Search Engine Optimization is very important for blogs and websites. All the big bloggers and websites reached that level with the help of SEO.

When you start a blog or a website you can buy ads, promote your new domain to press releases, pay bloggers to blog about you. You get a good amount of traffic and you can say “why do I need SEO?”. After the first phase where you are so enthusiastic about you new website and don’t care about the money you spend, the excel moment comes and you have to figure out how much you spent on advertising, how much you gained ( probably  nothing because the goal was to grow the website not to make a quick buck ), and most important how much money you will make in the future continuing in this way.

Cutting the advertising budget you end up with very low traffic, and worse, it is decreasing in time. To sustain the level of the traffic you need effort and money to drive visitors. Here comes SEO. Traffic from search engines does not cost you money to buy, and, in most cases, once you have a good position there it will continue to raise because your domain ages and search engines consider more relevant old and established websites.

Once you decide that it is time to focus on SEO, you have to take an important decision: You do it for yourself, hire an individual or hire a company?

Do it yourself

If you take the hard road to do SEO by yourself, you have to know that there is a lot to learn and catch up. Even if you worked at SEO in the past things are changing so fast that you practically have to start from scratch with learning. It happened to me: few years ago it seemed so easy to rank websites and get backlinks, I had my tools, my favourite techniques, and the process was almost semi-automated, but when I wanted to do it again I felt lost and outdated.

Hire an individual or a SEO expert

SEO is time consuming, and you need money too if you want to get results faster. It is worth for you to spend months to get links that you don’t even know they will be good for your SEO ? Wouldn’t be better to pay someone few hundreds of dollars for guaranteed placement in the first page of Google for you preferred keyword ?

Yes, you heard it right, the results are guaranteed. But be carefull, most SEO individuals will ask for all or half of money upfront and they promise they will return the money to you if you are not on the first page withing 6-8 months. That’s a very long period and you cannot trust anyone who claim it is a SEO expert.

To avoid being fooled, either you search for a SEO individual on a freelancing website where you can make use of the escrow system, or use a SEO reseller company. They will take the worries from you and they can interact with trusted SEO experts that can get your job done. They are not doing the work by themselves but they can work as a filter for SEO individuals and SEO thieves.

Hire a SEO Company

Hiring a SEO company is very costly. They will request anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 for ranking your website for 3-5 keywords in the first page. They will also promise guaranteed results but be aware: they can also be scammers.

Unless you are trying to get on the first page for a very competitive keyword where you need a million of backlinks to your website, they are not worth.

To get the safety of a SEO company, but to take advantage of the cheap work of SEO individuals, you can make use of a Private label SEO service offered by SEO reseller companies. For a small fee they will find an individual to do the SEO for you at a low priced with guaranteed results.