Does SEO cost money?

This is a question that appears in this forum commonly, and it's completely relative.

For example, I have two activities: 1. that I earn ~$15 per hour and can work any amount of hours I want and 2. all the spare time in the day where I can allocate my hours however I want
So technically If I spend 3 hours link building, writing some high quality content or just editing my sites to look good to the eyes of google, I'm just not earning 3*$15 = $45 with the other activity
But also I play some videogames everyday for 1 - 1.5 hours... Am I missing $20 per day for doing such?
It's relative as I say.

Not everyone has the opportunity I have to work when I want. Some can make a lot more, but they are attached to closed projects with a beginning and an ending for $100 per hour, and others have a 8/5 job that earn a fixed $100 per day.
So is extremely difficult to estimate the COST OF OPPORTUNITY

Conclusion: Does SEO cost money? With money you can invest your time in other topics while leaving others do the SEO for you (or buying expensive expired domains in auctions). Without money, you could do a lot of SEO activities technically for free that can profit in the future.

underachieved said:

But for most cases I do believe you need external services, or tools that can provide these services.

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And we are on a Black Hat internet marketing website, so I totally understand if everyone wants to use external tools and services to speed up the process, or hire someone with more expertise in an area, or take advantage of weaknesses in Googles algorithm to get their websites ranked higher. That was my only point is that I see so many people who think money is the answer to SEO, without looking at the core meaning of SEO and really thinking about SEO in a different way besides just "what will boost me in the ranks the fastest and easiest."

Lets just say that I want to rank my website for any particular keyword. In order to do that, first I need to determine how difficult will it be to rank for that keyword. In order to do that, I'll will have to check the difficulty score of that keyword by subscribing for a paid service like kwfinder. Sure, these services do provide a free trial but assuming its not a one time deal for you, you will eventually have to pay to use these services to find out about things like, keyword difficulty, competitors links, DA/PA/TF/OBL etc. of the websites you're willing to create the backlinks on.
Moving on to the next part, "the content" which you can obviously get it done for free (if you can write). Next, suppose you need a huge list of hq websites with good MOZ/Majestic/Ahrefs metrics (as these are the most popular ones) so that you could add your backlinks there, do you really believe that you can do it manually? In order to make the things x1000 faster, you need tools like scrapebox along with the proxies ( as you wouldn't want the search engines to blacklist you original ips). Yes you can find free proxies to use, but they don't last more than a few hours and are terribly slow. After you have that HUGE list of websites, how do you plan to filter out the good stuff and junk without using the paid services? :/

Lets say you don't want the create the type of links mentioned above. You are willing to create pbn links or guest posting on other hq websites. Anyone familiar with SEO would know how much it costs to manage a pbn. As for the guest posting on niche relevant websites, you may either ask them to add your content for free (which doesn't work very often) or you can pay them to post your article along with your link. Since you don't want to spend even a single dollar on any of these things I'm assuming that you'll contact the website owners to post your article on their website for free. Well, even then, how would you determine that their website is worth having a backlink on.

Moving on further, lets say you want to have some social bookmarks like fb shares, twitter retweets, pinterest repins etc. How would you plan to create those without managing a number of accounts on the same platform - *without using proxies*.

These are just a few examples but I hope you got the point.

So, asking "Is it possible to do SEO for free" is like asking "can you travel through the world without spending a buck on transport cost". The answer is YES in theory but its not practical.

USA282 said:

Lets just say that I want to rank my website for any particular keyword. In order to do that, first I need to determine how difficult will it be to rank for that keyword. In order to do that, I'll will have to check the difficulty score of that keyword by subscribing for a paid service like kwfinder.

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This immediately is just wrong. First, ranking your website higher in search results for a particular keyword is not SEO. Second, if you want to rank for a keyword, why do you need to check the difficulty? The idea that it is mandatory to do keyword research in order to do SEO, or even to rank for a keyword, is just insane to me. I don't understand where you guys are coming up with these ideas. Then you jump into black hat link building as if that's the only logical next step in search engine optimization. Then you want us to believe that the only way to get social media interactions is by managing multiple accounts. Really? What about actually creating good content that is worth people sharing for you? It doesn't seem like you considered creating good worthwhile and valuable content as even an option.

