If you own a business like I do, you will know that creating a website and publishing it on the web is the easy part.
The hardest part is getting it found and making it search engine friendly (SEO) so that it can achieve high rankings and in turn gain more customers.
If your new to SEO and haven't got any idea of where to start the official Google webmaster Central Blog has some useful articles and tips on the matter to help you get started.
For everyone else it's just improving on what you know.
The main aspect of SEO consists of both optimizing a website and gaining good quality incoming links from other sites.
What if you don't have the time it takes to work on your site or you can't be bothered, should you employ an outside company to do all the work for you?
There are hundreds of companies offering to do all your online marketing and optimize your site for a hefty price.
In exchange for help you would have to folk out hundreds if not thousands of pounds a month to these SEO experts who might or might not improve the ranking of your site.
Is it worth paying for top rankings or should you do it all yourself?
It depends on whether you have the patience, the time and don't mind being hugely disappointed at times when things don't work your way.
On the other hand, learning to do your own SEO can be a rewarding process.
It takes a lot longer to see results and I'm still learning, but gaining the knowledge of how to do both on page and off page SEO can save you a lot of money.
Of course there are genuine reputable companies out there, but there are also a lot of con artist who are after your hard earn cash.
Don't be fooled by higher rankings, some sites use black hat tricks to boost there overall position in Google.
I know of one site which spammed other websites just to get 1st page ranking.
Google apparently wants to target sites which over indulge in on page optimizing.
No one knows how Google intends to incorporate this into their algorithm, but one thing is for sure, the methods webmasters use to improve their web presence will change forever.
Most of the basic tweaking can be done yourself such as; Writing a effective meta tag title, keyword and description, adding keywords to alt tag images, adding keywords to the main content and so on.
Some can require expert help, however it's possible to do all the work yourself for free if your willing to read and apply what you know.
It's possible to gain high rankings for low competitive keywords without any link building, this isn't true for popular keywords such as; Fashion Jewellery or Gold Jewellery.
One of the best methods is to combine low competitive and popular keywords together.
Spying on your competitors and seeing where they are linked to and trying to get links from the same places can help massively in improving your position in the search engines.
When link building it's important to have a variety of links from directories, social networking sites, shopping sites, forums and blogs.
Many big companies buy lots of domains with their company name on it and use this as a way of creating one way links to their main site. They would also host the domains on different IPs and servers giving the impression that each domain was owned by a separate individual, when in reality the same company owned all of them.
So if they had a company say with; dotyhul.co.uk, they would buy all the domains associated with that name including, com, info, biz, org, etc and have them pointing to dotyhul.co.uk.
I'm not sure about this type of practise, as it seems too expensive for the small business owner to implement and too much additional work as you would have to put unique content on each and every one of the sites in order to avoid duplicate content.
There are some good free SEO tools out there which will check your site and point out any problems, offer suggestions on how to fix it and give you a free report.
If you choose to go down the pay route make sure you do your research on the company first.
Many people are left frustrated and disappointed when the SEO firm they have been shelling out hundreds of pounds to, cannot get them on the first page for their major keyword.
Ask a lot of questions, ask them to show proof of their previous work and try to get your money's worth.
Better still do it all yourself and be patient.
Learning about what the search engines want is a game of trial and error.
Don't give up if you make mistakes, in the end your determination and hard work will pay off.
