by Jonathan Marshall

Many of the conversations around the office this week have included the cost involved in providing top quality search engine optimization. All too often we find value added services or strategic improvements that require more time than initially anticipated. How much additional value can we provide without increasing fees?

While those questions continue to be bantered around, it got me thinking about the cost of SEO in general. As more and more avenues arise within the search marketing landscape, costs of total inclusive SEO services can be quite hefty. And that’s not even considering the SEOs that charge $500-$1000 per hour. The sheer number of hours involved in SEO can make it an expensive venture, whether you’re doing it yourself, engaging a consultant or hiring search engine optimization specialists san diego to manage it for you.

Can small businesses really afford SEO?

That’s the question that many small businesses are asking. And depending on who you talk to, you’ll get answers from “yes” to “no” to a qualified “maybe.”

The trick to keeping your SEO costs down is efficiency. That can mean different things to different people. Finding the most efficient balance between time, budget and what is absolutely necessary for success, is the only way to keep your SEO campaign affordable.

Investment of Time:

Time is one of the primary investments of SEO. You’re either spending your own time, paying for someone else’s time or a combination of both. With the vast amount of work that goes into SEO it all boils down to how much time one has, vs. how much time any particular task takes. Depending on those two factors, you then need to factor in which tasks are more urgent—more worthy of the time being invested. Focus on those first and then start working your way down to the less important tasks.

Another component of time comes into play regardless of which search engine marketing company you decide to use.  Very few sites can become an overnight success. Any investment you make into SEO must consider the period of time it takes for SEO changes to work through the system. The length of this time can vary on a number of factors so you should have understanding of this ahead of time.

Investment of Budget:

The next consideration to balance into SEO is your budget. Budget can help you determine whether you invest in your own time or someone else’s. But budget itself should not be considered without understanding the value behind the work being performed. Such value should be determined by the quality of the information gathered, the skill of the person implementing the information and the ability of the implementation to achieve positive results. Paying more does not necessarily mean that you get more value. On the other hand, rarely can you find great value on the cheap.

Investment In What Is Necessary:

There are a lot of components to SEO, not all of them necessary for every campaign By and large I would say that the most successful SEO campaigns utilize all possible forms of online marketing, but success itself is not determined merely by doing everything possible. Success comes from doing the right things at the right time, in the right way. If you can determine what search marketing services San Diego need to be pursued for your campaign, then you’ll ultimately reduce the “cost” involved in getting results.

SEO can always be affordable:  SEO doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, expense is just relative to the return. To some, anything more than a few hundred dollars can seem expensive. But if the value returned is several thousand dollars, then it’s not so expensive after all. The same holds true if you invest several thousands of dollars. It’s only expensive until you get multiple thousands in return.

A little can go a long way.  SEO often has much more value than the sum of its parts. The more time, energy, knowledge and skill you invest, the more exponential the returns tend to be. The idea is to invest what you can, where you can, when you can. And when the returns come, reinvest that even further to expand your campaign and your return on investment. As long as your search marketing campaign San Diego is returning a positive ROI, then the true cost of SEO is affordable.

There are many benefits of using CSS. One of the major benefits of using CSS is the easy maintenance of the website. Maintenance of a website made with CSS is much easier compared to the ones which are table based. CSS splits the presentation style of documents from the content of documents and makes the maintenance of the site easier. Aside from being able to make site extensive changes with no trouble through one CSS file, the clean code it generates makes it easier to update. Webmasters can characterize the appearance of a site in one place, and change the whole site by changing just one file. With CSS, when you decide to craft a change, you simply alter the style, and that element is updated automatically anywhere it appears in the site. So, if you have to alter the color of all pages in your site, you only have to edit one style sheet. This saves you enormous amount of time, particularly if you have to edit each page independently. CSS generally requires less code compared to table based. This makes your code lighter and cleaner. Clean code makes a huge difference in maintaining your site.

Cascading Style Sheets Benefits and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another major benefit of CSS is that it makes your website SEO friendly. The reason behind this is simple. The search engines spiders are actually very lethargic. They do not go through the bundles of HTML codes to get to the indexed codes. Font tags and tables make the HTML code very cumbersome; thus, reduce the accuracy of the results. If you use external CSS files to design and determine the design attributes; the HTML code will be clean and it will result to better search engine rankings. With some knowledge of CSS you will be able to change the code layout without destroying the actual visual layout. For instance, you could easily make the main content of your site to show up above the header or navigation menu in the code of your website; thus will help to show search engine crawlers the importance of your content. I personally saw a huge boost in rankings in fully CSS web sites. When I look at someone’s website that was built using old school HTML code with tags such as: TABLES, TD, TR, FONT and so on, I feel awkward and immediately convert that site to a fully table-less CSS layout. There are many tools on the Internet that shows the actual code over text ratio weight of your site. Do you know why? Because modern search engines such as: Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted websites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. With CSS everything is possible. You practically externalize excessive code into external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and simple.

