Many newbie internet marketers think that they can do their own SEO by doing a lot of keyword research and building link popularity. The truth is, it’s just not possible to do this on your own. Search engine optimization doesn’t work the way you think it does. That’s why it’s always good to pay a little fee to someone who knows how to optimize for the search engines.

How do search engines work? They don’t just look at the content of a page and judge how important it is to the user intent. They look at the keywords used and the amount of competition that page has with other pages of the same topic. They then rank the pages on an arbitrary system called “spiders” or “web spiders”. Keyword intent and volume dictate where you rank in search results.

So if search results are primarily based on these two factors, how do they make their decisions? Well, they base their decisions on a couple of factors: total link popularity, importance of keywords and relevance of content to a user’s intent. These three things are partly based on your current ranking. And that’s where SEO by yourself can help you.

Let’s look at some more details on how web pages are ranked: search engine behavior shows different behavior depending on the user’s intent. If a user is browsing for a product or service that closely relate to your website’s content (i.e. if your website sells chocolate, then you probably have a blog or similar website where you can talk about food, recipes etc.) then the search engine behavior will usually show more relevance to your web pages based on your search intent. Your website, therefore, should contain relevant content that gets people’s search intent.

However, this is not always the case. If your website is just a sales page or a website selling products, then your search intent is not necessarily tied to your particular products. Instead, the user experience in general with your site is what drives relevance. Therefore, in this scenario, a lot of the relevancy algorithms of SEO are more concerned with the user experience and relevance, rather than the search engine optimization. And so in situations where a simple user experience optimization can drive more traffic to your site than a fancy, complicated backlinking campaign, then you can optimize for this and still see good results in terms of increased ranking and traffic.

These two ranking factors – total link popularity and importance of keywords – form the core of most successful and popular SEO campaigns today. So even if you want to do SEO by yourself, you’ll still benefit from SEO by adding some organic search result pages. You just need to make sure you do it right. So choose the specific area that you’re going to work on and stick to it.