I just got off the phone with a Realtor, one who in the past year paid approx. $10,000 to a firm that promised top ranking for 3 prime regional search terms, 12 months later his site is ranked #14 for the least competitive of his targeted keywords and nowhere to be found for the other two, so go figure why he may be sceptical.

Our primary approach and belief is that SEO should always be first approached from an On Site basis, and what we mean by this is that the focus should be on the various elements that comprise the local page, ranging from domain name to site copy, images, code structure internal linking structure and more.

The basis for this approach and belief is that when it comes to the search engines they all have one common goal which is to provide the most relevant search returns for the query entered, this is and always will be their primary objective - without it searchers will go elsewhere to find what they are looking for. The goal of onsite optimization is to clear the site of any elements that may prevent the site content from being indexed, and ensure that the content is comprised of and presented in a manner that the search engines will identify it as being the most authoritative on the target search terms.

This sounds complex, and it is, with no hard and fast formula or published algorithms from any of the major search engines the only true way to identify what works is through reverse engineering the current top ranking sites for the targeted search terms. We utilize a handful of manual and automated tools, some purchased proprietary, others freely available.

The offsite methods employed by a number of firms focus on driving traffic from external sources through the use of gateway sites,  multiple microsites, and various other means and while some firms have excellent results they are susceptible to changes in the search engine algorithms, being blacklisted (if using questionable techniques) their results can be short term or long term

The idea of SEO is in the name - Optimization - if you stop to think about it for half a second you will realize that the guy offering to provide you with incoming links, gateway pages, micro-sites etc isn't offering SEO at all he's offering to drive traffic to your site, and to artificially inflate your search engine return placements (SERP's) through external means, means that they can take away should you decide to discontinue their contract.

Optimizing a website is an involved process, it touches on every element of the site from the underlying code structure to the domain name, the text and image content, the meta descriptions, the outgoing and incoming links (including optimizing the link texts and URL's being linked too).

 The benefits of approaching your websites SEO from an on page perspective include:

• the results are not contingent on continued fees (although scheduled follow ups are recommended, they are less frequent and more affordable) this means your SEO service provider does not hold the ability to "turn off" your optimizations
• the site content is optimized inline with the search engines primary objective of providing the most authoritative website for the term being searched - this reduces risk of significant ranking drops when the search engines revise their algorithms which is a common side effect of off-site methods
• the sites usability is also addressed at the same time as the search engine needs, allowing for the use of techniques targeting increased time on site, pages visited and return visitors while lowering bounce rates (people leaving right away) allowing for increased lead capture