ADVANTAGES OF SEO

The advantages of SEO are numerous and far reaching for any site that obtains the rankings it seeks on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Let's take a closer look.

Let's talk about fast food outlets. This may seem an odd place to start with when talking about the advantages of SEO, but it isn't. The various fast food companies pursue the placement of their restaurants with great care and research. Once they identify the optimal position, they open their store and reap the benefits of the traffic for years.

McDonalds is the classic fast food company. They spend $50,000 to $100,000 researching where to open one of their outlets each time they do it. What are they researching? They are trying to find the optimal spot in a community to maximize their exposure to potential customers as well as make it incredibly convenient for said customers to buy food from them. Think about it. Have you ever seen a McDonalds that is hidden back in the corner of a strip mall or is hard to get to from the street?

As strange as it sounds, your site should be positioned like a McDonalds on the web. You want to research the keyword phrases being used by the maximum number of people in your business area. You then want to position your site in front of them by getting ranked in the top 10 for the search results for that keyword phrase. Once this is accomplished, you can reap the benefits of continual business just like a well-positioned McDonalds franchise. Of course, one of the advantages of SEO compared to McDonalds is you can stay open all night!

Let's boil the above example down to more fundamental advantages. The primary advantage of SEO over any other type of internet marketing is found in the long-term aspects. Once your site is ranked in the top 10 for your keyword phrase, you should be able to keep it there with a minimum of fuss. This means that you will receive free traffic from prospects 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year for as long as you keep your site up.

Return on investment is another one of the advantages of SEO over paid advertising. SEO can take time to produce rankings, so the initial return on your investment in it is poor. Once rankings are obtained, however, the return on investment becomes excellent as you receive a large volume of free traffic. In contrast, paid web advertising produces more upfront, but caps your profitability in the long term. Why? Well, you are always going to be paying for the traffic. In two years, you will be paying the same or more for the identical traffic you are getting today. With SEO, you will not.

To understand the practical advantages of SEO, do a search for the most basic keyword in your business line. If you have a site offering carpet cleaning services, do a search for "carpet cleaning". Now, imagine how much money those sites that appear are making.
(source-www.alucardseoservices.com)