It sounds like you are ready to get fleeced if you are asking these things on HN without Googling around enough to have a basic idea of what you are talking abo

It sounds like you are ready to get fleeced if you are asking these things on HN without Googling around enough to have a basic idea of what you are talking about. Some suggestions: 1. If you don't have talent on board to assist with this, and you have the money to, then why aren't you talking with them? 2. As detailed in many other places on the web, just making your site/webapp provide textual content without a lot of crap or images/flash containing the important stuff is a step in the right direction. Try this out: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html What do you see? Is it content that you think a search engine would view as crap (would you view it as crap) or does it look like something that someone searching through it would view as representative of what they'd be searching for if they were looking for something that your site provides? 3. This does not mean that you have to axe images, flash, etc. (although it might help), but use alt tags, etc. and put in metadata, descriptions, etc. that would help someone looking at the source of your webpage(s) as if it were a human reading through it. (right-click -> view source, etc.). SEM is getting listed in the ads in google, etc. Google Adwords are great and can help get yourself noticed if you are selling something and competing against a lot of others for the same search terms that are in the top of the results, but doing the SEO stuff (even by itself) might be better if you rank highly enough in the search results for the terms you want people to find you with. There is a lot more to it than that and the tricks change over time, but odds are someone told you that you need SEO, and now you are freaking out. Don't. Your site may suck. Fix it. Consider getting your URL out there in other ways (printed ads, business cards, etc.).