Do It Yourself SEO: 7 Easy Steps

SEO doesn’t have to be expensive, yet day in and day out, small companies pay agencies thousands of dollars in hopes of getting better rankings. Here’s the thing about agencies, though: the turnover rate is high, the pay is low, and passion for your industry isn’t always there. Half the time, you’re paying for a new hire to re-learn your product and industry, while the other half, you’re not able to get a hold of your account manager.

Do It Yourself SEO

Even in industries and companies where you wear many hats, it’s possible to tackle SEO. “Do it yourself SEO” means that you can move at your own pace — no worrying about agencies going over budget because they spent too many hours researching a blog post, and no wondering why someone else took your company name on the newest social networking site.

“I don’t have time for ‘Do it yourself SEO’”

That’s OK! There’s a few reputable services out there that will outline exactly what needs to be done, from linkbuilding to content generation, and will alert you of the next steps to take. You’ll get an SEO checklist of sorts that will lead you to Page 1 rankings for targeted and high converting keywords. Even if you absolutely don’t have time to one or two things from the checklist each week, you can find someone to outsource these tasks to — check sites like craigslist.org for freelancers that will work for lower costs than agencies and that are readily available for outsourced work.

What kind of program will allow me to partake in “Do it yourself SEO?”

There’s a few, but the one I stand by is LotusJump. For under $24 a month, Lotus Jump will tell you EXACTLY what needs to be done in order to achieve Page 1 rankings for the keywords of your choice. Here’s the thing, though — anyone can tell you “Build backlinks” or “Create content - content is king!”, but how do you know your building the right backlinks or creating the right content? LotusJump tells you exactly what you need to be doing - the sites you should be building links on and from, the content you should create and which sites to distribute it to, the directories you should be checking out, and the links that your competitors are grabbing. You’ll get alerts whenever one of these tasks should be done. No guess work needed.

Not sold on Do It Yourself SEO Programs yet? Take this challenge and try these tasks on your own. It’s a bit of work, yes, but once you start seeing results, it’s worth it. The hard part about this challenge, when SEO isn’t your main source of income and your company is, is finding the correct outlets - the backlinks, the content sites, the social sites. That’s why a tool that TELLS you what to do is nice, but I dare you to do this yourself.


Step 1: Social Profiles

Create 1-2 profiles on social media sites on a weekly basis. Find sites in your niche, as well as sites that have a high PR and can bring in quality traffic. Build html backlinks from those sites back to your web site. (Weekly)

Step 2: Q&A

Monitor Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers for questions relevant to your industry. Respond to those questions as a way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche and to build links and traffic to your web site. (Daily)

Step 3: Social Bookmarking

After you’ve created quality content on your site, bookmark the content on high traffic and relevant social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking should be done with every post you believe is of the highest quality, and really, shouldn’t all your content be high quality? (Per Post)

Step 4: Buzz

Monitor the keywords you’ve selected to target and respond every time those keywords are mentioned in blog posts, forums, twitter status updates, or articles on the web. (Daily)

Step 5: Content Generation

Write how-to and informative articles and post them on high PageRank and highly trafficked sites. In the resource box, link back to your web site. (Weekly)

Step 6: Competitive Backlink

Monitor your competition and the backlinks they are building. Every time you get an alert (or manually check) that a new backlink is created, try to procure a backlink from that web site to your site. (Weekly)

Step 7: Directory Submission

Find relevant directories that you can submit your web site to. (Weekly)

Completing the above tasks is easy — that’s “Do it yourself SEO.”

The hard part is finding the sources - where is the newest social network you should belong to and do you have a few hours each week to research them? What kind of tool do you use to monitor different Q&A sites, or do you manually check each site each day, trying to find a mention of your keyword? How do you know when your competitor gets a new backlink? Who alerts you when a new directory is available for you to submit to?

Do it yourself SEO isn’t difficult, but the research part can take a bit of time. If you’re still ready to give “do it yourself seo” a try, check out .