When it comes to doing SEO for your website, one of the major concerns you may have is how much time and money you’ll need to spend on it. If you’re hiring an SEO firm, then time IS money, and you’ll want to know a rough estimate of how much time the SEO firm will put in and, therefore, charge you for.

You can break down the steps necessary for SEO work, making it easier to judge how much time you or your SEO company will need to spend on each. The estimates given here do not take into account any major issues or technical problems that may arise. You may want to add in a few extra hours to each step to account for any problems that you may have to deal with. If your website is exceptionally large (a thousand pages or more), you may also want to add more time into your estimate.

Step 1: Domain/URL Issues – Two hours to a day

The first thing to do is to go through your website manually and make certain that everything is consistent. You also want to look for things that will cause a search engine robot to have difficulty navigating through your site. If you have a large, dynamic site or a site that brings in a lot of content from other sites that may change often, it may take you more than a couple of hours for this step. Once you’ve completed this step, expect it to take two to four more hours to create and test all of your 301-redirect links. It may also take between two and fifteen hours to rename or re-code any filenames depending on how your site is assessed.

Step 2: – Design issues – two to four hours plus 30 minutes per page

It’s easy to see many design issues, but it can be difficult to make certain that your design is consistent from page to page across your entire website. It may take a few hours to note down every design issue, but it shouldn’t take more than four or five hours. You can often note down these issues while you’re doing your domain/URL assessment, saving a bit of time. How long it takes to implement all of the changes you need to make at this step depends on how many pages you have. At most, you may end up spending half an hour on each page. If you’ve got a huge site, this can add days to your SEO.

Step 3: – Architectural Issues – 125 hours

The most important aspect of your webpage to a search engine is its architecture. While building a list of your architectural concerns can be done while making your other lists, the actual implementation of these changes may take days or weeks. Much of this depends on how dynamic your site is and just how much re-coding is necessary.

Step 4: – Content – half an hour / 250 words

Creating content that is search engine optimized can take a good amount of time, especially if you have a lot of content on your site. One way to save time and money on this step is to do the writing yourself; however, before you jump on that idea, make certain you understand how SEO works. Otherwise, you may do more harm that good. You can also purchase licensed content or rewrite your own content to include keywords.

What is Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Organic SEO” refers to the manual type of page optimization vs. automatic submittal and page alteration.” The important thing to note is that when a company first gets listed on Google’s first page, the traffic in the first two months goes up almost exponentially, and conversion rates also improve strongly,”

I would say this is my favorite way of optimizing websites. You bring in traffic by using content that works, linking strategies, and adding value via interactivity and a great user experience, not paid search listings.

Money will definitely be spent in the areas of site redesign and probably in getting content (you may actually have to hire writers to get content) but then again, if you are a web designer who is building your own websites on a low (or nonexistent) budget, organic SEO is definitely the way to go. It may take some time, but you will actually grow in real time experience as you move towards your SEO goals.

Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) facts: It has always been recognised that organic search listings or general search listings are the ones most used by search engine browsers to the extent that research shows in excess of 70% of search engine users prefer these listings to the 30% of browsers that utilise sponsored listings or PPC. Most corporate search engine optimisation companies now avoid organic SEO and have moved ever further towards paid search (PPC). Although High Position is an expert in paid inclusion programme set up and management the golden egg has always been the organic listings. Ethical search engine optimisation and compliance technology is the only way to gain these listings..

The main difference between the two methods of marketing is that PPC is aimed entirely at your budget and skill in setting the campaign, however, organic listings are based on the quality and stature of your website in conjunction with the strict search engine guidelines.

Complete the exercise for yourself, go onto www.google.co.uk and search for your main products and services, are you there? If so well done but it may be inadvertently, remember 2006 was started with BMW being thrown out of Googles database for black hat techniques. This highlights the need for High Position to analyse your corporation’s website to make sure you are compliant and maximised!!

The Myth of Overnight Success

There are few things that get to me more than the assumption that a large goal (such as getting to number one for a keyword on Google’s SERPs) can be done overnight. The easiest SEO I have ever done for an unknown site was done over the course of a month, via content refreshing alone. The key word was unique (blue interface), and the competing web sites were half asleep while we worked.

The issue with this myth is that customers actually believe it. They post jobs such as “We want to be number one in the following key words” then list close to a dozen key words, and everything has to be done under a budget of a thousand dollars and in record time. Organic SEO works, is adaptable and ensures high rankings on SERPs over the long time despite changing algorithms, but nobody can guarantee anything in a month.

If you are on a small budget there are a lot of free ways you can use on the Internet to advertise your business. Yes that is right! You don’t have to pay anything and they are the same solutions that companies pay thousands of dollars to do. So if you have some time, you can get ready to generate your own traffic for free!

Content

First of all you need to make sure your web design has the right content. Your content should be unique and interesting to your audience.  Give people something they are interested learning something that will bring them back for more. Your text needs the right keywords repeated in a certain density.  Only use about 1 keyword for every 100 words. This will help with search engines for your ranking. Do not repeat the same keywords too much. Search engine could see it as spam!

Blogging

Blogging is a great starting point for free. There are many of free services on the web that allow you to publish a blog. If you already have your  business web site then you can work the web design with the blog so it is a part of your site. When you write a blog be sure it is related to your business, then includes as much  inbound links possible to your website.

Press Releases

Press Releases are another way to promote for your business, writing press releases about upcoming events and other big happenings. This way you can get the word out and create hype about the business. Press releases can be sent to media outlets like newspapers, radio stations, news stations, and such.

Bookmarking

Bookmarking is a perfect way to bring more traffic to your site and get the word out about the fact that you exist. You can bookmark every single page on your website and this will ensure you get some traffic and will create a site rank.

Social Networking

The idea is that social networks like  Linkedin , Myspace and Facebook are similar to search engines, where the goal is to ensure that the most relevant and interesting content bubbles up to the top. On sites like Digg it means having enough votes from the community to move your news article to their front page, while on a site like MySpace, your measure of popularity is all about how many friends you can get. if you build relationships with other community members. Even though becoming an active member on these sites will help you get more traffic to you website , it is a great strategy for promoting your own material.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many techniques you can use to get free advertising for your web presence, There is no reason to leave out any opportunity, however if you don’t have the time, it is highly recommended to ask for an search engine optimization (SEO) expert that understands well your business model.