Search engine optimization was easy back in the 90's. You could use techniques like keyword stuffing to rise to the top. Those are now known as unethical methods, and would get your website banned now. In truth, SEO is an art form these days. It takes attention to detail, and lots of knowledge in order to get the job done right. That's why it is important to find a web development service providers and marketing company with good qualities such as using only ethical, white hat methods, and good communication. To begin locating a good SEO firm, first you should find out how much knowledge that they have.
Web development service providers - An experienced SEO expert will know about the following topics:
On-page elements such as anchor text, clean comment code (avoiding keyword stuffing), no follow links, meta tag elements, CSS and JavaScript file usage, page naming, alt text, and site maps to name a few.
Anchor text means the text that you see when you click on a link. For example, if your website is about dog grooming, then those keywords would be in the anchor text which is clickable as a link. Anchor text is good for search engine optimization because it tells the search spider what to look for on the following page. This is often why you will see keywords being used on a service page linking to the various company offerings. Comment code should be descriptive for development purposes. It should not be created for additional keyword placement opportunities. A comment code is not visible to a regular visitor of a website. One would have to view the source code of a web page in order to see HTML based comment code. Server driven PHP comment code however, wouldn't be displayed at all, and would not matter for SEO purposes.
Web development service providers - No follow links are links that are using the following HTML format: rel="no follow"
What a no follow tag aims to do is prevent a search engine from bleeding your Page Rank to a page you are linking to. In other words, it is basically a way of linking to another page or website without "associating" with it. Meta tag elements include the web page title, description, keywords, and other items. Back when search engines were created, they would simply take your title, description, and keywords for what you said they were. It made search engine ranking much easier. Now, search engines tend to take them into account, but will not necessarily use them in their listings. Instead, they will sometimes pull text from your web pages for their search results. Many search engine optimization firms will claim that Meta tags do not make a difference. That would be a false claim however, and certainly tells you that they may not be as knowledgeable as they think. Search engines still want to see Meta tags. They simply use them in their algorithm in a different way. If you do not include Meta tags, then the search engine will rely entirely on what you have on your actual page. But if you do include Meta tags, it would actually help you more than if you left them out. There is a catch however. Your Meta tags should actually match content which is on your web page by a good percentage of 80% or more.