It said a lot, but not enough; nobody knows what search engines are truly looking for in an itemized list fashion except the powers at be.  Sometimes though, you can simply just be observant towards who and what shows up in search engine results and why.

The first thing you should understand regarding H1 or header tags are its purpose because that alone helps you understand why search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing rely on them so much.  Consider an H1 tag for how it’s named, a ‘header’ tag.  When you were in grade school or college would you hand a teacher a paper with no heading?  Absolutely not, the header basically introduces your entire article to the reader.  Search engines feel the same way.  They would like to know what your article or webpage is about.  How convenient for the article to have a header, where they summarize it in as few words as possible?

Alternative Text is an awesome way to communicate with search engines.  Alternative text is the info buried in the coding of a photograph describing what the picture is of.  The most important beneficiary to alternative text is a person who is visually impaired depending on what they call a ‘reader’.  The reader will scan over a photograph and read back to the individual looking at it what the picture is of.  For instance, if the picture is of an elephant and the alternative text reads ‘African elephant’, when the users mouse hovers over the picture, the words ‘African elephant’ will be read back to them.

Before you start talking pricing or anything else with a potential SEO company, make sure you know they’re worth your time.  First, start with whomever answers the phone.  Sales people are okay, but does this ‘sales person’ actually know what he or she is selling?  Or have they just been taught how to sell it and nothing more.  Have a list of ‘qualifier’ questions to ask them before you call.  Things you’ve researched about internet marketing and SEO that would immediately tell you whether or not the person knows what they’re talking about.  For example; latest algorithm updates, percentage of traffic Google gets compared to Yahoo and Bing, simply asking them their background in the subject etc.  Then, after you’ve qualified the consultant who answered the phone, on to the company itself.

First to answer the questions; what you did wrong, if you did anything wrong and it’s not a technical error that caused your rankings to drop, know it’s not the end of the world and there’s solutions for you out there.  It’s just NOT RECOMMENDED TO DEAL WITH THIS ALONE.  You obviously did something wrong the first time and trying to fix this yourself may either cause your situation to be worse or just have you wasting more time.  

With all the different variables and algorithms out there affecting your SEO rankings, it is not uncommon for a rumor or ‘myth’ to propagate regarding what to do and what not to do in order to get website traffic.  During my time in the SEO field I have heard on a number of occasions people tell me that ‘Google no longer looks at meta tags’ or ‘Google no longer looks at keyword tags’.  I’ll explain where this rumor came from, how it became mixed up and why it’s not only untrue, but dangerous to ignore.