There are a large number of search engine marketing companies that will gladly take your money for the types of SEO tasks that you can do yourself. I know a lot of people will say they don’t have the time to do all these required things that need to be done. I think that lt’s critical that internet marketers understand why “diy” (do it yourself) seo is so important because it keeps them plugged into the key strategy for everything about their website.

If you are intimately involved with the seo process, you will have direct control over the overall theme and content of your website. You not only will be able to make these decisions on the technical merits (keyword optimization, back links, etc.) but also on your gut instincts. Left to an outside company that has none of the understanding about the niche that you are targeting and can never match the passion you have, you are turning over what is arguably the most important aspect of your website’s success to someone who probably has limited knowledge about your niche.

Most people right away say, I don’t have the time, or I don’t have the technical skills. My response is you don’t need a whole lot of either. There are some basic skills that you need to understand, but you can learn these over time. I’ve been studying seo closely for several years and a) I still don’t know everything and b) the technology is changing everyday and I probably never will understand everything. But I apply what I have learned on a daily basis and am always searching new information to learn more. It’s a never-ending process but the key thing is that I am in control of my own websites and because I have made my investment over time, my monthly spending on search engine optimization is nothing but time.

So what are you options if you want to diy seo? There are two approaches that you can take:

• Join an SEO company via monthly subscription – Companies like SEOBook or WebCEO provide a full range of SEO services under one umbrella – keyword finders, link partners, reporting and analysis tools, training and tutorials, access to premium content just for members, etc. These programs are very good if you want to manage the SEO process yourself but don’t want to go it all alone. As a member you will have access to forums, education white papers, video tutorials, premium content and an overall packaged process to learning organic SEO from the ground up.

  For the breadth of product, education and the hands-on services that they provide, programs such as SEOBook or WebCEO provide good value. They provide the tools you need for SEO optimization, which allows you to stay plugged in to the most important part of your business, and the opportunity to learn SEO properly over a period of time. The downside to this approach is that you are paying a monthly subscription service which can be quite expensive and if you quit, you lose access to all the tools and reporting data that you had been collecting.

• Buy the tools yourself and go it alone – The other option is to make a one-time investment into a small set of tools and totally manage everything yourself. This is not as scary as it sounds because the stand-alone SEO tools that are available today are very good and also provide their own education tutorials, etc. The biggest difference in going this method is that you will not have everything on one dashboard but will have to log into several places to check stats and perform your daily duties. The good news though is that some of these are free services, and because you make a one-time purchase of the products vs. monthly membership service, you will save a lot of money over time.

  Here are the tools that I suggest, ranked by priority of which ones you should sign up with first:

• Keyword Elite – This is a must-have product if you are serious about your internet marketing success. It will allow you to dig deep into keywords and uncover keyword phrases that drive high volumes of traffic to your website. You will save hundreds of hours in keyword research and uncover profitable niches that you can target more closely.
• SEO Elite – This is a sister product to Keyword Elite, but offered separately. SEO Elite allows you to spy on your competition and find out why they are ranked higher than you in the search engines, and lets you know exactly what you need to do to improve your search engine ranking. At the time I am writing this blog, if you purchase Keyword Elite, SEO Elite is bundled at no additional charge – that is a great deal that you should definitely jump on.
• Utility Poster – In today’s SEO world, it’s all about building backlinks, and Utility Poster will provide you with backlinks every time you make a new post on your blog. Great, great tool.

There’s no need to pay search engine marketing companies a lot of money for something you can do yourself. Take the plunge to learn SEO, and become proficient with learning all the steps you need to learn to make your internet business a success.

Tags: search engine marketing companies