SEO: Do It Yourself Or Hire The Pro?

When considering optimization your website for search engines, one has to consider the following question:

“Do I do it myself, or do I hire an expert?”

There are pros and cons to both the “do-it-yourselfer” and to the expert.

If you decide to apply search engine optimization techniques on your own, you will definitely save the cost of hiring an SEO pro, who will likely charge you a pretty penny for the service.

However, the money saved in hiring the pro, may be lost in the amount of time you will spend in doing it yourself.

One school of thought, is to learn little pieces of SEO and apply a little at a time to your website. Over time, you will see some benefit if you can spend 1 hour a day on your website. If you don’t have that kind of time, then you need to hire the expert.

During that one hour a day, you can:

* See where your website is currently ranked in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. Establish a baseline of how things currently stand.

* Conduct keyword research in your industry. Use keyword research tools like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery to uncover what keywords search engine users are search for on the Internet.

* Research your competition. See what keywords they are using. Find out who is ranked in the top spots in search engines on the keywords you want to use.

* Once you have your keywords selected, write new Page Titles, Page Descriptions and meta tag code for every page of your website. If you don’t know how to do this, you may need to hire a web designer to help.

* Write fresh content. Humans – and search engine spiders – love fresh content. Update the content on your website. Write a new article. Publish your company’s press releases on your website. Create and write a blog.

* Submit your website to Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

* Submit your website to industry-specific directories.

* Establish a link building strategy and get more links pointing to your website.

While the above list sounds like a lot of work, you can accomplish it over time by just working on your site for just one hour per day.

However, there are some negatives to applying SEO techniques yourself.

There are other issues to consider besides the amount of time you may spend if you optimize a website on your own.

Chances are good you have little or no SEO experience, so some of the tactics you may choose to deploy might cause more harm to your website than good. Please be careful. Don’t try any “tricks” that could get your website banned from Google. Do not stuff your pages with keywords and key phrases and do not hide keywords in the background of your website.

Hiring a search engine optimization pro can be expensive. However, they should know and apply only “white hat” techniques needed to get your website ranked higher.

When considering an SEO pro:

* Ask about their techniques and processes.

* Ask them how often they will report to you on the progress of the SEO project. Will they report to you once a month or once a week?

* Will they explain the process in layman’s terms or will you need to buy a “Geek” dictionary to understand what’s going on?

* How much is it going to cost and what does that get you? A few keywords and an ink pen with their logo?

* Do they have a “service” guarantee? What happens if you are not happy? (Note: If the SEO firm “guarantees” Top 10 rankings in Google, then run! Only Google can make such a guarantee).

* Ask for references. Then, call the references and ask them questions about service, quality of work, etc.

Finally, another possibility to consider is to consult with an SEO pro for an hour or two a month and then apply the techniques yourself. The guidance can be valuable and you could save a buck or two in the long run.