SEO best practice
The first thing to understand is that site content does not exclusively guide a site in search rankings. Site content is an influencing factor and 'content is king'. The site should be coded in a search engine friendly way and should avoid coding pitfalls. Visit our page on site coding for more information on what to be wary of.
The two things that make a difference to optimization is the site itself and its position within the online community. In most instances older sites do better because they have been around longer and enough time has passed for others to recognize the sites value and to make links to it.
Search engine friendly search content provides the ability for a search engine spider to traverse a website by following the navigation of the site via html links. Tags: titles; descriptions; keywords; headlines (H1, H2, H3 etc) are used appropriately and descriptively, following the content of each page. So that they are relevant to site visitors first and foremost then by implication to search engines.
Compromises often need to be made in order to accommodate the sites aesthetic form and function. This is where there is a need for third party optimization. Changes recommended tend to benefit visitors who come from natural search and pay per click - so every one wins - especially the site owner.