If you are looking for economical search engine optimization services, have you considered doing some of the tasks yourself? This does not mean trying to take on all of the work by any means. SEO consultants have skills and knowledge that would take the average person a long time to learn, and there is always a benefit in hiring an expert to do what they are good at while you concentrate on your part of the business.

However, if you do have a little time and are interested in optimizing your website for better search engine rankings, and economical search engine optimization is important to you, a great place to start is with keywords.

Keywords are the phrases that people type into the search engines when they are looking for products, services and information online. For example, 'buy refrigerator' is a keyword. If you were a retail store accepting orders online for refrigerators, it would be great for your business to have the top spot on Google for that keyword.

But it is not just a question of sitting down and thinking of all of the words that people who want your products might type into the search box. That would be time consuming and not very effective. Instead, you can use keyword tools which will analyze data provided by Google to tell you the most commonly searched keywords in your niche.

Some of these keyword tools are free. One of the best is provided by Google themselves through their Adwords advertising program. You do not have to have an Adwords account to use it, although you will see more data if you do. You can find this tool here: http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

If I type 'refrigerator' and click on Search, the tool returns 100 keywords. The number of monthly searches covers a very wide range from over 9 million global monthly searches for 'refrigerator' to less than 400 for a particular brand. 'Buy refrigerator' is around the middle of the list with 49,500 global monthly searches.

That's a good number of searches but the competition is high. You can see this from the green bar on the left. If it is full, that means very high competition. If there is some white space, the competition is lower.

You can also drill down by entering one of your keywords to reveal another list of keywords related to that. When you are done, you can download the list.

You can also pay for keyword tools. These will do most of the clicking and sorting for you, working away in the background on your computer while you do other things. Even the most thorough and expensive of these tools will almost certainly be cheaper than paying an SEO consultant to prepare keyword lists for you. Therefore, a paid keyword tool could be an important investment for economical search engine optimization.

Keywords can be used in many ways. For example, if your website always used the phrase 'purchase refrigerator' but you discovered that 'buy refrigerator' was a better keyword with higher searches and/or less competition, you might decide to change some or most of the text on your website to use the better keyword.

You could also write new pages for your site based around other keywords such as compact refrigerator, frost free refrigerator, etc. Those pages would be optimized for those keywords. The idea would be to draw visitors to your site where they will see your products.

All of these things can be done by SEO professionals but in many cases, it can work out cheaper to do them yourself or have your staff do them. As most business owners know, reducing costs has the same effect on your bottom line as increasing profits. Therefore you might want to consider your options for economical search engine optimization.