Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

Hi mschlossberg,

What Michael says about your website goals and objectives is true.

If you don't need to be found, if the only purpose is to have a place for people to go once they know who you are, then it is not worth the money.

However, if you need to be found via search, and this is what your competitive space is all about, then most likely your top-ranked competitors have hired a professional organic SEO firm to optimize their site for them and you need to do the same or you will be buried so deep it won't even matter.

There are less costly ways, the least costly is go buy a book on organic SEO and if you know html you can do it yourself but this will not be the most effective as organic SEO has become a highly skilled talent that requires a thorough knowledge of how you think major search engine algorithms are tuned at any point in time and how to tweak a website to make it search engine spider friendly and then of course you have the relevancy and quantity of inbound links.

Your other option is pay-per-click also knowns as sponsored search, but again, with the cost of keywords and phrases being what they currently are, you can spend a lot of time and money maintaining a top-ranking if you don't know what you are doing so for this you need to seriously consider a professional also.

At least with PPC you can control your positioning. You might not have a positive ROI, but at least you can pretty much choose and guarantee where you want to be ranked.

At any rate, if you need anymore help or advice, contact me offline.

I hope that helps.