Image by: Lou
By Michael Sterling

It’s a common belief that most, if not all, SEO companies are scams. Many business owners spend thousands of dollars on these firms only to realize a couple years later that they might be throwing all their money away. Well get ready for the shock of the century: hiring an SEO company, actually, doesn’t need to be a major priority.

By taking matters into your own hands, not only will you have more control of who sees your content, but you might be able to save truckloads of money down the road. All it takes is a bit of knowledge on getting you in the right direction:

#1) Know The Goals You Want To Achieve

Many business owners who try to seek SEO companies don’t even know what they want out of it, which obviously gets you nowhere. When you set a goal for yourself, it makes it easier to know which tools you need to attain and how to do it. Once you know, you’ll soon realize that all of these tools are easily at your disposal.

• Do you want to grow sales by 25% over the next year?

• Grow leads by 50% within half a year?

• Would you like to increase your ranking?

• Or do you just want to feel like you’re being “productive”?

If it’s the latter, you might want to consider your dedication. In order to increase your company’s life force, you must have a set finish line, otherwise you will never know how to run the race. Each target will most likely require specific strategies, not one giant snap of a finger.

Tools like AdvancedWebRanking will help you get where you need to be with no interference by SEO companies. They’ll offer all the tools you need as well as resources that will help you find the proper ways to achieve your goals.

#2) Monitoring

One of the major jobs an SEO company has is to monitor and analyze your website in terms of its market, conversion, traffic, ranking, and competitors. Since search engines only update their information periodically (some as long as once every 90 days), it’s an ongoing process to try and make each of these meet the result you want, but it is possible.

If you keep monitoring the results by searching the keywords you’ve chosen, and still aren’t happy with your rank, there are a few things you can do which can get you higher simply by using the engine’s algorithms:

• Get Your Pages Shared – The more people or sites that share your links on their pages, the higher your rank will climb. Photo contests, discount offers, testimonials, even donating to charity may help get you more shares which will ultimately work to your advantage.

• Find Mentions Without Links – If ever a website mentions your site and doesn’t link it, Google won’t count it as a vote in your favor. Tools like Google Alerts are great for monitoring this. They will send you an email every time your business is mentioned.

• Speaking Engagements & Press Trips – When you speak at events or do a press trip where you visit local news stations (which is easy to book if you play your cards right), it’s an excellent opportunity for them to include a link back to your business which will increase your rank.

#3) Keyword Optimization

This is probably the most underrated tool not just because it’s the easiest way to bring traffic from search engines, but it’s also free. The first thing you need to realize is that having too many keywords is just as bad as not using the right ones. In fact, filling your meta tags full of keywords can actually be penalized by search engines. It’s called “keyword stuffing.”

To get results, you need to do research both on what your customers are searching for and what your service provides. For example, if you own a magic store in Wyoming, don’t use a ridiculously long string of keywords like “magic, store, Wyoming, magic store, stores, etc.” Instead, use “magic store Wyoming” as one keyword and “funny magic store Wyoming” as another.

Once you have these set of keywords in place, implement them into your URLs and page title tags also. Something that will help is to put your company name after the description title, i.e. “Funny Magic Gifts From <Your Company>.” This will give your company name priority to the keywords at the front of the title – search engines love to see that.

*Tip: Google’s Keyword Tool, WordTracker, and SpyFu are great online tools which will help you chose keywords.