With SEO (Search Engine Optimization) becoming such a huge factor for website success, it’s not surprising to see a lot of web hosts offering SEO services—for more money. I’ll admit I’ve never used any of these web hosting company SEO extra services. They very well may be effective. If you don’t have the time to work on SEO for your site and you have the money to spend, then it might be a viable option for you. However, you might be surprised to find out that many of the tasks these expert SEO services include are things you can do on your own. The tasks aren’t very difficult to set up and you can save a lot of money too.
Here are some significant SEO items that these premium services usually include that you can do on your own:
Keyword Research and Analysis
One of the first and most important steps in SEO is to determine which keywords you’re going to target for your site. There are some great tools like Wordtracker that you can pay to use. But if you don’t want to spend the extra money, you can easily use Google’s Keyword Tool to do some similar analysis.
Image Optimization
Basically you just need to make sure all of your images have titles, alt tags, and captions so the search engines can find them.
Analytics Configuration
Google Analytics is one of the best tools available. And, it’s free! Setting it up on your website is not very difficult at all. Just follow the step by step instructions on the GA site and you’ll be good to go.
Google and Bing Webmaster Tools
This is another task that you can easily do on your own. Google Webmaster Tools (as well as Bing) are a great help in determining how your website is behaving and performing online. Just as with Google Analytics, setting it up on your site is not difficult.
Sitemap Generation
These days there are plenty of free tools that you can find online to create sitemaps. For example, if you have a WordPress site, there are many plugins you can use to generate your sitemap.