Website Accessibility

CSS makes your website more accessible. The number of users browsing the web through hand held devices are continuously growing tremendously. It is estimated that by 2008, one third of the world’s population will be using hand held devices for accessing Internet. It is always important that your site is accessible to them also. You can make an additional CSS document particularly for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; which is not achievable with a tabular layout. CSS benefits accessibility chiefly by separating document structure from presentation. By separating style from markup, webmasters can simplify and clean up the HTML in their documents, making the documents more accessible.

Increases Download Speed of Your Website

CSS code downloads faster than tables. Browsers read through tables twice previous to exhibiting their contents; first to work out their structure and then to determine their content. Moreover, tables are shown on the screen as a whole, no part of the table will be displayed until the entire table is downloaded and rendered. Tables support the use of spaced images to assist with positioning. CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables. All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then stored on the user’s computer; while the table layout stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads. Also with CSS, you can manage the order of the items downloaded into the screen. You have the control to make the content appear previous to the slow loading images, which is liked by most of the web users.

Cross Browser Compatibility

For all webmasters out there! CSS makes your website more professional. Taking the benefits of CSS like making your websites load faster and easy to maintain, you save a lot of time and labor. This in turn makes you lots of money. CSS makes links of the website look more attractive and dynamic. Using CSS, you can slot in rollovers easily and effectively, without having to use a single character of JavaScript. Thus, CSS gives your websites a professional look. It is wise to use CSS to jive with the current trends of the industry. All major browsers like Firefox, Explorer, and Netscape presently recognize CSS and it is definitely safe for web designers to use CSS now.

If you have spent the better part of the last few years on the Internet, you may have already chanced upon the term PHP. You may have even encountered the definition: “a server-side scripting language”. But what exactly does it mean? And more importantly, what use can it be to you as an aspiring Web developer or Web designer?

Going back to the definition for a little while, PHP is indeed a server-side scripting language that is typically used in the creation of dynamic Web pages. It is a relatively easy to learn programming language that enables you to feature more dynamic content on your web sites.

PHP is different from other types of programming languages in that it is designed to work in conjunction with HTML. This compatibility is a distinct advantage of PHP and allows you to easily integrate it into web pages that have already been extensively rendered with HTML. This integration is in fact so seamless that you can quite readily switch between the two languages even within the same web document.

How it works is basically like this: web sites are typically designed with a combination of PHP and HTML in varying proportions depending on the designer’s intended purpose. When a visitor points his browser to the web page in question, the server will “read” and subsequently process the PHP instructions and later send the results of the process to the browser of the visitor.

This is pretty much similar to how other languages such as ASP or ColdFusion work. The main difference however is that PHP, unlike the aforementioned ASP or ColdFusion, PHP is both an Open Source and a cross-platform application. What this means is that PHP can be run under the Windows NT platform as well as many versions of the UNIX platform. In addition, PHP can be designed to function as an Apache module and even as a binary that can be run as a CGI.

PHP by its very nature is exceptionally light and fast to run but when designed to run as an Apache module it is even more so. The absence of any process creation overhead allows PHP to return results quickly compared with other programming languages plus it has the added benefit of not requiring the tuning of mod_perl in order to limit your server’s memory image to a manageably small size.

Beyond its usage as a means to control and alter the contents of your web pages, PHP can also serve to function as an HTTP header sender. It is typically used in this function to set cookies in web browsers, manage the site authentication processes, and to redirect users to other sites. PHP also works well with other programs and applications, enabling unparalleled connectivity with many different databases as well as ODBC, as well as offering seamless integration with many different external libraries; libraries that allow you to accomplish tasks such as publishing PDF documents and even parsing XML.

The way PHP fits within your web pages is extremely elegant in its simplicity; so simple in fact you will not need a special development environment or IDE at all. You merely have to place a at the end. PHP can also be configured to utilize ASP type <% %> tags as well as .). The PHP engine is charged with the task of processing everything that is contained within those tags.

If you have had an extensive or even only a little background in programming languages, you may have already noticed that PHP has a lot in common with the languages C and Perl, especially in its language syntax. Just like in C and Perl, you do not have to declare variables prior to you using them, and it is also quite easy to create arrays and hashes (associative arrays).

So much for its characteristics; now how can you use PHP?

One of the most often mentioned and widely used applications of PHP is for server side scripting. This has traditionally been the area in which PHP has been focused. The three components of PHP in this particular application are: a PHP parser (which can take the form of a CGI or server module), a web browser and a web server. The web server is run with a PHP installation connected and the program output of the PHP program is accessed with a web browser. The PHP page can then be viewed through the web server.

Command line scripting is another area where PHP is utilized and for this application you only need a PHP parser. Typical uses include rudimentary text processing and running scripts such as Cron or Task Scheduler.

Finally, although not the ideal solution for this particular scenario, PHP is also used in writing desktop applications that feature a graphical user interface.

Clearly the uses for PHP are both varied and endless and you should explore it in depth to find out how it can be of service to you.