I really want to get some good rankings for my site but I don’t have a lot of money. Can I realistically expect to get some decent rankings without hiring a professional SEO to do it for me?
if you time then you can yourself and if you don`t have much time then you can go for hire, and if you are going to do you self SEO try to find some good learning video from you tube
There are already lots of affordable seo gurus out there but if you know the steps and have enough time to do it, then I suggest you do it by yourself. Just be consistent. good luck.
The optimization has become much professional and getting into a matured phase where you need lot of training and understand to compete in the industry. However, its your technical ability and amount of time you can spend on the efforts. In case you have a professional businesss website and you except a lot of business out of the site, it would be better to choose the SEO professionalist.
Have a good read of: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3/dont-pay-search-engine-optimization-do-yourself-726109.html
Should sort you out.
One of the problems with getting someone to do it for you is being able to find someone from within the small percentage of people who claim to do SEO who will actually do a better job of it than you could do yourself rather than applying short term patches that might actually hurt your site in the long term.