SEO campaigns can consume a lot of budget very quickly with very little return in the short run. Let’s face it, there are a many things that need to be done and time is money. So what are the tricks to a successful (and cost effective) SEO campaign?

First – establish a benchmark. If you don’t know where you are starting, you won’t know if you are winning the battle. Find out how you rank on the search engines of your choice for your most cherished keywords.

Now choose carefully – you want to pick one or two search engines and a handful of keywords. Each search engine is different and while some will like your SEO tuning, others will hate it and your rankings may drop, so it is very important that you make a conscious decision as to the ones you want to improve on.

Once you have done that – then look at your competitors, and see what they are doing. If they have been successful, then by emulating them, you too will be successful.

Now go and make your changes – update your copy, your meta-tags, your titles, your image texts – all of the things that a decent SEO tune up will do.

Now for the hard part – have patience. It will take somewhere close to a month or maybe more for those changes to have any effect, so there is no point in making changes on a Monday and expect a shift in your rankings by Tuesday. It is simply not going to happen – so get back to your regular business and make a note in your diary to re-check your rankings in a month.

Rinse and repeat on a monthly basis.

Simple isn’t it – well not quite, because even if your site is fully SEO’d there are other factors that you need to work on, and those are called back links.