I must admit that this may sound odd since I am always preaching about why DIY websites just do not cut it (another post!). But I am a complete believer in DIY search engine optimisation.
SEO is effectively broken down into the following types of task
- Competitor & keyword research
- Updating your website (on site SEO)
- Monitoring
And the process goes on.
You can spend as much or as little time on SEO as you like. The more time you spend the better the results and the more skilled you’ll become. There are some HUGE benefits for small companies to SEO their own website(s)
- Budget. Initially there may be some costs involved, I would definitely recommend a good training course or mentor to ensure that you have a sound foundation of the process. And you may need to pay a professional to make some changes to your website (that you can then self maintain).
- Control. I outsourced SEO to an external company about 4 years ago. I paid the money and then they wanted FTP access to my site to make changes – I am a bit dubious about this, I didn’t really want people playing around with my website without understanding or reviewing the changes first. I’d invested a large amount of time on my wording and just couldn’t have a stranger changing it around!
- Realistic goals. If you are optimising your own website you will be forced to set realistic goals. You will soon realise that optimising is not all about getting a top stop on Google – hits mean very little if you do not convert them to paying customers.
- Font-line. Part of the process of optimising your website will involve searches on Google and looking at competitor websites. And this is good. It’s so important to be checking your completion and to be aware of change.
- Context. Fancy tools are not required to optimise a website – you can do it all by hand. It’s all very well receiving a report each month from your SEO company with your new Google position – but far better to do the search manually and see who is ahead of you. If the only people ahead are the major players like: wikipedia, yell.com, tesco or argos then you can pat yourself on the back. If your arch rival is ahead – then you’ll be inclined to take a peek at their website and see why.
DIY SEO is not without it’s issues. It will take time and you will want to ensure that you have a firm grounding in the process before you start. But once you get going I am certain that you will see lots of benefits including more customers!
I ran an SEO workshop yesterday with 6 fabulous business women. I had a great time and we covered some great topics. Here is some of the feedback
“Thank you so much for such an interesting and invaluable training session on SEO, your pitch was exactly right and I can’t wait to start using my knowledge!” – @katielevett
“I really enjoyed this SEO workshop – thank you so much” – @BojangleComms
“Lot’s of information, great support and endless knowledge” - @q5partners
“I just wanted to thank you for yesterdays SEO workshop. It was so informative and such great added value and support for your clients” Giselle -www.infocus.co.uk
If you would like some more information about how to DIY SEO then I would love to hear from you.
Sorry, I tend to disagree. I have seen far too many site owners cause more harm than good by trying to ‘optimise’ their websites.
SEO is much more than putting key words in your copy.
And I think things like canonical links, mod_rewrites and video sitemaps are best left to people who know what they are doing.
The website owner should simply concentrate on providing a website that’s full with unique, truly amazing content.
Hi Gary
I appreciate your comments and I agree that there are some area’s that are best left to developers/SEO experts. All business owners should have some training in SEO so that they understand the effects of the changes that they are making.
However for a small business: targeting a local area, with a good CMS (our CMS SMART creates static HTML pages) and a well coded blog they don’t need to worry about any of these things. Larger dynamic sites with different content types – then yes – but these are not type of people I am really referring to.
There are huge benefits of searching manually and nurturing your onsite SEO, am I really believe that for teh smaller websites and businesses that so much can be learned by being on the front line.