Chances are, you went out to eat sometime in the last few weeks. Why? Perhaps you don’t like to cook. Perhaps you like having food brought to you while you relax. Perhaps you were in a hurry. Perhaps your cooking skills are limited to heating a frozen dinner in the microwave. Perhaps you’ve found a place where you really like the food. Whatever your reason, you chose to pay for a professional to do something you could probably, with some effort, do yourself–prepare and serve you a meal. In my work with search engine optimization (SEO), I’ve heard several people say, directly and indirectly, that it’s basically a waste of money to hire someone to do SEO for your website, because “anyone can do it.” Let’s look at that idea for a few minutes. Here are some reasons why, just as you would choose to eat at a restaurant, you would choose to turn SEO over to a professional. 1. “Anyone” can’t do it. As I mentioned earlier, many people’s cooking skills are limited. Marcia’s greatest culinary accomplishments may be boiling an egg and making macaroni and cheese out of a box. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But if she wanted to impress a potential client or business colleague with a nice dinner, she wouldn’t put herself in charge of meal preparation. The same goes for SEO. If you know something about keywords, and what a “title tag” is, and that having links between your website and other sites is useful, that’s great, but that knowledge doesn’t put you on par with a professional, any more than boiling an egg makes Marcia a chef. SEO professionals spend lots of time learning and testing strategies to improve a website’s visibility. Not tricks like invisible keyword stuffing (which will get a site banned from search engines), but real stuff like: • how visitors use a website • what pages are popular and why • what searchers are looking for • what search engines are looking for • whether using new technologies helps or hurts or does nothing • whether version A or version B of a page brings in more visitors • how to allocate money in a pay-per-click campaign (where the numbers and competition are always changing) If you are looking for SEO Solutions or any kind of diversified SEO Solutions or even SEO Solutions articles for you to read – then you are at the right place.