(or search engine optimization for our North American friends) is a term nearly everyone involved in any kind of online business or website promotion is familiar with, but which few truly understand. That dearth of understanding has allowed more unscrupulous internet marketing providers to charge the uninitiated exorbitant rates for their services and lock clients into expensive long-term contracts.

Effective search engine optimisation (SEO) can give a tremendous boost to efforts to raise the profile of an online business or service, and is in fact today an essential part of being online with top search engine rankings being so crucial to market share. But it is difficult to truly guarantee results, especially the lofty results promised by most UK SEO firms. Often times testing various different approaches is necessary to find the website promotion formula that is right for your business or service.

Locking oneself in with a single SEO company that is staunchly committed to its particular methods can just as often as not lead to dismal results and leave the client with too little resources to try an alternative route.

Pay-as-you-go SEO is a concept poised to reverse this trend and redefine the way online businesses and services relate to SEO. Glasgow-based Micrositez is one of the first providers of pay-as-you-go SEO, and sees it as a way to bring effective, cheap SEO services to a broader range of customers for whom traditional internet marketing and website promotion packages may have been financially out of reach.

The Micrositez model is to charge customers affordable rates for single-instance services in what it calls the three key areas of SEO: generating quality backlinks, ensuring the crawlability of your website, and making sure meta tags are both relevant and optimised.

To be sure, an effective strategy in all of the above areas is crucial for online businesses and services fighting for attention in today's crowded online marketplace. What is not necessary, and in fact what may even be harmful, are repeated submissions to the same search engines or low-quality links from FFA sites unrelated to your topic. Sadly, those are some of the services that customers end up paying for when they hire many international and .

The truth is that an effective SEO strategy does not always require long-term ongoing maintenance beyond the regular production of quality content and a steady build up of quality backlinks. So instead of paying through the nose for services that are as likely to get you banned by Google as they are to get you on the first page of search results, look to a company like Micrositez that will charge an affordable one-time fee to set you on the right path, point you in the right direction and then get out of your way.