Test first with PPC and then create your SEO strategy…

Before you invest money in SEO, links or any other form of online marketing, I strongly recommend that you first spend some time buying Google Adwords for your site and track the conversion-to-sales-or-signup ratio of various keywords (you can also use Yahoo Search Marketing).

Once you know what percentage of visitors for each keyword will end up as customers, and how much money you make (on average) from each customer, you can then accurately determine exactly what you can afford to spend for each visitor, and you’ll know which keywords result in visitors that convert to customers, and which ones are just a waste of time.

The amazingly accurate marketing data you can get almost instantly and inexpensively with Pay-Per-Click campaigns is something you could not have bought for any amount of money 5 or 10 years ago.

There is a famous quote attributed to John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Using Google or Yahoo PPC you can give a pretty good idea of what will work and what won’t before you spend and/or waste any money.