Too many people think seo is the end all of internet business. To what extent should we agree with this idea? should we put google before our customers to get more customers? never if you ask me, but its very easy to fall into the trap of doing things because you are used to them, even if they are not effective or even useful.

SEO is great to learn because essentially its the art of providing a good easy to understand site with good unique content that is of some worth. But its far to easy to get caught in the game. Yes using amazing seo skills can get you millions of viewers but no not hugely easily. The art of seo has exploded in line with online business and now is populated by a fair few million seo practitioners, but how far should we go?

It is possible to get huge amount of traffic, from lots of different places. You can gain better positioning in the serps, get dugg a few hundred times, become facebook fantastic - but the first is the only really stable producer.

Going niche is the obvious choice for those who can - but what if you require the top spot for an insanely competitive keyword/phrase - do you go niche for a few hundred similar phrases or work on that one mass keyword - its a sum up to be made by you.

Ultimately the more competitive the business probably the more time need be devoted to seo and sem techniques. If your in a fairly non competitive market you may only have to provide a good website to your seo dude or company and leave it with them for a few weeks to set up good seo practice, keyword alliteration and then your done. But if your after “cars” it will take a whole lot more to make it up there.

Day in day out you will probably need to provide 5-10+ brand new pages of keyword rich, new, original, appropriate content. Backed up by well designed pages, a long standing domain, customers that chatter endlessly about you elsewhere online and a monsoon of backlinks that could carry donkey.com to the top.

Personally I try to go for a balance - some weeks I will push things more than others, on low budget weeks I might do nothing but create good content or further work on making the current pages more appropriate. To compete with the “cars” serp big boys it probably would take a budget of 60k a year - mainly to pay 3 people to do the work!!!

But in the end does seo mean £££? It takes a lot more than just good seo to get the money in. Remember to make a good site with functional ways to convert clicks to customers and customers to £££. Sometimes its better if we don’t all just follow google around looking for our dish of customers and we just go and get them ourselves!!!!

How often do you use forums? PHPbb lover? Myself I am registered at Digital-Point, Site-Point and a handful of niche forums. But is the day of the forum still relevant? Do we still have time for forums?

With the global hype of the blog system and the development of wordpress, blogger and the whole blog ideology perhaps forums will fade away and become another fall out software that worked well in its time. I doubt that will happen completely but I see numerous business’s placing more belief in blogging than in forum administration.

I suppose if you compare the two, blogging is a more self centered approach to the same issue. Blogging says ‘I am an expert and I am more interested in what I have to say’ or ‘I have something to give - come see’ whereas forums are intended to be more communal. So perhaps its in that, that we choose our preference. If we seek communal chatter we hit forums and if we seek expert advice we seek blog articles? This isn’t right - we don’t. But perhaps blogging allows bigger stars to be made, with a fine line between people that read and comment and bloggers the roles are emphasised?

I would say that forums are a mine of useful tips, they allow networking and communal discussion in a way that no blog system/blog network I have seen can do.

So I suppose we blog and forum post for differing reasons and results, and personally I will continue to do both. But if the whole world has a blog - who’s going to read them all?

• Subscribing people to your blog - conquer the email blogosphere
• Organise your online Reading - tips and tricks to spending no longer than nescessary reading
• Ditch the coffee - get me some lemon Juice!!!