This is the first in a series of posts I will be doing here at Search Engine Journal that will help small business website owners better understand what SEO tasks they can safely tackle on their own and which are best left to the pros. Many in the SEO industry will try to tell you that there aren’t any optimization efforts that should be undertaken by a do-it-yourselfer, but that’s not entirely true.

In today’s economic climate most small business owners are looking to save every penny possible and many simply don’t have it within their budgets to higher one of the search marketing industry’s SEO heavy hitters. That doesn’t mean all is lost or that their sites should be left completely unoptimized. Not only that, any task that a small business owner can do themselves is one fewer task that they may pay an SEO firm $50 or more an hour to do for them.