Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be divided into two main parts. There is the so called on-page optimization and on the other hand there is off-page optimization. Off-page optimization includes linkbuilding and getting trust trough word of mouth. The latter is often poorly ,or not at all, implemented which harms your site and you loose a good share of potential customers and/or readers. But first, before even trying to do off-page optimization, you must have a fully optimized website or blog. This includes highlighting your main keyphrases, deploying proper meta tags and have standard compliant code. Always keep in mind that categorization is key when doing proper on-page optimization. This begins already at the planing stage when creating your new website. The linking structure should categorize your site in the main topics you are going to cover. You should always set the pagetitle appropriate to the page content and use the same title tag in the H1 headline tag. Bolden most occurences (common sense applies here!) of the keywords you target trough the title (and the linking of your site trough categorization). Remember, its all about staying on topic trough every part of the site. So the linking tells google what to expect on the following site, which then uses the title accordingly to the link anchor and the content then covers exactly that topic. The more factors you can add that show the search engine the topic the better you will rank. This part is about off-page search engine optimization trough quality backlinks. Important for a good and natural ranking in the search engine result pages are backlinks from other websites because those links are like a personal rating from other webmasters. Dont run out now and post your link anywhere! You should however keep in mind that not every backlink is a good backlink. Because today a search engine can categorize every single page and knows what topic it is about, so backlinks from totally different websites could even be a backshot to your own website. Most of the time it is a backlink after all and gets you some traffic, but dont bet on that one. To get the most out of a backlink you should, if you can change it at all, the title tag of that backlink and what text it is hyperlinked on (the anchor itself). So if you want to get a good link for your local dating site you should place the backlink on a sentence lik: local dating tonight in helsinki. Remember, not only links to your start or homepage will do you good. Its even better if you can put out some links to inner pages of your website (this is called deeplinking). Otherwise most of your pages will fall into the supplemental index of google for example. I would even say the deeplinks can outnumber the links to your homepage without doing any harm to your rank. Last but not least, lets destroy some myths surrounding seo and particulary google. There is no such thing as the google sandbox effect. Backlinks are what you need in order to rank. PageRank has nothing to do with ranking. Trust is what makes a site rank good. My final tip for you: Do not hire a so called search engine optimization guru. If you really have to let them explain their methods and what they will do to your site BEFORE you hire them. There are pretty shady tactics to get sites rank well but you could get banned from the search engine index which will hurt your business pretty bad. There will be no way back!