Search Engine Optimization - Hire an SEO Company Or Do it Yourself?

This is a pretty simple question with a simple answer. But before you'll be able to answer it you need to know what actually SEO is, what you can do and what SEO companies can do.

Search engine optimization is divided into two groups: on-page and off page elements. On-page elements need, at least in general, only some checking and minor modifications. The goal is to emphasize target keywords. You can do this by placing keyword in page title, meta description, header tags, and the in page content itself. This is a very simple process that anybody can do it. If you are not familiar with the CMS you are using or you already have somebody that maintains web pages for you then you can simply give instructions what needs to be done. You also need to create an attractive meta description which would be displayed as a text snippet in Google search results. Page title length should not exceed 64 characters because this is the limit for search results.

The majority of SEO activities are focused on link building strategies. This is the real SEO which should bring your pages on the top positions in search results. To understand if you need to outsource this job you need to know what it takes to do SEO. The basic principle is very simple. You need to get as many backlinks to your website as possible. This can be done in many ways. The easiest ways are to post in blogs and forums. You only need to avoid focusing on your links and posting spammy comments. Try to be constructive and contribute something useful to the discussion.

Unfortunately blog and forum links are mainly labeled with the nofollow attribute. This attribute tells Google and other search engines not to follow this link and not to take this link into account for PageRank calculation. This means that such links are much less valuable than normal links. The best SEO effect you can get from normal "do follow" links from content related pages. There are two general ways to get quality links. The best and the easiest way is to have interesting content to which other webmasters will create links by themselves without any intervention. The second option is to write articles and press releases and publish them at relevant websites. Each such article should have few backlinks to your website, each with proper anchor text. So those are basically activities that SEO companies do.

Now you can answer the basic question. If you can write and submit articles then you will be able to do SEO for yourself. But if you run many websites then this means also a lot of work.