Professional SEO Service or Do It Yourself SEO?

If you have a website or if you are planning to start one, the question you should be asking yourself is whether to opt for do it yourself SEO or hiring a professional SEO service. There are benefits to both, each has its advantages and disadvantages, so which do you choose, which one is better? That is a hard question and I don’t have a straight answer to it, but let’s go over the pros and cons of the two options and maybe you can decide.

Let’s start with do it yourself SEO. I prefer to do my SEO, but I’m already experienced at it, the only time I’m not doing my SEO is when I have too much work, then it pays to hire a professional to do it for you, which is one of the reasons why you might choose a professional SEO service. Well, like I said I mostly do SEO myself and the greatest benefit of it is that I have complete control over every aspect of my website and the off page optimization. So I can either be proud of the work I’ve done or I can bang my head and curse the day I tried to do SEO. You see there is no point in having a good website if nobody sees it, which means you have to promote it, but there is also no use spending time or money promoting a website that no one will find interesting.

Well the reason why most people choose DIY SEO is the fact that you will save money, but you need to have time and you need to know what you are doing. If you start overly aggressive your site may suffer penalties, if you take it too easy you may never get the top rank. Like I said, you need to know what you are doing, SEO basics are necessary, you will learn the rest along the way.

There is a third option, you don’t have to do the SEO yourself nor do you have to hire a professional to do it for you. Find the middle ground, hire an SEO consultant to make an assessment and compose a plan, a course of action that you will follow. So you will be doing the SEO yourself but according to professional’s opinion, that will cost you a bit, but I think it’s worth it if you are not sure what you are doing.

Professional SEO services don’t come cheap, that is a fact. You might need a small fortune to hire the SEO experts, but, it may just be worth it. A good SEO company knows how to predict the niche market you are in, by analyzing it they will be able to make a rough estimate of how high they may rank your site, but a good SEO company will never guarantee such a thing. If someone guarantees you a certain rank you should say no thank you.
There are those that will just do the linking, but I never considered those as SEO companies, just wannabes that will get you banned from search engines for spamming. A professional SEO service will do everything from on page to off page optimization including, correction of HTML, design, navigation on your site, internal linking, getting backlinks, press releases, article marketing with writing and directory submission. A professional SEO service will save you time and hardship of doing SEO by yourself, and they will get results.

Again, you have to be careful when choosing an SEO company. We already said that if a company makes promises and guarantees, you should walk away from their offer. Over 90% of the so called SEO companies out there are inexperienced, people working there just want to make quick money so they promise things and go with Black Hat SEO methods to get fast results, they spam and manipulate, which eventually will get you penalized. Black Hat SEO is to be avoided, there are too many SEO services that use it and if you don’t know much about SEO the wrong choice of company may ruin your website.
There are three ways I recognize bad SEO services immediately:

1. Their linking, I ask for some of the sites where they link from, usually I just find link farms that will get you banned.
2. They practice articles spinning, and a bad one at that, so when a company directly says that they do spinning back away. I always check their articles.
3. When checking their articles look for the keyword density, many of these companies still go fro 5% to 8% keyword density which is meaningless, in fact it may only harm you as the content will not be readable.

Professional SEO has its benefits and its flaws; I guess the hardest thing is to find the right company that won’t empty your bank account, which is one more thing to look out for, if the price is too low compared to others you should stay away. Whatever you choose, professional SEO services or do it yourself SEO you need to remember that this is a long term project and a very hard process. In fact it is a learning process for both beginners and experts as SEO always changes and search engines always update their algorithms trying to make our life a living hell. Your best bet to stay in touch with the changes and the news in SEO industry is to join a few SEO forums and keep your eyes open, who knows, you just might learn something.