DIY SEO isn’t always a good idea

Everyone wants their site to be found and get traffic, but not everyone wants to pay for SEO. There are a number of reasons why people may not want to pay it. Some may think it doesn’t really work. Some think it’s a rip-off, because it’s true, you can’t always “see” what was done to make the site more visible. Some people don’t have the budget for it. And some people may think they can do it themselves just as well.

I like DIY projects as much as the next guy. (Except when it comes to crafts!) But there are times when it pays off to hire someone who is an expert and understands how things work. When it comes to SEO, we are talking about a continuously shifting and changing set of rules that can be confusing and difficult to navigate. I always say that when you hire someone to do SEO on your site, you are paying for their expertise more than anything else. Because they know how it all works, and how to make your site work for you.

I have a wonderful friend who asked me for a little help with her website recently. I logged in to take a look at her site, and fixed up the problem she was having right away, but happened to notice something else. Her site is an e-commerce site with a handful of products. And each product was categorized in 15 or more categories, and also had the same number of tags. Many of the categories and tags were identical. There were variations of her product name several times, the cities she works in, and many more generic terms set up as categories and keywords.

It’s not difficult to understand her rationale. She wanted to be found for all those keywords, and so she wanted to make sure those keywords were on every page, and she chose categories and tags as her method of getting those keywords on the page.

Unfortunately, that is not how keyword targeting works and unbeknownst to her, she was likely doing damage to her search engine ranking. Categories and tags are not keywords, and they shouldn’t be used as keywords. Categories and tags are methods of organizing your content and that’s how they should be used. Beyond that, you need to choose specific keyword phrases and use them individually – one per page. A keyword phrase is like your thesis sentence in an essay – it tells the search engines what that site is about. If you have 20 keyword phases, then the search engines can’t tell what your page is about. You’re creating confusion instead of a clear message about the content of your page.

If you can’t afford SEO or don’t want to pay for it, then your best option is to write great content and update your site regularly with a blog. It’ll get you better results than most DIY SEO efforts.