Website optimization is the backbone to a successful online business. But if you are just starting your business, the cost of hiring an SEO Expert can be a bit high for anyone's budget. Yes, you could hire one of those sites that guarantee results in a short time for almost nothing, but are they using acceptable techniques to get those results? Or are you risking your site being banned from Google? For most businesses there will be high competition, so you can't honestly expect to get first page results in just a short time. It takes work and a lot of patience.

So does that mean that you are stuck with paying a large amount for SEO services? Definitely not! There are things that you can do yourself that can reduce the amount of services you will need from an SEO Expert. Fewer services mean lower overall costs.

Organize:

You might not realize it, but an unorganized website can lengthen the time it takes for an SEO expert to optimize your website. This goes for both what the visitors see when they visit your website, and what you see when you are viewing the files of your website through your host provider. When a website is unorganized, it makes it harder for visitors and search engine spiders to find all your pages. It also makes optimizing the pages take longer because of having to search through the chaos of your files.

Small sites, generally 20 pages or less, should have just one menu, which includes all links. If you are using java script or flash for your menu, make sure that at the bottom of all your pages is text links for every page. This will help your visitors and search engines in finding all your pages. The files of your site should have a simple organization, all html pages in the root directory with images in a folder that is labeled descriptively (i.e. images, pictures, etc.).

Larger sites generally will have different areas for visitors, for example cars and trucks. Create a page (a sitemap) visitors can go to that has text links for all pages of your site organized by area. Your menu that visitor's use can be more area specific, but make sure that all areas are accessible to your visitors no matter which area they are currently browsing. So if your website is about vehicles, the main menu could list cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc, then when they are in each area, there is a second menu specifically for that area. The main menu will always be there, so visitors can easily switch between the areas when they choose. When organizing the files, you can treat each area of the site like a mini site, with each having its own image folder for pictures that are specific for that area. Your main pages of your website, like the home page, would still be placed in the root folder and with the main image folder for the design and logos for your site.

Images:

Something that most people overlook, including even some "SEO Experts" is the use of images. Images are great to have on websites, and they can really help with the SEO of your website. Though search engines can't "see" the images, they can read the names of the images and the alt tags associated with them. Your images should be named descriptively. So if you have a picture of a flower on your website, don't have it named picture1.jpg or even flower.jpg. Name it something like beautiful_red_rose.jpg. That way the search engine can "see" what the picture is about.

You also want to add an alt tag to the image so when someone hovers his or her mouse over the image, a description will show up. This is easily don't by adding alt="description" to the file path of the image. For example, in the coding of your page the code for inserting the image into the page is img src="picture/beautiful_red_rose.jpg". You would only need to change it to img src="picture/beautiful_red_rose.jpg" alt="description" to add the description tag.

Meta Tags:

Though most of the coding on the pages will need to be done by the SEO expert you hire, there is one Meta tag that you can add yourself, the Meta description tag. Adding this to the pages gives a head start on the SEO work. The person you hire will only need to adjust the description a little to make sure it includes your keywords, unless you already have ones that you are wanting to use. For each page of your website, you want to have a different description tag (Google doesn't like duplicate descriptions on websites). If you have a list of keywords and phrases you want to use already, make sure to include at least one of those at the beginning of each description.

If you have a large site, this can be very time consuming (which is why this helps cut the cost down on SEO, especially if the person you hire charges by the hour), but at least they only need to be 160 characters or less since most search engines only read the first 160. You can go to http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_meta_name.asp to see how to do the Meta description tag.

Get your site indexed:

If your site is already indexed, great! If not, this is actually easier then you would think. Though submitting your website to search engines helps, it could take weeks, or even months before your website gets indexed. The best, and fastest way to get indexed is by finding a website that gets browsed often by search engines and getting a link placed on that site. Blog sites are great for this as long as they don't use the nofollow tags. A very good site for finding these blogs is http://www.followlist.com. Browse through the categories and find blog sites that are related to yours and start posting some comments. Make sure that you put your website address on the line for it on the comment form so Google can find your website the next time it re-indexes the page your commenting on. Before you know it, your site will start being indexed by Google and you possibly could even gain a PR point or two. Having your website indexed before hiring an SEO Expert helps since the person you hired won't have to wait as long to see how your site is ranking from the work they are doing.

If you are serious about saving money, these four tasks can greatly help your budget. But they do take time; so don't expect to be able to finish these quickly.