by dhwriting

Created on: August 03, 2009   Last Updated: August 05, 2009

Search engine optimization, otherwise called "SEO." I'm not an SEO professional but I've done SEO quite successfully for my own websites. And if I can do it, just about anyone can.

Every SEO consultant out there will tell you that SEO is important to the success of any website. And they're absolutely right: there's no doubt that SEO is one of the most important things you can do to build the amount of traffic that comes to a website. In fact, SEO is absolutely essential. But every SEO consultant out there also has two dirty little secrets. Their first secret? SEO is easy to do for yourself. SEO experts don't tell you this because they want your money, and some of them charge hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a thorough SEO job.

There's no reason you need to hire an SEO consultant to do SEO work for you. If you're able to build a website yourself - even the most basic, rudimentary website - then you're able to do your own SEO. And if you do, you'll save those hundreds if not thousands of dollars. It's well worth doing for yourself.

SEO, in a nutshell, helps search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing (among others) find your website and index its contents. And once the search engines do that, visitors will start arriving at your website. It's similar to "If you build it, they will come." All you need to do to help this process along is decide which keywords, meta tags and alt tags best describe your website and then include those keywords and tags on its pages.

It took me about ten minutes to learn how to do search engine optimization. A search of "SEO" on any search engine will return dozens of pages that can teach you how to do SEO. But you don't need to read dozens of pages to learn - any one of them will teach you what you need to know.

The trick to SEO isn't how to do it, it's knowing which key words, meta tags and alt tags best suit your website. And that brings us to the second dirty little secret of the SEO consultants: to do a proper job, any SEO consultant will need to know exactly what you have in mind for your website. What it does or will do, what the target audience is, and other details about your goals. Well, guess what? By the time you get done explaining all of this to the SEO consultant and making sure it's all understood, you might as well have gone ahead and done the SEO work yourself! After all, who knows your website and its goals better than you? And the goals you have for your website might change over time, too. If they do, and you use an SEO consultant, you'll have to pay again. If you do your own SEO work, you're home free because all it takes is a little time. And the emphasis is on LITTLE time: it just doesn't take that much.

If you want to save hundreds of dollars, do your own SEO work. It's easy to learn how, and it's easy to do. And best of all, you can take the money you'll save and keep it in the bank or spend it elsewhere, on anything you like. But if you'd really rather spend that money on SEO consultants, it's easy to find dozens who will be happy to take it.

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