Archive for April, 2011

DO YOUR OWN SEO - SEO DIY

Before I start, I will say that for people that want to do their own SEO I do offer an SEO consultancy Services. I tell you what to do and you do it. You need to know how to change webpages thats all.

For this example, we’ll say you time is worth $15.00 per hour

You have a website, with 10 main product and information pages built it costed you $2000 and it’s online.

Your find the perfect html course and you learn how to write html code in say 30 hours.

$450 for 30 hours learning the tricks of html and writing web page codes..

Then you will need a program to upload your new website pages, there are free ones around, so make that 3 hours to find one that suits your needs and another couple of hours learning how to use the ftp, that’s another $75

Then you must learn the secrets of optimization, this could take several hundred hours, so for this, we will say you found a program that does it all. (well it doesn’t do it all, but helps you do it all) we’ll say you spend 30 hours researching, and you found the right program $450.

Then that program costs you…. Now this is a hard one, I haven’t found program that does everything well, I have 12 programs that do different things very well, which costed me $1000, so for this article we’ll say this comprehensive optimization program costs around. $1000.

Now the time to learn how to use that program, remembering you are a computer whiz and have an extremely high IQ, we’ll say 10 hours to learn to use the program another $300, ok you are ready to START optimizing your website, and you have already spent $2275. (the same price you paid for the website)

Do I need to go on…Contact me lynny lynny@canzdesign.com   oh my, you aren’t convinced yet huh….lets carry on.

Ok, even with your new program with all the bells and whistles, that tells you exactly what to do (oh and by the way, please let me know the name of it when you find it) anyway, you will probably find you have to rewrite you webpage content so it’s keyword heavy, but say you don’t, all you have to do is add the things it tells you, the very least amount of time it will take is 1 hour per page. 10 pages

$150 arghhh this is sound better huh… and you find someplace online that you can submit your website to 1500 search engines at once, wow it only costs $30 Wahoo this is great so you submit your website, and you get at least 300 emails from various search engines, saying you have to go and become a member, and then submit… and you notice that the websites that ask this, are all the main websites, and hang on, you will see that that many of these emails say they are from different search engines, but the link to make your submitting is actually to Exactseek, or Yahoo, or Jayde search engine, and since you never get an email for the other 1200 search engines, and you don’t actually know what they are called you can never check you are in them. 

Oh, then there’s all the emails from search engines that are country specific, and will only take websites, you don’t find that out usually until you click on the link in the email and the page opens. We’ll say you are super fast and get through those emails in 2 hours..

$30, oh I might add that now your email address will start to receive untold spam, and it will just get worse and worse over time, we won’t go into how many hours you will spend unsubscribing from legitimate but unwanted emails, reading the interesting ones, or the time it takes to delete the other spam each day from your email,inbox, that’s just one of the joys of doing your own SEO.

Ok, so now you have fixed your web pages, and entered your site into the search engines. Now you must find a good website statistics program, to read the results of your efforts, 10 hours to learn to read and understand what the statistics are telling you, another 2 hours a week, reading statistics and learning from them,
$180.

Now your wiz bam program starts telling you, you have to do all these other things to promote your website online, so every night you decide to get on the computer, and spend 4 hours doing these other things. 120 hours a month,

$1800 per month….. you will also learn very quickly that the internet slows right down from about 5.30 in the evening until about midnight everyday, so you could always get up early on a Saturday, and spend the weekend doing your own optimization. Even if you only did that for 6 months, and then cut down to a 14 hours a week for the next 6 months. That’s still $16,200 for the next year.

But the total figure now is $18,475 for one years work, $355 per week.

I won’t even mention that new program you find, that you run on your site to check your optimization you have just finished, and it says most of what you have done isn’t correct, and you HAVE to change it!!!!! Even though it told you to do it in the first place.
Or worse still although your site ranks #1 for several keyphrases no one actually searches for those things, so you are back to the drawing board, even wizzbang SEO programs can’t tell what people actually search for.

I charge $100 per hour for my SEO skills.
As a general rule for a basic website:
I take one hour to analyse how a site is doing in search engines currently and find out from you what you require.
Approx 3-4 hours making changes to the website code.
1-2 hours checking results of my SEO and tweaking code when nessecary.

Note: I usually hire freelance workers to do the time consuming work of SEO. This mean you are only paying for my expertise.

I recently charge $750 for basic SEO for an osCommerce website.

Contact me lynny@canzdesign.com asking about a quote to SEO your website. I will need the url of your website, how long it has been online, if you provise a budget I will do my best to keep within it.

For the same 10 page website, I would probably charge around $1000-$2000 to do the initail SEO, and $200-$300 a month for six months, at the most $3800 in total for extensive national and international SEO.

NOTE: Many friends that know a lot obout SEO, have read this page, and all without exception agree, that the prices I have quoted to to learn DIY SEO should be at least tripled and the only really accurate quote is the first one, to learn to write enough html code to do SEO !!!