One of questions our firm often gets asked is, "Why is search engine optimization (SEO) so expensive?" The simple answer -it isn't.

SEO is most cost effective form of advertising with a low cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and high return on investment (ROI). Studies have shown that dollar for dollar, SEO is best form of advertising... online and offline!

SEO is proactive... customer is actively looking for products and services you provide. Traditional advertising is passive... you are hoping to spark someone's interest and get them thinking about buying your products and services.

Compared with other forms of advertising, Internet marketing via SEO is very inexpensive. Think about how much your business spends on television, radio, newspaper, magazine, and even yellow pages ads. If you were to break these costs down on a monthly basis, SEO would probably cost least and still deliver better results.

To test this, we looked into advertising in a couple of national US magazines as well as newspapers, yellow pages, and radio spots in some major Canadian cities. The following table represents average cost per month for each.

Blogging software is really a simple Content Management System (CMS) that easily adds new pages and integrates them into your site's navigational structure and linkage.

Blogs and blog posts are naturally search engine friendly because they are text-rich, link-rich, frequently-updated webpages that use stylesheets or CSS, and have very little extraneous HTML.

Optimizing a blog is very similar to optimizing a website, and optimizing a blog post similar to optimizing a web page. But depending on blogging service or software you use, results may look somewhat different.

If you follow some simple rules for search engine optimization, your blog can rank much higher than static website pages in search engine results pages.

Here are most important rules to follow to get your posts listed for keywords of your choice.

1. Use your primary keyword in your blog domain

Whether you purchase a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains primary keyword you want to optimize for.

For example, if you want your blog to get found for keyword "rss" get a domain with keyword "rss", or use keyword in a subdomain as in http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/rssnews/

Getting a domain name with your own name might make for good branding, especially if yours is a personal blog.

But if you're doing it for business and want targeted traffic to flow your way, keywords in domain or subdomain are a move in right direction.

2. Use your primary key phrase in your blog header tags and title of your posts

If your primary key phrase is "business blogging" make sure that word business, or blogging, or both, appear in your blog headers (the H1 or H2 tags) as well as title of each of your posts.

Most blogging software will take keywords in your post title and put them into file name of permalink posts it creates.

For example, if you have a blog on Blogger and title your post "Search Engine Optimization For Blogs", Blogger will automatically create a page with your post and name file "search-engine-optimization-for-blogs.html" or something similar.

With other server-side software like Wordpress and Movable Type, you may require mod_rewrite command to save title of your entries as a permalink.

3. Use your secondary keywords in body of your post

If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in body of your post and pepper your blog titles or links with them appropriately.

Don't overdo this or your posts will end up sounding unnatural and spammy to readers.

4. Use your keywords in anchor text of links

Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.

Use your primary and secondary keywords in anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages on your main site.