I am owning a small consultancy firm, and I have a computer programmer in-house here and he's not too busy. Could I ask him to do our SEO instead of hiring Rank for $ales.com?

Trusting your SEO to a person that has no previous experience in the professional optimization of a corporate web site is a risky proposition at best. Also, using a do-it-yourself SEO software is an inexpensive approach to search engine positioning. This type of arrangement typically provides you with some limited tools to carry out certain basic functions of search engine optimization and positioning initiatives in-house. However, this option requires an internal "expert" to carry out the search engine positioning and optimization software. One major downside to this is that this option is likely to provide very minimal results at best. The whole success of this strategy is limited to the efficiency, the knowledge and the overall effectiveness of your in-house practitioner.

Furthermore, if that in-house person happens to leave your company, your search engine optimization program will end abruptly and without warning. In such case, you must start all over from the beginning. Additionally, a comprehensive search engine optimization strategy requires a full understanding of all major search engines and their algorithms, plus that person needs a lot of expertise and in-depth research capabilities that is very difficult to achieve in-house, if not impossible. It takes years to become a good search engine optimization professional, plus it takes all the specialized tools and complex processes.