SocialManager said:

This immediately is just wrong. First, ranking your website higher in search results for a particular keyword is not SEO. Second, if you want to rank for a keyword, why do you need to check the difficulty? The idea that it is mandatory to do keyword research in order to do SEO, or even to rank for a keyword, is just insane to me. I don't understand where you guys are coming up with these ideas. Then you jump into black hat link building as if that's the only logical next step in search engine optimization. Then you want us to believe that the only way to get social media interactions is by managing multiple accounts. Really? What about actually creating good content that is worth people sharing for you? It doesn't seem like you considered creating good worthwhile and valuable content as even an option.

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Since you claim to know so much about SEO, I'm really curious to know how you do it. Can you list down your steps?

Too lazy to Quote.. You can try to sound smart a** as much you could, talk philosophy as much want, but the clear result, you answer doesn't benefit the OP sh***

The OP is clearly asking, Does he has to pay money to rank in search engines and make earn from it! If you can't understand this simple question, then you need immediate help!

And the simple Answer is : YES ! If you are entering the f**** SEO game, you need to pay money and a good chunk of it to see any result!

We are answering the OP, not preparing an academic master degree about the definition of SEO.

And the more you answer, the more clueless you appear.. it clearly shows you have never ranked a worthwhile keyword in your life.

So, to cut the crap and save both of our time, Why don't you share a screen shot of your ranking for a keyword which brings good traffic from google, earns you money, and didn't build backlinks for?

And if you are not doing SEO to rank higher (WTF!), then please enlighten us, why exactly are you doing SEO?

KHer0 said:

Too lazy to Quote.. You can try to sound smart a** as much you could, talk philosophy as much want, but the clear result, you answer doesn't benefit the OP sh***

The OP is clearly asking, Does he has to pay money to rank in search engines and make earn from it! If you can't understand this simple question, then you need immediate help!

And the simple Answer is : YES ! If you are entering the f**** SEO game, you need to pay money and a good chunk of it to see any result!

We are answering the OP, not preparing an academic master degree about the definition of SEO.

And the more you answer, the more clueless you appear.. it clearly shows you have never ranked a worthwhile keyword in your life.

So, to cut the crap and save both of our time, Why don't you share a screen shot of your ranking for a keyword which brings good traffic from google, earns you money, and didn't build backlinks for?

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Totally agree with you

USA282 said:

Since you claim to know so much about SEO, I'm really curious to know how you do it. Can you list down your steps?

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I don't claim to know "so much about SEO." I am just talking about the extreme basics of SEO. That's why I get so frustrated here. Optimizing your website for user experience, submitting sitemaps to search engines, creating high quality original content that users want to link to and share, thinking about why users should visit my website over another website and implementing strategies related to content and user experience to reflect that, adding relevant tags to images and adding videos and images wherever they can add value to a page or post, linking out to relevant authority websites when such links add value to the user and the page, linking to other relevant pages on the same website, maintaining the website on a fast and stable host, regularly updating content to ensure it is relevant, regularly adding new content, creating and maintaining active social media accounts and sharing content from the site on a regular basis, adding contact pages with legitimate contact information (the more the better), adding author pages with biographies, adding terms of service and privacy policy pages, monitoring Google webmaster tools for errors like broken links and duplicate content issues. These are just a few steps of optimizing your website for search engines, especially Google.

KHer0 said:

Too lazy to Quote.. You can try to sound smart a** as much you could, talk philosophy as much want, but the clear result, you answer doesn't benefit the OP sh***

The OP is clearly asking, Does he has to pay money to rank in search engines and make earn from it! If you can't understand this simple question, then you need immediate help!

