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The extreme popularity and success of Internet marketing has created a new career for thousands of forward thinking individuals. That career is SEO consulting. Search engine optimization jobs are lucrative but very demanding. This relatively new career field is in tremendous demand and with the Internet growing by leaps and bounds year over year, the demand for skilled consultants will continue to increase over the coming years.

It stands to reason because today, over one million domain names are established nearly every month with the majority of them for business use, according to research from Statistic Brain Institute[1]. It is these business websites that savvy marketers are creating that will make many of these entrepreneurs millionaires in a relatively short period. Thus, the need for SEO consulting is vital to bring these websites effectiveness to the level of making money and developing staying power amidst the tens of billions of web pages already in existence.

SEO and attracting visitors

SEO consultants (SEOs for short) face a tough challenge when faced with trying to break into an already competitive field on the Internet, or by optimizing an existing website to perform at its best. However, that is precisely what SEO consultants do. With their many tools and techniques, they can develop workable plans specific to a particular website's goals and create as much traffic to the website as possible. An example of these objectives includes increased exposure, higher page rankings, on-page and off-page optimization, and back linking strategies, just to name a few. The Internet is very competitive, as already mentioned, and a skilled SEO digs deeper by researching the field to seek out areas that although heavily searched, are not too competitive from a search engine perspective.

Consider cost vs. ROI

As with any business venture, costs are involved that sometimes scare away the weak-willed investor or business owner. SEO consulting is expensive, but the results justify the expense. Hiring an SEO consultant is a decision about putting money at risk immediately with the hope of a handsome return later (ROI). From a cost perspective, having to invest money in the services of an SEO company to handle your sites complicated metrics may seem prohibitive at first. Until you gain some understanding of the steps involved in optimizing your site, you might not appreciate the level of skill required to deliver positive results in the long term. From an SEO perspective, the days of counting keywords and monitoring keyword density are over, except for the quality, not quantity, of those keywords. This assumes, of course that any SEO consultant worth their salt would not risk using black hat SEO methods such as keyword stuffing and the like. What is important today more than ever before is how your content affects your reader, and this is only the beginning. Content still reigns supreme regardless of any other component of a website or blog. The search engines, especially Google, are serious about cleaning up all the spam and wasted space where poor content lives. A newer facet of SEO is the use of LSI words within your content. Note that LSI words are not keywords, but words that tend to relate to the keyword. In fact, pages can rank very high in Google without a single keyword, but with the sensible use of LSI words. Of course, an alternative method is to dive in and work hard at the business while investing lesser amounts of money as a tradeoff for rapid success. All in all, SEO consultants help in numerous ways to catapult a website to prominence with the proper application of techniques in a timely fashion.

The importance of SEO

It is imperative to study SEO regularly to learn search engine optimization techniques and to stay current with keyword research, search engine updates, web search engine optimization and especially, social media. The Google algorithm updates dramatically changed the SEO landscape forever, which inspired SEO consultants to fine-tune their craft. Techniques that worked before are either outdated or gone for good. The SEO techniques mentioned here are important aspects of a well-planned campaign. The campaign needs clearly defined steps with built-in monitoring in order to build and sustain success. A sustainable campaign using accepted SEO strategies and techniques is the mantra of SEO communities worldwide as they work to create the perfect blend of methods designed for maximum effect.