There are three basic levels of website SEO in the modern Internet Marketing game. There’s the basic, low-level SEO that offshore companies are famous for performing quickly and accurately — simple, repetitive tasks like commenting on submitting your site to directories and pinging RSS aggregators. Then there’s midlevel SEO that involves keyword research; things like social bookmarking and forum posting fall into that category. Then you’ve got the top level of SEO, where you actually create content that you expect real people to read and respect. Article writing and submission, custom blog creation, and similar activities are top-level SEO.
Each stage of organic SEO is important, because each one fills different goals for your website:
Low-level SEO
Low-level SEO forms ‘background’ of your site’s link profile. Each one of these links is quick and inexpensive to create, which means that every site in the world that’s serious about SEO has hundreds of them. You can’t safely ignore this level of SEO, because even though Google doesn’t give any one of them that much credit, if you’re several hundred backlinks behind a competitor, you can’t catch up, no matter how powerful your few good backlinks are.
Mid-level SEO
The search engines give quite a bit more credit to midlevel backlinks, but they’re still relatively easy to create. If you’re just starting to build backlinks, it’s a good idea to start with midlevel links, because they’re less expensive but more powerful as a whole than high-level or low-level backlinks, respectively. In other words, mid-level backlinks have the best RoI in terms of ranking-per-dollar than the other levels of SEO — and that’s worth a lot.
High-level SEO
This is the gold mine. High-level SEO should take an hour or so of work for each backlink you get. That’s because you need the content associated with your site to be good, or you’ll miss out on lots of potential customers that would otherwise have clicked through to your landing page. Done right, however, high-level SEO drives traffic, which means sales, in addition to skyrocketing your page upward in the SERPs. What more could you need?
