Let’s face at least two facts today.  For one, Google pretty much rules the world.  As the world’s largest internet company, they can exert a massive amount of control over just about any part of the web search process.  The now ubiquitous phrase “Google it” refers to just how powerful this search engine behemoth has gotten over the last few years.  And when you are intending to do some website SEO, Google is going to pretty much top your list of people to please.

The second fact is, organic SEO is no longer a way to zoom ahead of your competition.  In this day and age, if you are not practicing organic website SEO at a high level, your competitors are leaving you to eat their dust (while they get all of your potential customers – bon apetit).  And no matter what kind of site you are running, we are ALL working for Google at some level.

Let us consider mobile website design.  If your web site is too wordy, you can forget about it.  Nobody wants to read War and Peace on a little tiny smart phone screen – if they were big enough for proper reading, they would be laptops and not cell phones any more.  And most people do not want to spend ten minutes scrolling around with their phone, trying to make out what that massive image on your site might be.  So naturally, traditional computer based ideas of what constitutes a smart web site design are out.  But website SEO does not stop just because the medium has changed.

And keep in mind that often times, the people make the product into what it ends up being.  While directory submission is normally a reasonably useful way to get your site noticed, it becomes even more powerful when you couple it with the fact that Google’s entire reason for being is to find and share knowledge.  If you bring great content, and then you show it to people, they will become little advertisers for you.  And Google will find their glowing reviews, and a star will be born of your site.

When you start out with website SEO, you may think that “you get what you pay for” has to automatically mean “expensive equals good.”  But this is not the case in the slightest.  In fact, affordable SEO is how the game is played, in this day and age.  If you are paying a heavy premium for your small business SEO, you may actually be paying too much for a bunch of frills you may not even need.

A lot of times, dealing with a big company does not turn into making big gains.  When you hire a huge law firm to represent you in court, they send two trainees, one experienced lawyer, and charge you for all three at the highest rate of the group (whether or not they actually do anything).  And often enough, Atticus Finch could defend you just as well.  And when it comes to optimizing your web site for the search engines, this is very much the case, as well.

Consider that getting first page placement is tricky, which is most likely why you decided to outsource this task in the first place.  After all, if we were all SEO pros, the first page simply would not be big enough to hold ALL of our sites.  A good professional search engine optimizer is going to take you, step by step, through the organic SEO process, which will end up with your web site not only delivering good content to those who stumble on it.  In the end, the RIGHT customers are going to do more than just stumble onto your site.

When it comes down to it, the first stage of any SEO operation revolves around knowing who you want to attract – since no site is perfect for everybody, you have to have your niche firmly in mind, and give the people what they want.  And the second stage of the SEO process is just looking through your site, and noticing the little “tweaks” you can make, to make the whole process of being noticed by the search engines run with a smoother stride.  And once those two parts are done, all that remains is in the doing.

Does it really take a huge company with oak paneled offices and fancy letterhead to make your web site shine?  Of course not.  So don’t pay more than you should!