As the owner of an online business, you need to form a solid base of clients as soon as possible, and, for this, your site must be listed as high as possible in SERPs. According to many internet marketing gurus, applying the right search engine optimization techniques can do that for you, but, financially speaking, is SEO a profitable investment?

On one hand, in order to get to the first positions in SERPs, your site must offer original, informative and relevant information, to be a valuable addition to its niche. Unfortunately, due to the amount of information available and to the efforts other site owners make to promote their own businesses, your content must be also published on a regular basis with some rules to follow regarding the use of the keywords you targeting.

Writing and posting blog posts daily can be exhausting, especially when you have several websites and the spinning software no longer works, so outsourcing is your best shot at getting what you need without investing too much time. By publishing regularly on the articles directories or by guest posting, you can draw traffic to your website and create some valuable backlinks, which means more sales and a better rankings with the search engines. Therefore, the original and relevant content that all SEO strategies rely on is an investment worth making.

The other basic SEO strategy is backlinking. Although artificial links are in theory condemned by the search engines, in practice, if they are well build and they come from the right websites, they can improve your site’s ranking and draw traffic, so they are worth investing in as well.

Even after you manage to conquer a good position in SERPs, you still need interesting content built around long-tail keywords, backlinks, social bookmarking and all the other so-called “white hat” SEO techniques in order to maintain that position, target new keywords or consolidate your status as an authority in your niche.

The investment you make in SEO brings sales, reputation and authority, but, more important, money, lots of money for you, your loved ones and the things you love. Just like real life businesses need proper showrooms or headquarters, advertising and protocol expenses, online businesses need SEO in order to make it to the top of their line of business.

If your site remains forgotten in a corner of the web, without receiving any attention from the search engines, it will never bring you the profits you desire.