In the realm of e-commerce, one of the top marketing tools a company has is a Google ranking. The difference between a page 1 or page 2 search engine ranking can be the difference of tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for a company. Because of this, companies are allocating more budget space than ever toward search engine optimization (SEO), the strategy and process of improving the volume of traffic to a website by improving the search rankings of various search engines like Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask and MSN.

For many online companies, using SEO techniques to achieve a high search engine ranking is essential for survival. "Our website is our complete livelihood, since 99 percent of every penny that comes into our pockets is from our website," says Michael Del Chiaro, president of an online sales company. "If we're not getting a good search engine ranking, we're starting to atrophy as a company."

But SEO isn't as easy as it may seem. It requires a host of strategies to help climb the search engine ladder from page 0, including content revision, link building, coding, and even social networking. Some companies elect to do in-house SEO. Yet if they lack proper knowledge of the way search engines work and are evolving, they might be limited.

"If you don't have analytics, it's like driving blind," William Sun, president of Accelet Corporation says. Using analytics, we are able to track where visitors to our client’s website arrived from, what keywords were entered, what customers ordered, how long they stayed, how many pages were viewed, how many quotes were requested and other useful information. Knowing what keywords customers entered to find a website is important because search engines primarily search for content when ranking websites.

The SEO factors that matter today, over and above the coding piece of a website, include the content on a website, If you want to show up under the phrase ‘working capital loans', you need to build out a website that speaks with a significant depth to that keyword. The more content a website is able to publish on a particular keyword, industry or phrase, the greater likelihood the site's rankings will increase.

Commission based SEO means for every sale or lead the SEO is paid an agreed upon percentage of commission. In essence, the client is seeking an affiliate marketer who understands SEO. This is not a traditional SEO role. SEO get traffic to the site and affiliates know how to monetize off that traffic. Clients who are seeking commission based services should setup an in-house affiliate tracking program for their website or setup a third-party affiliate tracking program and track affiliate commissions in this manner.