internet marketing specialist since many of them calling themselves seo (search engine optimizer) don't have any design skills. In addition to your internet marketing specialist, would you also need to hire a web developper and add this to your bill?

Those are just some basic things you need to know before hiring an internet marketing specialist. After optimizing your website for search engines, many other actions can be taken. Can your internet marketing specialist perform those for you? Developping partnerships and content pages, submitting your url to search engines and directories, trading links, writing articles and advertising on internet are all among other marketing actions that would help improve your online presence and website ranking. It's now up to you to find an internet marketing specialist that could work within your budget!

STEP 3: Get Linked

This part is different depending on if you have a content site or a commercial site. For content sites you want to find similar websites. Websites that target same people that you do. Don't think of them as competition, think of them as partners...link partners. Arrange link exchanges with these websites. Place a link to them, and in return ask them to place a link to your site. Most search engines use spiders to crawl web, so more similar sites they find that link to yours, better.

For commercial websites link exchanges aren't always best idea. Any other websites targeting same visitors, ARE your competition. You don't really want to send your visitors to your competition. One idea is to arrange link exchanges with content sites. We have links to many commercial websites on American-Firefighter.com that we have posted in exchange for those sites placing links to our site. The second option is to advertise. Find large scale content websites to advertise with. This part can be a little tricky. Many content websites are so saturated with advertisements, and their prices are so high it hardly seems worth it. If you can't find a good content site to advertise on, we recommend Google AdWords: http://adwords.google.com Not only will your ad be shown on biggest and best search engine on web, but you can also have your ad shown on thousands of AdSense publisher websites, content websites that show contextual text ads served up by Google.

STEP 4: Don't Cheat!

Using doorway pages, hidden links, dynamically generated pages full of garbage, or any other sneaky tactic won't help, in fact it will usually hurt your websites success. Many search engines will ban your website if they find such tactics, and when a visitor sees such tactics, they will lose all faith in your website. A website with no visitors isn't much of a website.

Believe it or not, that's it! We have followed these four steps and have great search engine rankings on nearly every major search engine...and we didn't pay thousands of dollars to get there!

http://www.american-firefighter.com