OK, here’s a much-needed basic introduction to SEO and how to use it to generate ongoing free traffic…

What is SEO, anyway?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and refers to the idea of making your website “search engine friendly.” This basically amounts to designing your website so that search engine “like” it, because if they like it they will index it and then return it in search results to other people . . . which means free traffic for you.

What do Search Engines like?

Plain and simple, search engine (just like people) like fresh, high-quality content! This content can be text, images, audio, video or some combination. They also like unique content which means the best kind of content to put on your site is content that you create.

When you’re regularly adding unique content to your website it will get indexed by the search engine and appear in search results. Static, single-page sites will generally not get ranked. So it’s important to differentiate between a website that’s designed to attract traffic from the search engine (a content site) and one that’s designed to sell a product (a sales site), also called “money pages” because they are the ones that actually make you money. Ideally, you will create content to draw traffic and then funnel it to your money pages.

Power Tip:

The other reason you want fresh, high-quality content is so your visitors stay on your site once they arrive. If Google sends you visitors from search results and they consistently click back to Google immediately, this damages your site’s rank for that keyword. And eventually Google will stop sending you visitors.

Keywords

OK, so we’ve talked about using content to draw traffic from search engines, but how does this work? Mostly it’s based on keywords, which are words and phrases that are the main topics of a given web page. For example, this article is about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Generally, search engines can figure out what a page is about through something called “keyword density” and “semantic relatedness.” Keyword density is just the percentage of times a given word or phrase shows up in a document and semantic relatedness is the expectation to find certain other words or phrases nearby. These algorithms are intended to keep people from cheating and just putting a bunch of keywords without any real content.

You can also help the search engines by including the appropriate keywords in the “Title” tag of the document, as well as in some important positions on the page, like content headings “h1″ tags and by bolding some of them and even italicizing some instances of the keywords. It’s important that you maintain consistency between the keywords in the title of the page and the body of the page.

Another powerful tool, known as “tags,” helps search engines figure out what your page is about. If you look at the words “SEO” and “Search Engine Optimization” two paragraphs up, you’ll see I “tagged” them to technorati. I wrote another post about Web 2.0 Blogging that explains this in more depth.

The other thing that tells search engines what a page is about is the “anchor text” that’s used to link to it from other pages. For example, in the paragraph above “Web 2.0 Blogging” is hyperlinked to another page. When you create a text-based hyperlink, the words you use are called the anchor text. So if lots of other websites are linking to you on a specific keyword or phrase this tells the search engines that the page they’re linking to is probably about those keywords.

This bring us to…

Page Rank

This is a big one and I think it’s often misunderstood - probably because it’s pretty complex and no one really knows how it works exactly. But it’s basically a measure of how “important” a webpage is as compared to other webpages about the same thing and in general. And it’s determined by the “in-bound” links to that page, but it’s not just the sheer volume of links that matters. Here are the important factors in determining Page Rank:

• Number of in-bound links (other pages linking to the page)
• The Page Rank of the pages doing the linking (1 link from a highly ranked page is worth more than 10 links from zero ranked pages)
• Number of out-bound links (this may be a factor – we don’t really know, because Google won’t tell us)
• Anchor Text (this may also be a factor)

Authority Sites

Once a site gets big enough and important enough it becomes what’s known as an “authority site.” Some examples of authority sites are: del.icio.us, Squidoo and Hub Pages. These sites has tons of users and get indexed by the search engines regularly because of their traffic, content and popularity. So in-bound anchor text links from these site will improve your site’s performance in the search engines. And the good news is that you can create them yourself and for free! How cool is that?

I’m going to write another article about some “Web 2.0 Linking Strategies” soon, but for now I just wanted to give you an overview of SEO, how it works and some of the key things that affect it. If you have specific questions about anything I’ve covered here or other topics I missed, please post them in the comments below and I’ll answer them for you…

Action Steps:

Forget everything I just said!!

Seriously, well almost seriously. The only thing you really need to do is focus on creating value. This is what I’ve been talking about and will continue to talk about . . . because it’s the only thing that matters. When you create value by providing good quality content guess what will happen…

1. People will visit your blog and make comments, creating a community and increasing the value for everyone further
2. People will link to your content and boost your page rank
3. People will bookmark your content and generate more traffic from social bookmarking sites
4. Search engine will spider and index your content so you show up in search results

The only technical thing you really need to do make sure your title and body keywords match. Obviously, there are advanced techniques I’ll go over later, but I don’t want you to focus on this. I want you to focus on creating value for your readers and our community through great content!