Don't pay for SEO - do it yourself

Nowadays I see the internet is flooded with companies - that sell their SEO work… But why would you pay for this? That’s ridiculous - there’s a lot of things you can learn for free and do it yourself - you do not need to pay someone to do it, unless you’re too lazy to do it yourself.

I know its saves money and is a lot easier to do it yourself…

So, what do you think? Paid SEO or do it yourself?

Do it yourself if you have the knowledge, time, and resources.

Paying for it is a respectable option since many people / businesses simply don’t have time to do these kind of things themselves.

most businesses don’t have the time to do it themselves,
For example one of my clients is a dentist, he works nine hours a day,
do you actually think he has time to do it himself, no he doesn’t.

If the person has the time knowledge and skills to do it, of course it’s a great idea to do it himself

Because your time can be better spent doing something else? Why do people pay plumbers, electricians, car mechanics, decorators, gardeners etc to do work that they could do themselves? How lazy.

This is all about delegation. If you’re in business of any respectable size then you delegate tasks to whoever is better than you at said task. If there is someone out there who can do a better job than you then you delegate it to someone outside of your company.

SEO/SEM work is no different, although it’s becoming increasingly popular for people to hire graduates with any experience in SEO as a cheap alternative. The gap between SEO and online marketing appears to be thinning and I think that before long SEO will be a small part of marketing departments.

Regardless, in the same way that people bring in firms to handle web design, development, marketing and other areas of business, SEO is no different.

Any work that you do yourself has a cost – the cost of your time, unless you’re working for free.

Whether you want to do the work yourself or contract it out will depend on your situation. If you value your time highly and you’re not that confident or knowledgeable about SEO (maybe you’ve designed your own business’ website), you might find that spending time trying to spread the word about your site and get backlinks is not efficient when there are more productive things you could be doing. On the other hand, if you’ve got staff who are knowledgeable about SEO and understand the business of the site, and who maybe aren’t so high up the pay scale, you might be able to use them more profitably than an outside contractor who will take a cut of the money but who may not know an awful lot about your industry.

We’re not hunter–gatherers any more, and sometimes we pay other people to do work that we could do, because it works out better for us!

If you’re running a business, you should have time.
It’s the same as paying for links in order to get ranked higher on SEO.
How do you know if you pay for SEO, you’ll get good rankings? You don’t.

i think the biggest plus an SEO company has over you is time
to learn new stuff, knoledge using HTML, CSS, PHP etc…
resources like blogs and website and the list goes on…

there’s plenty of free resources available for you to learn.

That is so true. While I do seo work myself, I still believe hiring people do the work for you still is a great way to boost your company’s profits. Like many offline businesses, we know you will not always have time for everything. Simply put, were Ray Croc always there on every opening of all franchised mcdonald stores? making your money work for you and becoming more productive is the principle behind it.

Sadly, like with many things, these free resources are often lacking and misinform their readers. A free guide on giving birth to your child won’t make you a trained midwife, neither will a few tutorials turn you into a commercial-standard Web Developer. In the same vein, all it takes is for someone to read that “meta tags help you rank on Google” or “put ALL relevant keywords on your home page” for that information to be worthless.

That’s an interesting assumption given that you don’t know the daily tasks required of me to run my business. If you don’t know what I’m required to do, how can you say I have time?

But it’s not just about having the time to do it. It’s about spending your time in the most profitable way. If you value your time at $100/hour, but you can outsource SEO to someone much cheaper, you can then free up your time to perform tasks that can’t be outsourced.

Doing by our self is not a bad option but the problem comes up with sources for promotion of the site. And all search engines now loves high and quality sources.

You can do SEO yourself just by forum posting, and this thing i don’t know why but i enjoy it a lot, so i wont let any one take the thing that enjoys me and also for that, to pay him. :slight_smile:

Forum posting is close to ineffective in regards to SEO, which is why people are reluctant to either learn it themselves or call in a small-time SEO firm/consultant. Unless you’re a regular at a forum and your URL’s are within your signature and are not nofollow then forum posting is no better than spamming.

to be honest, I’m a big fan in outsourcing my seo work.

Nowadays I see the internet is flooded with companies - that sell their web development work… But why would you pay for this? That’s ridiculous - there’s a lot of things you can learn for free and do it yourself - you do not need to pay someone to do it, unless you’re too lazy to do it yourself.

I know its saves money and is a lot easier to do it yourself…

So, what do you think? Paid web development or do it yourself?

I am doing myself. I had a thought, i won’t spend any money for my blog, before i earn anything from it.

The free resources that are lacking aren’t much of a resource now are they?
I know there’s plenty of free SEO resource sites such as the following:
http://www.seobook.com/blog

http://www.seomoz.org/blog

Not sure what free resources you’re talking about.
It’s like going to school - if you’re not paying attention, you’re not going to learn. If you’re not reading the articles and putting things in practice, then how do you expect your SEO to succeed?

So, what do you think? Paid web development or do it yourself?

Don’t you think that’s a question for another thread?

If there’s anything I’ve learned about marketing on the Internet it’s that you shouldn’t believe anything you’re told unless you’ve tried and verified it for yourself.

I’ve tried reading the SEO blogs, and more often than not their own agenda (buy our stuff) pushes through. The SEO community in general is a collective bunch of magic bean salesman, and as someone who has worked at companies that have attempted to hire SEO consultants before I can safely say that the crap many of them peddle is completely untrue.

Yes, these blogs have a vested interest to keep on top of things, but the only person you can trust in the search engine business is Google. They’re not stupid, and it’s their business to ensure that the best website for the user is found with their searches. I’ve worked with various firms for a few years now, and my SEM strategy every time has been “improve the site”. By doing basic things like reducing cognitive load, improving the logical structure of data, making mark-up semantic and using an in-depth competitive analysis I’ve rarely struggled to do well enough for my needs.

In the same vein, if you copy the kid who doesn’t know the answers then you’ll get a lot of things wrong. In anything the best indicator of a right answer is your own knowledge.

Exactly! Experience is what counts. This is why online marketing companies are becoming so strong in top-brand SEO and brand marketing campaigns, because they have the experience in the industry to know what to do, and their experience may come from reading a bunch of SEO articles, but I bet 99% of it comes from experience in their markets.