Hello Sandra,

I think you have to be careful of who you choose to do your website. Some SEO companies claim to guarantee you a number one position in top search engines etc, but these number one positions may not necessarily be on your most important website keywords. Getting a number one position or top ten position for that matter on keywords that are rarely used to search for your products or services are not going to give you a great deal of extra traffic.

Also be careful of SEO's that "Spam" search engines by creating many doorway pages leading to your website. Once a search engine realises you're using doorway pages you're likely to receive a URL ban in that search engine.

So if you're going to use an SEO it's best to ask them exactly how they are going to do it.
Additionally - don't let them change your website URL's unnecessarily as all these pages that are already indexed will be lost and send your potential customers to 404 error pages - web page not found.

So while SEO can be helpful there is definitely a right and wrong way of going about it.

I have an interesting article on SEO on my website written by David Wallace of SearchRank, called Spamming Techniques That You Will Want To Avoid!. This article covers some of the things that shouldn't be done.

Additionally there are quite a few other articles written on SEO.

Hope this helps.

Sandra, how competitive are your keywords?

If they're not very competitive, doing some basic SEO yourself could well be enough.

Check out this website, along with others such as www.seochat.com, www.seo-guy.com/forum/, and www.seotown.com

Many SEO experts visit those forums, and you'll be sure to get lots of tips. What I would recommend doing is checking out those sites and learning from what you read. Try to do some SEO yourself. The best people to help you SEO your site are top posters from those big SEO forums - people who have a lot of knowledge that they're willing to share - seo techniques are no big secret. They're just time consuming and do take know-how and expertise - an SEO can act as a business advisor of sorts.

many times people think seo is all they need, but it helps to also work hard to establish brand.

seo services do not work well for every business model but they work well for most if you find the right person

If your reasonably 'techie' and have the time to dedicate , then I think you can do it yourself, but you have to follow the rules and be patient. Much of the guidance you need you can find in the Internet Marketing forum here

Otherwise let the experts handle it and you stick to what your good at, eg:sales, makrketing etc etc

Sandra This depends on the SEO but I can tell you one thing for sure absoulutly sure.

If they make any claims to have secret technology or wont flat out tell you everything they are going to do they are proabably a black hat seo.

Make sure to shop around, if you like call me and I would be happy to consult with you at no charge to you, what you should be looking for is someone who will not allow you to cut a corner in the or do anything un-ethical.

Depending on your own ambition -- there's plenty that you can learn and do yourself as well, so you don't have to pay the costs. I think SEO is great -- I've seen really good results after doing some SEO to my site and I'm not even where I want to be yet! So yes, I think it's worth it -- but I think that depending on how savvy you yourself are, you can do much of it yourself.