SEO is the new fad among internet marketers these days. Position in Google organic search can make or break a website sales. More and more users are interested in organic non paid search results as opposed to the paid results on the right. Organic search results have more credibility than the paid ones. Also traffic is essentially free if you rank high in Search Engines.
So what is SEO? How is it done? How important is it? These are a few questions that everyone who sets up a new website faces. Another challenge a person faces is in deciding wether she should do SEO for her website herself of hire services of one of the many Search Engine Optimization Companies. Lets tackle all of these questions one at a time.
SEO is the process of increasing the search engine ranking of a website for particular keywords. One should note that this does not include the pay per click marketing campaigns in which you pay for links to your site shown and you pay for every click to your website.
The processes that are involved in SEO in general are quite diverse and like any other marketing technique there are ethical and unethical ways of doing SEO also. These are called White Hat and Black Hat methods, just geeky way of saying good and bad. While publicizing your website on the internet to increase the traffic and search engine rankings is perfectly legitimate but some people use bots to make huge automated link farms which are considered unethical and the website stays to loose spot in search engines if detected.
The last question of wether you should do it yourself or not is a rather tricky one. In theory you can and should do it yourself since you know best about your website so you can write best about it. But the only problem is that there are time constraints to everything. Same is the case with SEO. SEO professionals will on average take about 3 times less time in doing the same things as you since they are doing those same things routinely and have a workflow setup. So if you would like to save yourself a lot of time and effort theta its worth exploring the option of hiring professionals to do the dirty work for you and you can simply reap the rewards in terms of increased traffic to your website.