Like to do it yourself? No one knows your business better than you do - follow these notes in building your site for truly optimized site:
Keyword Research
Before starting any web site project, research should be done on what keywords your users are using to search for your product or service. Search Engine Optimization without research is still optimization, but it is optimization for the wrong target audience. Even just a few minutes of research can yield far better results than you have today.
Some simple methods:
Brainstorming
No one but you knows your industry, web site, company, customers, or content objectives as in depth as you do. Take some time to think about what your customers would search for when looking for the content on your site.
Competitive Analysis
Look at your competitors web sites. What does their content look like? What phrases and words jump off the page when you are browsing their web site?
Look at your competitors' source code. Right click, view source. What keywords or other content to do they have in their META tags?
Keyword Research Tools
These tools are for expanding your keyword lists. Then you can also use them to go through your long lists and slim them down to a more usable size.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
WordTracker Keyword Tool
SEOBook Keyword Tool
When selecting keywords, you will need to consider three primary factors: volume, relevance and difficulty.
Volume - how many searches a term gets.
Relevance - if it isn't a good match for your site's content, you won't rank where you want to.
Difficulty - some words are just plain difficult to rank for. Be realistic about your keyword target goals.
Meta Data, Titles and Robots
Meta Description - this is your opportunity to convince the searcher to click the link for your site in the search results. Many users will decide which page to visit because of the title and description listed in the search results. The max length here is 155 characters (including spaces).
Meta Keywords - the major search engines are no longer looking at keywords in their search algorithms. Yahoo is the only engine that even bothers indexing these keywords, but they don't even use them in their ranking methods. As they are no longer considered by the engines, it is not important to enter keywords. You would enter keywords for individual pages mostly only if your internal site search uses meta keywords in returning search results. We don't generally recommend using meta keywords, but some researchers still consider it a best practice. If used, there should be 1-8 words per page.
Page Title - Put your keywords here. Currently, the title is one of the best places to use keywords. Be sure to put together a descriptive title using your main keywords that your searchers will find engaging, this is not just for the search engines. Avoid just listing keywords - this can be a sign of spamming to the search engines. The max length here is 65 characters (including spaces).
Alt Text - Be descriptive. Describe your image using your keywords. This helps images show in search results, as well as helps the search engines see that your images are in fact relevant to your content.
Meta Robots - These are just instructions telling the search engines' bots how to work with your page. <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW, NOARCHIVE, NOODP">
Headline, Header Tags (H1, H2, and H3 tags) - These mark the section headings on your site as being important. They are important, as they tell your users and the search engines what the section is all about. H1 tags are the most important. H1 should only be used once per page - it is for the most important headline, informing users what the page is about. H2 is more important than H3, and both can be used multiple times on a page for subsection titles and headlines.
Content
Content Format - Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and HTML to write your web pages. Search engines are often unable to read the text in JavaScript, AJAX and Flash content. Some search engines have made claims they are able to read text in JavaScript and Flash now, but best practice is still to write your content using HTML/CSS. Flash or JavaScript can be good elements of a web page, enhancing the content, but not replacing the content. As for images, search engines have no way of reading text in them either, so writing text using images should be avoided as well. Lastly avoid using tables or frames as they may cause issues for the search engines in crawling your site.
Copy - Good content is the most important thing you can do for your page. Having good content means people will be more likely to link to you, causing the search engines to see more value in your page. Use your keywords throughout the entire body of the web page. Remember though, it is very important to use your keywords in the first few sentences of the page. Much testing has been done, but none have shown any higher results for higher keyword density on a page. So make sure you use them, but there is no ratio that must be achieved.
Writing for Search Engines - No, you aren't really writing for the search engine. You are writing for your visitors, your customers. Target your customer first, and the search engine second. Always target a few keywords per page, using any more will end up looking like spam. Looking like spam is what you want to avoid. Don't repeat keywords if it can't be done naturally, and don't put in keywords that don't make any sense, or would mess with relavance. Rememember that search engines see singular and plural versions of words as completely different from each other. Try using words that are similar to your keywords, even direct synonyms. This will help the search engine to see what your words are related to and will improve your relevance. And of course make sure to use the keywords that are in your page title, URL, Header tags and alt text.