It often seems easier to pay someone else to do the ugly things on our site, and SEO is one of the uglier things we need to do - it can be very tedious, not to mention slow, to fix a site for good search engine placement. But hopefully you don't hire someone who messes up your site rather than improves it, like what happened to Kathryn. Sometimes it's just better to bite the bullet and do it ourselves.
My horror story began when I hired my Host to also do the SEO for my site not long after I launched it on 3/29/07. They said it would take at least a month before what they did would even begin to have results, so I didn't think about it during that time. Kept working. After more than a month (beginning of May), I went to Google and typed the title of my Web site to see if it came up, and to my amazement, it did. I was ecstatic - it was on the 3rd page in the top 100! I clicked on the link and up came a page that had that old-fashioned no-color university-style site, without any CSS (which I had worked so hard to do), and no images. It was just ASCI text.
I called my Host to ask what they had done. They had pointed my site to another domain name I own with them, but that has no site yet! So, they told me they would fix it...but that it would take at least another month to see the results. Meanwhile, I was paying them to do this and they did not offer yet to reimburse me for their mistake. I waited.
After more than a month again (July), I checked again on Yahoo. This time I got a page "This page is under construction" and nothing came up. Stress struck! I called the Host again, and this time they said another month. So, I cancelled their SEO and they did give me a refund for a total of 3 months for not helping my site, but damaging it instead. I doubt very much if you get brownie points when your site is pointing to something really ugly that doesn't work, or doesn't even go to a functioning site!
I began to do my own SEO through metatags and a bunch of other nice little things I learned through Jennifer at About.com, and now I find that without paying anyone - I am in the top 100 sites for 4 of the categories of my site on Google! I am always thanking Jennifer, but again, I have to really commend you for always telling people how to do things so that it is easy!
