Key word research and  recommendations
It is hard for some clients to understand why they might want to optimize for one keyword vs. another, but if we really analyze keyword search traffic, the competitive market, and the overall marieting opportunity, and then focus on a broad market plan, there is good justification for doing appropriate study around keyword development.

Review the website code to gauge SEO 'friendliness'
We ask the technical questions around how easy it is for search engine spiders to find a website, search through it's pages for important information, and then cache [and index]everything relevant.  Some of the things we look for:  friendly URL's, Keyword density, clean HTML, internal linking structure, meta data intact and formatted correctly, sitemap usage, page title descriptions.

Competitive Analysis
There is no amount of competitive research that is really "enough" ... if you want to win over everyone else, you have to know them and execute on what they do, but better.  We ask questions around what traffic/audiences the competitors are going after, who are they advertising with, who is willing to partner with and potentially give them inbound links (and why, and how!).

Content Creation and/or Suggestions
Well, yes, this is pretty broad, and it takes alot of time and effort to come up with good suggestions around valid content.  There seems to be a fine line between providing good, solid, provacative content vs. being verbose, prolific, and boring.  Just knowing the difference is a start, and while we maintain that more is better, it is important to use good taste, and judicious use of the web-page's real estate.. 

Website design and User-Friendliness
A website owner never wants just traffic ... they want buyers!  Conversions!  Customers, for sure.  Attractive website design is important because it might entice visitors to further surf and investigate the site...the more visitors that look at the site's internal pages, the better the site might rank on the search engines.

Link Acquisitions
This is another sensitive issue...  This is why:  while all SEO specialists know that more (and better) inbound links is inherently good, too many and too fast will win you a black hat from some of the search engines.  How many is too many?  No one knows for sure, and it's different for anyone.  We suggest that the better, legitimate links are the ones to shoot for ... buying links is probably ok, too, but only if they are all quality links from relevant, respected, resources.

Black Hat Avoidance
One of the most important things we do is make sure to adhere to solid practices around website development.  Google, Yahoo, and MSN actually prescribe how to optimize a website, so we pay strict attention to their suggestions and guidelines.  There are innumerable suggestions by SEO specialists on blogs, in books and journals, on Search Engine-specific websites, in media articles, and many other places that only confuse the issues.  Rarely do we find anything of real use, and continue to go back to the search engines themselves for our own best practices.  We advocate the following, and it drives our methodology behind the work we do to gain search engine strength:  Be real.  Copy some of what seems to work for your competitors.  Be relevant.  Be honest.  Write original copy.  Know what not to do at least as much as what to do.