There's a service on LinkedIn called Answers. Any LinkedIn user may post a question and get answers from other users; everybody's may give his own advice, suggest links or the name of a supposed expert on the topic proposed. What happens, as everywhere there's a free-not-moderated-everybody-get-in access (which is ok), is the signal-to-noise ratio is quite in favour of noise. For the very peculiarities of LinkedIn everybody's looking to stand out of the crowd, or to promote his own business. Which, again, is ok. As long as you have something intelligent, and honest, to say and you're really trying to give out a tip to somebody's that maybe really need some help.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION IS TOO EXPENSIVE for small office & home office’s websites. Any advices?

This is the question asked. A very interesting question, since it touches a common problem to lots of small/on a budget business in a global and more and more competitive digital business world. I don't know why, but SEO looks to me one of those fields where sharks are more common. I'm sure you know what I mean.

A lot of anwsers were given, most had something interesting to say, sometimes higlighting her experiences, often pitching their company, which I guess is part of the game. A few people, me among them, suggested the do-it-yourself approach. Advices are mainly on focusing on the content, the code, building up a blog, work on meta tags and keywords, and so on. Everything is just fine.

Untill someone said NO!, the do it your self approach is not worth it, in the end it's more costly than hiring a professional. No matter how much you read, and learn on your own, or find on shared resources, you have to hire a pro.

So, I said, let see who's the guy that's talking here. I mean, let's his company web site (obviously the link was provided). And guess what I found?

Professionals with years of education, experience and training

The web site in question is a table based layout, with images as menu items, built with Macromedia Dreamweaver, with no meta tags, silly web 0.9 (read 1999) stock images of charming models pointing at non existent slides and charts, and so on. The site doesn't, quite obviously, validate against W3 standards, it doesn't even pass the laugh test actually. I won't go to far with this, it wouldn't be fair. I don't want to be the one that shot at the Red Cross.

If you want to find it out for yourself, this is the link to the thread.

My last words: Beware of Vaporware.