Be on the lookout for web design companies that claim to “search engine optimize” your website while proferring catch phrases that may sound foreign or complex to you. Some will claim to optimize your meta tags or have Google analytics installed. Others will submit your websites to the top search engines “Google, Yahoo, and MSN.” This is all peripheral stuff. By that I mean, yes these are some things you can do that are related to SEO in a sense, but they really offer little in the way of moving your website up in the search engine rankings. Meta tags can be added to your website in a matter of seconds. That said, the usefulness of meta tags is considered very weak according to many SEO experts and certainly doesn’t contain anymore than 1% of your SEO juice. Submitting your website is something you can do in a matter of seconds as well. Just type in “submit my site” into your search engine of choice and fill in your URL and that’s done. Of course, you could always just wait and 9 times out of 10, it will happen naturally. Google Analytics is nothing more than a free traffic tracker that tells you how many visitors you get and where they came from. There is a little more to it, but that’s the essential relevance. This can be installed in 3-4 minutes if you have a Google account.
These items don’t get to the heart of SEO. If a website is coming out with these items right off the bat chances are they don’t know what the hell they are doing as far as search engine optimization goes and they only want to charge you more for doing a couple of minute operations.