Now let's look at pro's and con's of doing it yourself.

Pro's

- You will be saving yourself cash outlay involved in hiring an outside firm (obviously one of biggest benefits). - Everything you do to promote your site is yours. It does not belong to someone else. You have complete control. - Once you learn how search engine optimization works, you can create as many online businesses as you wish and be able to promote all of them without relying on, or paying, a third party. Con's

- An initial learning curve. It will take a while to get a good grasp of what you are doing and to begin to understand game we call search engine optimization. - If your in a competitive market, a good deal of your time could be spent promoting and optimizing your site.

- Your results may never be as good as if you hired a top-notch firm. Well, there you have it. A good number of pro's and con's involved in both avenues. When you get down to it, deciding whether to outsource your optimization needs, or keep it in house, really boils down to what you have more of...time, or money. If you have lots of money but little time, then hire a good firm. If you have lots of time but little funds, then you will be better off doing work yourself.

If you decide to hire an optimization firm, be cautious with who you choose. Ask for testimonials from past clients. Find out if they offer any type of a guarantee. Do some research. Whatever you do, DON'T go on who is cheapest. This is your success we're talking about.

If you decide to do it yourself, there are also some things you should do. The best thing you can do for yourself is to do some research on search engine optimization. Find someone who has been doing it a while and see if you can learn anything from them. Read books on subject (electronic or printed). Visit newsgroups and forums on search engines. If you spend some time learning about how search engines work and what they look for when ranking pages, you will quickly begin to understand what it takes to make a top ranking page.

Further questions arise: will meta tags following Dublin Convention ("D.C. tags") be counted in or not? And what about HTTP-EQUIV tags? Would you really bet ranch that TITLE tags in tables, forms or DIV elements will be ignored? Etc., etc.

Another fundamental factor generating massive fuzziness left, right and center, is issue of semantic delimiters: what's a "word" and what isn't? Determing a lexical unity (aka a "word") by punctuation is a common though pretty low tech method which may lead to some rather unexpected results.

Say you are featuring an article by an author named "John Doe" who happens to sport a master's degree in arts, commonly abbreviated as "M.A.". While most algorithms will correctly count "John" and "Doe" as separate words, "M.A." string is quite another story. Some algorithms will actually count this for two words ("M" and "A") because of period (dot) is considered a delimiter - whereas others (surprise!) will not. But how would you know which search engines are handling it in which way? Answer: you don't, and that's exactly where problems start.

The only feasible approach to master this predicament is trial and error. The typical beginner's inquiry "What's best keyword density for AltaVista?", understandable and basically rational as it may be, is best answered with fairly frustrating but ultimately precise: "It all depends - your mileage may vary." It is only by experimenting with keyword densities under standardized, comparable conditions yourself that you will be able to come to significant and viable conclusions.

To get going, here are some links to pertinent programs that will help you determine (and, in one case, even generate) keyword densities.

KeyWord Density Analyzer (KDA) ------------------------------ An all time classic of client based keyword density software is Roberto Grassi's powerful KeyWord Density Analyzer (KDA). It is immensely configurable and offers a fully featured free evaluation version for download. Find it here: < http://www.grsoftware.net/grkda.html > (Expect to pay appr. $99 for registered version.)

Concordance ----------- Concordance is a powerful client based text analysis tool for making word lists and concordances from electronic texts. A trial version can be downloaded here: < http://www.rjcw.freeserve.co.uk/features.htm > (Expect to pay appr. $89 for registered version.)

fantomas keyMixer(TM) --------------------- Our own fantomas keyMixer(TM) is world's first automatic keyword density generator, enabling you to create web pages with ultra precise densities to first decimal digit. Read more about this server based Perl/CGI application here: < http://fantomaster.com/fakmixer0.html > (Expect to pay appr. $99 for registered version.)