Whether you know it or not, SEO can be a time consuming process, especially if you involve yourself in all aspects of the process itself. So the question I am going to put forth in this article is a simple one. When doing SEO for your site, should you do it yourself or should you outsource the work? Well, the answer I’m going to give you just might surprise you. Keep on reading to find out just how I feel about this subject.

I will be the first to admit that I am no SEO expert…not by a long shot. However, I do know all the basics and can get a site up the SERPs pretty quickly, if not in record time. I do know that to do everything you need to do to properly SEO your site, it is a lot of work and very time consuming. Let me give you one example of what I’m talking about. Let’s tackle social bookmarking.

For starters, most people go about doing this all wrong. See, your typical marketer will go to a social bookmarking site, like Digg, and only bookmark his own sites. This is not the way to get the most juice out of your efforts. You need to actually become a part of the community, which means filling in ALL your details and actually bookmarking other things of interest that are NOT your own site. In fact, you should bookmark more things that AREN’T your own site than your site itself. THAT is how to properly use social bookmarking.

Unfortunately, this is VERY time consuming as you can imagine, especially since you should be doing this for a minimum of 25 sites. I recommend between 50 and 100. Think about how much time this takes. It’s almost mind numbing. So you would therefore think that I would immediately recommend that you outsource things like this. Well, that’s where you’d be WRONG…at least not to start. But why? Why am I suggesting that you do this yourself?

By doing this yourself, you actually learn the process and understand it. That way, if down the road you decide to outsource, you can tell the person exactly what you want done and how. Sometimes by leaving things in the hands of an the person you hire, you can end up getting banned from these sites because they end up doing nothing but spamming the bookmarking sites. That’s why, something like this, you want to be hands on…at least at the start.

Each aspect of SEO needs to be taken on a case by case basis. Some things are simple enough that they can be outsourced with very little chance of a screw up. But even those items should be done by you at first so that you understand how they work. This way, if the person you outsource to fouls things up, you’ll know.

Anyway, there you have it. Outsourcing is not a cut and dried proposition for SEO. But in any case, I do recommend that you learn to do it yourself FIRST.

It will save you a lot of grief down the road.

To YOUR Success

Steven Wagenheim

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