And the simple Answer is : YES ! If you are entering the f**** SEO game, you need to pay money and a good chunk of it to see any result!

We are answering the OP, not preparing an academic master degree about the definition of SEO.

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WRONG. OP created this post because of a discussion we were having in a different thread about whether you actually need to spend money to do SEO. So maybe you shouldn't come in here talking shit acting like you know what you are talking about when you are the one who is clearly clueless.

I think if we have the knowledge then SEO is free of cost. But if we dont know how to do SEO, then we have to take classes or learn from someone or hire the SEO service, and in today's world, no one will give anything free of cost.

So answers are both, Yes and No, and choice is yours.

SocialManager said:

I don't claim to know "so much about SEO." I am just talking about the extreme basics of SEO. That's why I get so frustrated here. Optimizing your website for user experience, submitting sitemaps to search engines, creating high quality original content that users want to link to and share, thinking about why users should visit my website over another website and implementing strategies related to content and user experience to reflect that, adding relevant tags to images and adding videos and images wherever they can add value to a page or post, linking out to relevant authority websites when such links add value to the user and the page, linking to other relevant pages on the same website, maintaining the website on a fast and stable host, regularly updating content to ensure it is relevant, regularly adding new content, creating and maintaining active social media accounts and sharing content from the site on a regular basis, adding contact pages with legitimate contact information (the more the better), adding author pages with biographies, adding terms of service and privacy policy pages, monitoring Google webmaster tools for errors like broken links and duplicate content issues. These are just a few steps of optimizing your website for search engines, especially Google.

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So basically you think that on-page optimization alone will help you in achieving good rankings on search engines. You're a joke if that's the strategy you were talking about yesterday "

SocialManager said:

This is just wrong. There don't need to be ANY expenses related to SEO. Too many guys are only educated by gurus trying to sell them stuff or they only know about blackhat SEO and the BHW marketplace. There is enough stuff you can do for FREE to rank ANY website #1 for ANY keyword. What do you think you need to pay for?

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USA282 said:

So basically you think that on-page optimization alone will help you in achieving good rankings on search engines. You're a joke if that's the strategy you were talking about yesterday "

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I mean, you are just denying fact. Of course on-page optimization alone will help you in achieving good rankings in search engines. I don't know what else to say, besides you are straight up denying facts. Literally every SEO expert in the world agrees that on-page SEO alone will help you in achieving good rankings on search engines.

Let me challenge you guys to do some real thinking. If Wikipedia didn't exist until today, and just popped online with all of the information it contains, do you genuinely believe that Google wouldn't rank it highly for any keywords? Beyond that, do you think that users wouldn't find it and link to it naturally? Do you think Wikipedia only exists as an authority website because they spent money on private blog network links and fake Twitter likes? Because that is the implication of your arguments.

Who da Fck told you that SEO can be done for free.
People are paying thousands of dollars to get #1 rank l.

Bigdadddy said:

Who da Fck told you that SEO can be done for free.
People are paying thousands of dollars to get #1 rank l.

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I told him he can do SEO for free. People are paying thousands of dollars for sex, you can't get it for free? Sad for you, but many people get the best for free. Lots of people rank #1 spending no money. This is a fact.

Doing some of the SEO will cost , but at the end of the day it all depends on your competition.

To start with no, to start ranking yes

To build a site that earns $100/month - no/very little
To build a site that earns $1000/month - moderate
To build a site that earns $10000/month - high/very high

You can invest your time to save money on SEO but the quality of work will not be that good.

like everything in life is either time or money

do you believe in start from the zero?
of course, it's just the BIG LIE that they pin on your head the truth is that you need to invest money to get money so for SEO it's an investment bro

SocialManager said:

I told him he can do SEO for free. People are paying thousands of dollars for sex, you can't get it for free? Sad for you, but many people get the best for free. Lots of people rank #1 spending no money. This is a fact.

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Sorry but I would like to see the results you achieve d with with so called FREE SEO

Btw I have invested $500-800 into this and have made $5k+

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