How You Can Best Search Engine Optimize Your Own Website

When it comes to search engine optimization of a website all webmasters want the same things: The want to see their website on the first page of Google for a number of keywords, they want to see lots of traffic, they want to understand how SEO works and they also want to achieve all this on the kind of budget which will buy you a couple of chocolate bars in the offline world.

Maybe the size of the budget is not entirely reflective of the norm but, generally speaking, it is not far below the average and there are good reasons for that. SEO usually comes last on the list of priorities because it has to be outsourced, because it takes place after a website has gone live and it has started to work and because it is the measure of last resource, webmasters, at that point, only spend money because they need it.

All this is perfectly understandable. No start-up business has all the cash it needs when it starts up and priority is always given to what's immediate. By the time the need for optimization becomes obvious the funds are low and urgency has kicked in. What usually happens here is that the hard-pressed webmaster will try to either get SEO done on a shoestring or will attempt to trawl all the online forums and websites trying to learn SEO for themselves.

Neither of these is actually a good idea and I will explain why without being too glib. SEO work is based on mathematical logic. There is no magic to it and there are no complicated tricks and algorithms which need to be learnt. As a result it can be taught, but it is very exact and incredibly detailed. Expert search engine optimizers have usually become that way through the testing of hundreds of websites and the way they perform in the Google search engine and through learning through trial and error from the early days of search engine development. In this respect, many of them, also develop a certain intuitive approach to SEO which helps them interpret correctly the test results they get from the different websites they ran.

Can you pick up the same knowledge? No, you can't, or at least you can't without spending an equal amount of time and effort in which case you will achieve the very opposite of what you are trying to do: keep your online business afloat and make it a success. There are only 24 hours to the day and if you spend 18 of them learning SEO you cannot spend any time actually running your website.

If you try and yourself learn online, without guidance, what works and what does not you will often come across conflicting advice, out-of-date practices which are actually bad and, even, some completely wrong notions which are repeated endlessly in forums and which expert SEOs (if they see them in the first place) cannot even be bothered correcting because time, for them, is money and they haven't got a lot of it to waste. So, going online is going to be time-intensive and potentially can make you go down wrong paths. Both of these are going to be costly to your online business as each second spent in learning SEO or making mistakes, realising it and then learning from it is time you are not spending on the development and administration of your own business.

Webmasters who realise this are then left with the choice of outsourcing SEO. Here there is another trap lying in wait for the unsuspecting webmaster: snakeoil salesmen. Because budget is always an issue at this level the lowest-common bidder usually wins the SEO contract. SEO work is detailed, painstaking and time-consuming. That's why it is usually expensive to buy. When it is expensive, usually, it is being performed correctly and the client wins more than the money they spent by having their website perform correctly. When it is not so expensive (which is not the same as being cheap) it usually means that the SEO freelancer performing it is learning on the client's time. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don't, the webmaster will never really know and what's going to happen is that they will haemorrhage money.

Understanding your SEO needs

I know I am painting, here, a bleak picture of SEO so let's get to the point (and I promise you there is one) quickly. Between doing things yourself and acquiring an entirely new skillset and blindly outsourcing your SEO needs to someone you do not really know there is a third way which actually makes sense and which combines the best of both worlds. By choosing an SEO Book (and you know that here I am plugging my own) which basically gives you a crash course on SEO you achieve two things: First you avoid making costly mistakes. Second, you learn fast what works and how to do it yourself. This then allows you to make a judgment call on what to outsource and how to guide the SEO freelance doing it for you in terms of what you expect.

By working this way you begin to work smart as well as hard and begin to realise what your SEO needs are and how to fulfill them. Then and only then are you on your way to online business success.



David Amerland is part of the elite SEO team at http://www.helpmyseo.com aiding online business to win at the search engine visibility and online marketing games. His book, "SEO Help: 20 steps to take your site to Google's #1 page", is available to purchase as a paperback from Amazon and any quality online or offline bookshop. As an eBook it is available from the Sony Store, Amazon Kindle Store and most online eBook retailers as well as his own website.




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