I’m no SEO expert, but I’ve been using a few free resources available on the web to help optimize my sites without going through a pricey consultation.  They certainly won’t give the custom tailored solution best for your website, but it’s a good first step and you might learn a few things.

Let me first take a step back and describe what SEO is.  It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and basically it’s just trying to get your site to show up as high as possible on google and other search engines.  The first three sites listed on google get the majority of the clicks and the number of clicks quickly falls off after that.

The services that I use, in no particular order, are:

http://www.reactionengine.com/
http://www.pearanalytics.com/
http://websitegrader.com/
http://www.webseoanalytics.com/free/seo-tools/web-seo-analysis.php
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

I’ll also list off a few rules of thumb I’ve learned about SEO.  However, SEO is a constantly changing beast so these suggestions may be a bit out of date.

• The URL is very important.  Make sure that there is some pertantant words in there to the content of the page itself as in: someurl.com/article_keywords.html  Don’t put too many keywords in the URL though, as it might be interpreted as spam.  Somewhere between 3-5 words is a good rule of thumb.
• Have one H1 tag on the page that quickly summarizes the page.  The important of H2 tags is debatable, but it can’t hurt and don’t worry about limiting those.
• The title tag should have your company name and a title pertinent to the content of the page.  The company name should show up second because when your result come up in google the user is more interested in your content, and might become confused if they see your company name and just skip over your listing.
• The importance of Meta Keywords is debatable, but they can’t hurt.  Don’t go crazy with keywords though.
• The Meta description doesn’t do much mpre then allow you to control what show comes up under your pages title in Google.  So either ignore this or write one for each specific page.
• bold, italicized, alt text, and image file names also roll into SEO.  I wouldn’t lose sleep over these, but it won’t hurt.
• Validating your page is good for many, various, other reasons, but is also good for SEO.  Validated pages are happy pages 🙂