Are SEO firms bull-plop?

dudes excuse my ignorance what is SEO.
I'm  have kinda had web contract work thrust upon me.
thanks

I agree with Leafs_Fan in that if you do not want to take the time or have no interest in doing optimization yourself seo is a viable solution. There are many things to look at when choosing company, as there seems to be an unreal amount of bad apples out there. I would start by searching for term search engine optimization on Google and going from there. If a company can not get listed high for there own keywords, they most likely are not going to do well for your site. Also be leary of anyone promising you to be #1 foryour keyword, there is no way this can be guaranteed as there are too many varibles, the basic goal is to help you choose appropriate keywords and optimize them for you using a variety of tactics which will not get you banned, i.e. incomeing links, title text, link anchor test, keyword density etc... Any company that has any hidden text, sets up free for all links and other discouraged methods avoid.

I would reccomend taking some time to learn about how everything works and do it yourself. It is much more rewarding and you will not have to rely on someone elses choices. You can find help at so many forums and can ask questions here.

For minor_prophet, seo is "search engine optimization" meaning optimizing a site to rank well in search engines. Basically involves in finding and choosing keywords that are searched for often and yet low competition (sometimes) and optimizing your site to show up well for those keywords.

I agree with Leaf_Fan also, I actaully took the time out and learned SEO and I am glad I did because I was able to get one of the sites that my partner did into a number three spot in aol search under an important keyword, like bike riding the more you do it the better you get. You just cann't do one or two and that's it. One thing some people don't realize that you sometimes have to submit month after month like clock work if not you could lose your spot. I notice that some sites say guarentee listing I say that they are the search engines getting suckers into paying more then they should. Listen there is plenty of material to read out there on the net about SEO and one of my Favrotie books is 101 way to promote your website. I think doing it yourself is the greatest reward to know that your hard work was not just for nothing

Okay, I'm with you guys on what you've said so far right. Pretty logical, makes sense. I want to cover all the bases on this question that I can, so I'm doubling the points and adding another part to the question:

What elements constitute a complete SEO of a site? Kaitech, you mentioned repeated submits to certain search engines . . . which brings up the question, which search engines are actually relevant? I mentioned a couple of the optimization points I regularly institute on my client sites: descriptive title tags, useful content in the first couple of 'grafs . . . so what else is there?

Thanks,
Joe

You know what That is a very good question, especially since the search enigne  landscape is changing. What engines are relevant? Hmmmmm....... I honestly would not be able to answer that since you may different views on that question.

MSN is important
Google is important probably more then MSN
Yahoo is important
DMOZ is important but tricky to get listed but once listed aol seaarch will pick it up so will the following, Hotbot, Lycos, Ask Jeeve. I personally feel that this are the major ones that should be submitted too.
It seems nowadays that link popularity is just as if not a bigger factor in getting high ranks.

What you are already doing for your pages is fine, I do similar meta tags and all. Also adding the alt text for the images helps, adding a robots.txt file in the server telling what pages to crawl and what not to of course, heading tags for each main topic in the page.
I also insert a tag telling a engines robot how often to come back and crawl usually 14 days
Each person will be different you have to find what work for you.

Thanks, Kaitech, I agree with you here. I'll be giving you some of the points for your answer, and adding / awarding 100 points for everybody else who chimes in with their method and thoughts ( providing it brings something new to the table ).

-Joe

Thanks :)

Basically, in my experience linkage is a very important issue, including internal links - google cares a lot about what pages link to you and what *words* are used to link to you. Therefore, if a bunch of site related to golf clubs use the term "golf clubs" to link to you, you will have a boost in ranking in "golf clubs"

Title and content count a lot as well - meta-tags don't.

Any other thoughts out there?