Search Engine Optimization-The Basics of SEO

In a very basic nutshell, search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is making your site and the site's individual pages visible and relevant to both search engines and search engine users. Sure, you can throw around some fancy terms and complicated acronyms, but good SEO is truly very basic, very simple. And this is where most people get bogged down, throw their hands in the air, and yell "I give up!"

For instance, I frequent a few search engine optimization message boards around the Web, and I can easily get all wrapped up in the latest discussion about ROI, or the Google sandbox effect, etc. This is all fine, and since I'm in the field it's important for me to keep up with what's going on and participate.

However, I have to keep reminding myself that I can't lose the forest for the trees. In other words, I can't lose sight of what is at the heart of search engine optimization: keyword phrase rich content, clean design, good Meta tags, and simple navigation. Sure, there's more to it than this. But these are the essentials. Everything else is gravy.