by Leo Dimilo

Created on: January 09, 2009   Last Updated: January 11, 2009

As a search engine "expert" and website design guy and at the risk of taking food out of my family's mouth, I am going to state for the record that unless the SEO expert has a wide range of link brokers, then providing someone thousands of dollars to get listed for a keyword is not worth the money. Here is why:

1. The on page optimization factors are so easy that literally anyone can do it and do it quickly. While a lot of SEO experts would have you believe otherwise, onpage optimization is nothing more than clearly defining exactly where google or any other search engine should categorize your website. Nothing more and nothing less. For a regular webmaster, this means to do the small things, like understanding how tags such as title tags will help define what the page is about and providing enough supporting semantic terms for the search engines to make suppositions about your content.

2. The off page optimization currently equates to finding backlinks that "support" or "vouch" that your site is truly about what you claim it is about. This is the part where most webmaster's stumble because getting the proper backlinks from the relevant niche with the relevant anchor text can be tough. It is tough...but not impossible. And given the fact that most SEO experts charge not only a one time fee but also a monthly fee, the money could be used to sway other websites into giving the backlinks for you.

Frankly, the only reason why I would think that someone would need an SEO expert would be if they were outsourcing multiple projects and didn't want to take the time to do the menial tasks of link building and building pages that are contextually correct.

So, in summation, you have heard it from someone who actually makes money as an SEO expert....SEO consultants, in most cases are not worth the money they charge. SEO is not Voodoo science and search engine optimization is a learned skill that literally anyone can learn if they take the time. Onpage optimization is only a means for the search engines to categorize your site. In essence, you are simply telling the search engines what your page is about. There are plenty of "free tools" available for the webmaster to help them see things as the search engine sees. There are plenty of tools that will allow them to compare the competition within their niche and market. The only "hard" part of SEO is the off page optimization and this isn't because it is hard but because it is time consuming.

SEO Consultants are NOT worth the money. But you didn't hear it from me.

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