Should I do SEO by myself?

You can do SEO by yourself, however it is not recommended. 

Doing SEO by yourself gives you a feeling of saving money. But you will get much better results working with a professional.

You can learn a lot of SEO tips from the Internet or SEO books. However, many tips are  ineffective, many tips are outdated, only a small percentage actually work.

To find out what will work, you need to spend a lot of time because you do not have the SEO experience. 

Here is an example from a SEO article taken from Inc.com in 2010 "How to improve your site's search engine optimization". The article suggests:

Increase the number of "inbound" links to your site from other websites 

Here is the How-to:
 1. Give stuff away.
 2. Share useful information.
 3. Connect with your community. 
 4. Reach out to the blogosphere. 
 5. Use good old-fashioned PR.
 
Are they true? Yes. The question is how many links should you acquire to promote a keyword to reach the 1st page rank on Google in 6 months? You probably have no idea. 

So you keep adding more links and hope for the best.

You may find yourself spending a lot of time & effort on doing what you think will "helpful" but you have no clue about what will work, how long will it take and how much it will cost.

The tips offered though SEO books and online magazines can show you the right directions, but only the experience can tell you what you should do right now in your specific project to get the most out of search engines.

Secondly, if you can read SEO tactics on Inc.com, Crains, or zillions of SEO blogs out there, your competitors are reading those SEO tactics too. Thousands of website owners in your industry are reading those articles as well. All these people will do pretty similar SEO activities like "Install SEO pack for Wordpress", "build quality content for users" "acquire organic back-links". Now everyone will be sharing the similar SEO approaches, what makes you think your website will be on top?

Third, search engines evolve quickly. Google has made 500 changes on its search algorithm in 2010 alone. It did not publish all 500 changes online, but SEO specialists who are affected by these changes are aware of that.

Even if Google did publish all 500 changes in a magazine, you may not have enough background to read the in-depth SEO analysis, or you may not have the time or patience.

So, what will you do? You probably will pick the most simple SEO improvements first. 

However, most likely you  join 60% of companies in NYC that have reported no SEO improvements in the past 6 months. Simple SEO tactics can help improve your site ranking from 5,000,000th into 1,000,000th. But not to the first page.

SEO specialists are trained, and paid, to stay up-to-date with the latest search engine algorithm changes. Hiring a SEO firm can save you time and deliver results, but will cost you money. It is up to you to quantify the values to your business.


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