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I’ll repeat that … Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art form, it’s not a programming language or coding method. I like to think of SEO as an orchestra. The drum, tuba, clarinet and all the rest of the instruments may sound nice when played by themselves, but sound really GREAT when they all play together in an orchestrated manner. SEO is much the same … there are certain pieces of the puzzle that you work to improve on, and when they all come together, you have an optimized website.

If you were to ask me what to do first, I would probably say that your should learn something about SEO and optimization before you build your site. Since you probably already have a site, this is a moot subject. What you will need to do is learn the SEO techniques and then apply them to your site by making changes to it.

It will be of great benefit to you if you learn some good solid SEO skills before you start making changes to your site. If you simply start making changes you will not know why your listings may change, if they do. An often made mistake is keyword stuffing or over using important techniques like H1 tags and so on.

Something to avoid is overuse of your keywords. It happens all the time too. People just don’t understand the history behind the spider spamming and think that more is better. 50 keywords on your page will probably get you banned for that keyword. Five on the page may well get you listed high for it. Algorithms are always changing and there really is no one keyword density for any given page. This is something that has roots in all the other facets of your page, everything else that is there, and where any given keyword appears, whether it’s in heading tags, or just text. Get lots of inbound links.

SEO is common sense, but it is even more than that. It is understanding how different html tags works together, and how the search engines will perceive that. It is a lot of trial and error which will, in the end, lead you to good solid and proper optimization techniques. All of this will lead you to better search engine rankings.

Let’s face it, without listings “above the fold”, (visible without scrolling) on the first page at Google, you are just not going to get many visitors. You need to get your site into these top positions in order to make any real advancement in your online marketing.

So you need to work on all of the different parts of any given web page that will make it conform closely to the search engines algorithms, well for Google, MSN and Yahoo! anyway. They are the three big engines that will generate 99+% of all the traffic you will get from the organic search engine listings.

There are many optimization techniques, both on-site and off-site. The main on-site changes you will want to make will be to improve or add on the 1) title tag, 2) code attributes (alt=, title= and summary=), 3) keyword density, 4) use of H1 and h2 tags, maybe even using H3 tags, 5) your navigation and anchor text used, 6) meta description and keywords tags and 7) internal linking. Get all these things right and you have the major SEO efforts taken care of.