Over the years working in this industry we've come to look at SEO companies and experts with some derision. We've thought of the initial way it was presented as pretty specious. These companies or experts would be keyword stuffing content into web pages and filling meta tags with garbage content in order to game the search engine algorithms in order to gain page and site ranking.
In the last few years with significant attention being paid to how these algorithms now review content, there are some companies and organizations that are now following a set of standards and providing some actual useful information on what SEO actually is and why it matters.
Since the industry I work in is always moving and changing I need to try to keep up on the latest trends on the technology we use. Recently I've been reading on Accessibility. This reading has also lead me into reading about best practices for accessibility. The interesting thing I found was that many of the things I was reading echoed things I was reading about SEO. Making page structure and content accessible also means it places well for the latest iterations for the SEO algorithms.
Proper page structure and hierarchical content are checked and tested by the SEO algorithms when they are sorting out how to rank a web page for organic search ranking. While keywords are still somewhat important, keyword stuffing is no longer an effective method of ranking. A smaller targeted group of keywords is more useful when it is associated with well written content meant for the average person.
There are elements of any page or article that require what is referred to a Technical SEO. These are the webmaster and developer elements that are going on behind the code of any page. The CMS that we use on a regular basis has all of these tools available to our clients and we can show them how to use them. The issue we seem to find though is that SEO rarely takes priority when it comes to content management. Our clients do write their page content well, however they do not provide any concentration on adding the Technical SEO aspects that would help with organic search indexing.
This may be an aspect of our client relationships that could change. We don't generally concentrate on providing SEO help, but it may be a service that we can start offering in order to give our clients their SEO jumping off point.