SEO Crap
SEO is dead - at least much different from what it was known to be. But there are a plenty of consultants who market SEO, as if it is something that is hard to get right. Many organizations fall for it.
Search engines do not want to show web sites with some special SEO sauce to be on top. They want websites that people look for.
There were days when you could use neat little tricks (link farms, etc) to go higher on search results. This was possible because it is hard for an algorithm to figure out what’s better content. Now search engine algorithms have gotten better and they don’t fall for these tricks.
Yet I knew from experience that the real secret to SEO was not about tricks but about making your site the best it could be for your users while keeping the search engines in mind. It was true when I started doing SEO and it’s true now. Doing that always, always, always works to bring more targeted search engine traffic to your website. But, sadly, the tricks that the other SEO people were doing and writing about also worked, albeit temporarily.
So as long as your website
- has good content which people like,
- is accessible to internet users,
- uses proper HTML syntax, and
- is crawlable
you don’t have to worry about getting consultancy for SEO. If your web developer can’t get 2, 3 and 4 right, you should get a better developer; often it requires effort to get those wrong.
This document by Google is a pretty good guide about these stuff.