There was a time when businesses could avoid putting money into an SEO strategy and get away with it. But those days are long gone. Today, even startups need to make SEO a part of their larger marketing strategy from the word go.

 

The primary job of any SEO campaign is to ensure your website is placed at the top of search engine page results. If you get your SEO right, there is a very good chance you will be able to increase business profitability. But, SEO as a service is expensive and reputed SEO service providers charge the moon and back for their expertise.

 

Yes, there are those offering services at bottom of the barrel rates, but they cannot be trusted. You don’t want to work with the wrong SEOs just because they’re cheap. There are many businesses who decided to hire the services of a low quality SEO company and found themselves on the wrong side of search engines owing to the lack of expertise and inexperience of the company they hired. These businesses not only had to deal with a loss of reputation and profits but also had to put in money to right the mistakes made by their SEO company.

 

So it’s always better to hire somebody who knows their way around SEO, even if you have to dig deep into your pocket to pay them.  But what if you just cannot afford to hire an SEO expert for the job? Is there a way to stop your overheads from getting into a tizzy and still implement reliable SEO strategy?

 

Yes, there is.

 

Start slow, give importance to the fundamentals, work your way up through the SEO tactics hierarchy, create a foundation and only then go for expert help. And yes, you can do this yourself provided you take this job seriously.

 

Start On-Page

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The first thing you must do is get some learning under your belt. You must know what SEO is all about and The Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz is a great place to start. Take your time, chew on every chapter, chew some more, understand, digest and only put the learning received into practice.  Once you are done, go through On-Page Optimization Checklist: A Foolproof Guide to Optimizing your Content.

 

Remember, you are a novice and might not be able to use everything mentioned in the guide. But give it a go. If you think you’ve made a mistake, correct it. Some business owners hold themselves back from the DIY SEO strategy because they’re scared of making mistakes that might just put their online presence in jeopardy. Well, that might or might not happen; but if you stick to the rule book, you won’t make a mistake that will come to haunt you later. What you are essentially doing is laying the foundation of on-page SEO; you are not getting deep into it. That can be done later by an expert.

 

Leverage Social Media

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Chances are that you already are very active on social media. So, why not make social media a part of your larger SEO plan? All you need to do is to create a profile for your business on popular social networks and start sharing content with your friends and followers. This activity will generate social signals that will in turn positively impact your website’s ranking on SERPs.

 

 

Simple, isn’t it!

 

Actually, it is not quite that simple! You need to share informative content regularly on social media, nurture personal interactions with friends and followers, and on the whole make sure your brand is able to engage with its customers at many different levels.

 

To get some benefit out of these social interactions, you must ensure most of the content you share links back to your site. For this to happen, you need to consistently come up with shareworthy content that is most likely to get shared, re-shared, tweeted, re-tweeted by your audience. This isn’t easy. But who said internet marketing was easy. Knowing what when and how to share on social media will help you build a strong social media presence that also delivers great SEO value.

 

Content – Blog and Guest Blog

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Forget on-page, off-page, the key to great rankings in search engines is the quality of content published by your business online.

 

First, implement a blog on your site and make sure you regularly update it with useful, actionable posts and start sharing links to these posts on all social media networks. Keep doing this day in and day out. You will need to stick to a punishing schedule initially, because all you’ve got going for your business is the content. The more the merrier, but make sure it meets the highest standards of quality and is something that your readers will love going through. Over a period of time, you will find more visitors coming to your site and in a best case scenario experience a very tangible improvement in your website conversion ratio.

 

Secondly, you need to start approaching high authority sites in your niche for guest posting opportunities. Keep in mind that Google has been revising this method recently so you have to approach it the right way. Most bloggers will allow you to place a link from your author bio to your site which can be great if the location where the content is being posted is relevant to your business. You don’t want to be an IT company posting content on a site that sells baby cribs just to get a link. This will eventually result in a penalty from Google. What you want to do is to find locations relevant to your business you can contribute content to consistently. These are high value back links that have tremendous SEO value. If a blogger is feeling really generous, he might even allow you to place a link within the content. This allows you to build a strong high quality natural link juice for your website, which is essentially what Google wants you to do in order for websites to rank better.

 

Wrapping it up

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What you are doing here is creating a solid foundation for your future SEO efforts. Your brand begins to attract more interest as a result of these efforts, your website traffic sees an increase, your conversion ratio goes up and all this results in improved profitability for your business. And the great thing is you haven’t actually hired an expert SEO to get into the act yet.

 

Author Bio

Jeff Davis is living in California and currently associated with Quick Laptop Cash – A place for selling a laptop online. He has been in this field for the last 6 years and is responsible for troubleshooting issues. Interact to discuss projects, technology solutions. For more info please visit www.quicklaptopcash.com.