We started 4 Walls, our online apartment guide business, about 4.5 years ago on an extremely tight leash. We had about $5000 in capital, mostly in the form of credit card debt, to start the business. Needless to say, there was no money for anything that wasn’t absolutely essential.

Since we were starting a web business, we knew that developing traffic to our site was absolutely critical to our success. I began reading every book, website and newsletter I could find to figure out how to build website traffic. I quickly concluded that it was going to be pretty easy to put a website in place, but a lot of work to get it “right.”

In 2002, it was common for companies specializing in search engine marketing to send email-based solicitations that offered you a “free evaluation” of your website and ways to improve your search engine positioning. Of course, this evaluation was really a proposal which pointed out the mistakes you were making and offered the company's services to help your achieve better rankings.

Knowing all of this, I bit and asked one of these companies to do a “free evaluation.”

By the time I got the report back, I was a little farther down the learning curve. Admittedly, I was in no way an expert, but I knew that if I invested myself in learning more about search engine optimization, I could do better job then the company.

Still hoping to find a way to outsource this work, I started trying to figure out who were the “best of breed” providers. It was pretty easy to find them - they were the companies and people writing all the SEO books, and speaking at SEO conferences. However, when I began making inquiries, I discovered they were beyond what I could afford – a couple of hundred dollars an hour, not to mention the significant minimums.

At this point, I decided to learn as much as I could about SEO and do it myself. I became the SEO expert and my partner became the Pay Per Click guru.

In our case it wasn’t hard to justify this decision, even if money were no object. After all, we were an Internet-based company that was going to live or die based on our traffic results, so developing the know-how and core competencies to generate web traffic was quite reasonable.

We dove in and four years later we have multiple sites with impressive search engine rankings. This wouldn’t have happened, however, without a lot of effort.

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