When To Optimize Your Website Yourself
Many webmasters, business owners and marketing folks are sometimes more concerned about saving money than making it. Ever heard the expression, “Penny wise, pound foolish?” Save a buck today, lose two or three tomorrow. That’s what happens when you try to optimize your own website and don’t know what you’re doing. You’re likely going to fail or you won’t be patient long enough to wait for the results you hope to get. Often many times I have seen people that don’t take the time to truly understand how search engine optimization works, try to rush it or have unrealistic expectations and then vow that SEO does not work. I can assure you that search engine optimization is one of the most cost effective and best return driven mediums to drive targeted visitors to your website.
But is there a time when you can, and should, optimize your own website? Yes. There may be times when performing the SEO work on your site is to your advantage. The obvious time to optimize your own website is when you have taken the time to learn it on your own and have ample time to perform the on site optimization and ongoing link building and reporting efforts. You’ve studied it long enough and you’ve experimented enough with the tools that you can make it happen. I’m not talking about having read one e-book written in 1995. I’m talking about having actually tested some of the things that you’ve learned and you understand SEO well enough to employ its mysteries without giving up when things don’t go right. Because, inevitably, your first efforts are going to appear to fail; they actually may be succeeding, but you just won’t see the results for a while.
But is there ever a time when performing the SEO work on your site might be to your advantage even if you are not familiar enough with the principles at work? Maybe. It’s OK to perform small tweaks to your website’s SEO when you’ve gained enough knowledge to understand what those tweaks mean. For instance, if you see that a page is missing title attributes on its internal navigation links. If you understand the value of those attributes then you can add them to your links and be done.
Before you try to fix any optimization issues with your own site you should have it evaluated by a professional SEO firm and determine which tweaks you can do yourself and which ones you should pay a professional for. It’s possible that hiring a professional SEO firm to handle the big issues with your site will also lead you to have that firm take care of the smaller issues at the same time. You may be able to handle those yourself, but since you’ve got the mechanic under the hood you can have him change the oil too.