Are we paying our SEO to do nothing?

An attendee on one of my recent SEO courses wrote:

I attended yesterday’s course in Southampton, which was really informative. From the information you gave yesterday it has left me wondering one question. We are paying a company to optimise our website. From what I learnt yesterday pretty much most of what is needed to optimise a website fully is actually on the website. This company since changing to CMS have never asked for our details. From their website they claim ‘keywords’ are what are used to optimise a website but from yesterday course I found this to be untrue. So the question I am asking is are we paying for them to effectively do nothing?

From what you say it doesn’t sound like you are getting value for money. Google have written some really good guidelines on how to choose and employ a good SEO. The link is below. Read the section about “Secretive SEO Companies”. It’s about half way down the page.

References:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291