Remember that scene in Fatal attraction with Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, where she just won't die? SEO is a lot like that.

Yes, SEO is something that you need to implement properly to avoid missing out on organic search traffic, but most modern blogging platforms and CMS's incorporate SEO principles into their design. All you need to do is simply write interesting and relevant content about your niche and after time you will build up a sufficient body of content to start driving organic search traffic.

My issue is not that SEO should be ignored, but that it is leeching resources from bloggers, marketers, and businesses who should be spending their energy going after far more important prizes... like authority, social influence and reach.

Yahoo and Bing are consistently sending more highly targeted organic search traffic to my startup than Google. How is this possible?

Google dominates the search market, with about 66% of US traffic - clearly a far greater percentage of search traffic than all of the other search engines combined.

So if Google has the lion's share of the search market, why are Yahoo and Bing sending my startup, design-a-webpage.com, qualified organic search traffic for the SEO keywords and phrases that are targeted by the site? The answer could be part of a strategy to claw their way back.

Let's take a look...

SEO keyword research can yield some odd and unexpected results. Google webmaster tools, a free service designed at helping webmasters optimize the visibility of their websites, can be an incredibly useful tool for keeping track of which keywords your blog or site ranks highly on in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Internet marketers need to regularly check their analytics services to ensure that the right organic search traffic is arriving from the major search engines. The "right" traffic is any traffic that comes from a search that is highly relevant to the subject matter of your site, products and services.

Internet marketing using SEO and social media help drive revenue through my eCommerce site. I help startups, entrepreneurs, small and medium sized businesses to increase sales, reduce costs and generally meet their business objectives. I write books too - my books are translated and sold all over the world. Doing this allows me the flexibility to work from my poolside.

Ok, so I do have to fly off every now and then to build a new business application, give technical advice and consult with a few corporate clients. I also have a hand in helping a few startup companies that require me to work in different places (usually in-doors in front of several computers at once), but fundamentally, this picture of me (taken this morning) shows my office space in the heart of Cape Town.

When working on an SEO link-building campaign, it's important to focus on the 10 or 20 most relevant keywords for your site. After all, these are the terms that are searched most relevant to your niche, and by increasing traffic to your site for these specific terms, you'll convert a larger number of those visitors. Conversions are what you're looking for, no matter whether you define a conversion as a successful sale for your e-commerce site, a new client for your SaaS application, or a new reader for your blog.

However, a successful link-building strategy can't just rely on the top few keywords for your site. Taking a look at your analytics data, you'll probably notice a lot of visitors that arrive on your site through a search you haven't been targeting - usually a multi-word keyphrase. These search terms are called "long tail searches" and will typically make up the bulk of your organic search traffic.

To celebrate the release of Packt publishing's latest WordPress book, entitled Internet Marketing with WordPress, Packt is giving away 3 copies especially to siteprebuilder.com readers.

You don't have to be a WordPress blogger to take part either. Keep reading for more information...

Internet marketing with WordPress is a 100 pages of practical information on how to drive the right people to your WordPress blog and convert them into fans, followers and customers. If you have a product or service that you want to promote and sell through WordPress, then this book is a must have.

How do you make a webpage that stands out from the crowd, drives and converts traffic and helps to boost your Google PageRank (PR)? It seems like there is so much to consider: SEO, page speed, internal links, backlinks... and the list goes on.

There are three main aspects to building a webpage that turns your site into an Internet marketing machine:

Google's PageRank algorithm is what Google uses to determine where in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) any given page should appear. In other words, it is an expression of the relative importance of a webpage in comparison to the rest of the Web.

One of the most important business objectives for any blog or website should be to feature as highly as possible on search engines. To do this, you need a good PageRank. However, that doesn't mean you should specifically implement techniques to increase your PageRank - that's not how it works.

Woohoo! Internet marketing with WordPress has finally been published and will shortly be available all over the world. For now, the easiest way to get a hold of a copy is at Amazon (Internet marketing with WordPress by David Mercer).

The book is written for people who are not already marketing experts and who have small to medium sized marketing budgets. Much of the book's content focuses on best practices that lead to long term, sustainable growth in online traffic. Naturally, plenty of coverage goes to how to convert that traffic once it is there. But I get ahead of myself...

I gave design-a-webpage beta a trial run today, using it to create a landing page for my online business report card service.

It took about 60 seconds to create. I didn't have to write any CSS or HTML, or PHP. It integrates directly into my existing site using the exact same site logo and a link to my homepage. Absolutely awesome.