Can I Optimize My Own Website?

Let's face it. Carefully thought SEO campaigns are not exactly cheap. If you want to reap the rewards of SEO, you must first pump in the money. However, the entry of so called 'SEO experts' who promise the moon but cannot deliver, has tarnished the image of the SEO industry. Once bitten, twice shy - a few bad experiences and people wonder if it is better to do SEO for their company website on their own. To answer this question, it is first necessary to understand the basic principles behind SEO.

SEO Basics
Different search engines implement different algorithms to arrive at results, but at their heart, they are all equal. All search engines work on the basic premise of showing relevant results to a user based on their query. For example, google, yahoo, bing and others may show different results for the query 'web design company', but their basic intention is to display websites relevant to the keywords. So, the first lesson to learn is that your website must have these words in your content. The second thing to remember is to have unique meta tags for each page of your website. Most people do not bother to have complete meta tags in the first place, let alone unique. I have seen many websites developed by professional companies that have - Welcome to our Website! Title meta tag on all pages - if that. One of the SEO basics is to ensure that each page has unique Title, Description and Keywords (though major search engines have deprecated the Keywords tag now).  The third important thing to do is keep on adding fresh, original and relevant content on a continuous basis.

Again, the key differentiator is the content. If you have genuine, good content in place with unique meta tags, you have a fighting chance of ranking higher. Yes, you can go for link exchange, blogs, forum posts, etc but these are merely ancillary tools. You can do this only if you have time on your hands.

Anything Else..?
There are many other things you can do to increase your website's search engine ranking, but these are the basic things you can do on your own. No rocket science, no costly tools. Of course, there are other factors that search engines consider while ranking a website, but even if you stick to these basic requirements, you will improve your chances of ranking in a search engine - especially for keywords that are not competitive.
For keywords that are competitive - well, our company is always here!