This last year has provided me quite an education as I went from one chosen profession, to trying to learn the intricacies of another by launching a successful website business. Even the term SEO was a foreign one when I got started. I, like a lot of people, thought that money would be better spent paying a professional SEO company to optimize my website than trying to do it myself.

The perception of promised results over time is a powerful one so I went ahead knowing full well that the results would not occur overnight. Sure, it was costing money, but I assumed it was just the cost of doing business. All the successful sites were paying for it, right? I could not have been more wrong.

Not only don’t all companies pay for SEO services, I learned that the main job of an SEO company is to generate income for their success, not yours. More importantly though, no SEO company cares about your website as much as you do.

I do have to admit that most of the blame is my own. As a complete webmaster newbie, I made a lot of assumptions back then, and only found out later how wrong they were. But, it was the lack of timely or correct information to me, from any of these SEO professionals along the way, that really surprised me.

One of the first, and biggest mistakes I had made when I started out, was to select keywords that were really popular. I would have no chance of ever being found with them. No matter. I went ahead anyway. A lot of people make this mistake when they start out. No only was it a complete waste of my time and money, the SEO company, that I had hired in Boston, did not bother passing on that little detail, as they gladly collected the $500 monthly service fee while my organic traffic activity remained dead.

Later, when I realized the mistake on my own, I selected a different SEO company. This company said that they could optimize five non-premium keyword phrases for $350 per month so long as each term did not exceed 300,000 monthly searches on Google. So, as I spoke with the SEO representative, I chose the five phrases. For months, I believed that the big number on the top right of Google’s search results page was the monthly search volume. Wrong again! Not only had I never heard of Google’s keyword tool back then, if I had, I would have discovered that all but two of my keyword phrases had monthly search volumes so low they did not even register a number! And, those that did, were too low to bother with.

While I wondered why my long-tail phrases were not generating organic traffic either, the SEO company continued to collect their monthly fee too. None of the SEO professionals had bothered to check my keyword phrase volumes correctly or tell me just how worthless they really were. The SEO pro who had helped me select my keywords on the phone, was just as clueless as I was.

Due to my exasperation over time, I began discovering free tools for website optimization myself like Google’s keyword tool, analytics and Hubspots’ website grader; among others. I also found a minutiae of free SEO related information online, on blogs, and on forums. I was coming to the realization that if my website was going to succeed, without breaking my bank account, I was going to have to do it on my own.

It was time to cut the cord.

I became a little more familiar with the meanings of on-page and off page optimization, metadata, html, javascript and php. I also began to discover many flaws with my own websites on-page optimization, even though I had been paying for SEO for some time by now with two different providers.

1- Half my title tag included my website name instead of my chosen keywords. There should be no need to place your website name in a title tag unless it is a keyword because it will usually appear at the top of the page when people type it in anyway. Might be worth checking.

2- Having more than 10 keywords dilutes the effectiveness of those words. I had over 20.

3- Your H1 and H2 header tags should include your keywords. Only one of my 6 header tags did.

4- All your keywords should be included in your websites content description. Most of mine were not.

5- If you want to have header tags on your homepage, just be sure only one is H1, while the others are H2 or more. I had four H1s’

6- Consider having your keywords placed in the alt text for images, if you have them. I had two alt texts for my two images for my homepage with no keywords in either of them.

7- Have your main keyword located on the top left for your only H1 tag, and located on the bottom right of your homepage, maybe to the right of you copyright information, because this is how Google’s crawler reads a website. I only had mine on the top left.

Regarding off-page optimization, I learned the following lessons:

1- On-page optimization ( website improvements, keywords, etc) are weighed a lot less heavily by the search engines than off-page optimization. (Article writing, blogging, commenting and link building.)

2- Exchanging many links over time can actually lower, not raise, the page-rank of your website. Can you believe it? I was surprised to learn that the page rank of the site you want to exchange links with is an important consideration before sending the query. A lot of people are doing it anyway because, instead, they think it’s only about the total number of links.

3- Every day, websites are being banned by Google because these sites are linked to a bad neighbor. These webmasters have changed nothing about their own websites yet they have no clue as to why their rank has plummeted or they are no longer indexed by Google at all.

4- I learned about how advantageous it can be for a new webmaster to use keywords that only show up on a competitors sub-pages for page one on Google, i.e, not their homepage, when starting out.

5- One-way links carry a-lot more weight with Google than link exchanges and are usually obtained over time through the submission of good quality articles.

6- I learned just how crucial an analysis of your competitors page rank really is before any keywords are even selected

7-Finally, I learned about the importance of strategic thinking when it comes to moving forward.

For me, the value in using an SEO company initially, was the peace of mind that I felt the moment I got started with one. They are, after all, the experts, right?

In spite of my experiences, I know that there are a multitude of excellent SEO providers out there. I also hope that I have not given the mistaken impression that I am some sort of SEO expert, because I am not at all. I just know a little more, I think, about it, than I did a year ago. That said, I”m sure I’ve made some mistakes even with this post. I hope to learn from them through your comments.

Finally, I need to say that there are several individuals at the second company I had hired, who have continued to help me. I am indebted to them as I proceed on this journey of self discovery on my own.

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