How does SEO actually work?

- Backlinks
- Viral
- Fresh contents
- Age/authority

Those are the 4 important elements that will get you top ranking in seo market.

Well you Have onsite and off site SEO

Onsite SEO is making sure your site is structured correctly to get the maximum value out of the page. Onsite SEO highly depends on keyword targeting (ie 1 keyword per page).
Things that improve onsite seo are:
1) Keyword rich url (google likes keywords in the url / domain, it takes it as a strong indication of what your page is about)
2) title tag (make sure the keyword is in the title) (google kinda reads this as the page subject)
3) header tags (H1,H2,H3), variations of your keyword in the header tags (google reads these like headlines)
4) Body content, making sure your keywords appear in the body of your content (in a correct and relevant way).
5) internal links to other pages on your site using keywords as the anchor text (related post plugins on wordpress are great for this).
6) images / Media - putting media and images on your page, with keyword rich alt/title tags helps as well.

Offsite seo - backlink building, it's about getting keyword rich links pointing back to the correct pages on your site, this is the topic of a considerable amount of posts and threads on this forum, and is highly complex to cover. Would highly suggest using the forum search for this =)

- Justin

There's two elements to SEO - on page and off page SEO. On page SEO has to do with making sure your keyword phrase appears in the title and in the first and last paragraphs of the body. Off page SEO is about back-linking, getting links from other sites back to your site or page. The more back-links there are, the higher Google ranks your site or page. Not all back-links are equal, back-links from high authority sites will be valued more highly by Google.

The above answers are great. The way it actually works is this;

You build a website about donkeys.. great, but how are people going to know about it?

You think.. GOOGLE!, Google is by far the biggest search engine, so it makes sense to want your webpage to appear on the first page when someone types "donkey" into Google.

The problem is, so many hundreds/thousands/millions of sites are also trying to get on page one when people type "donkey", which is why one must Search Engine Optimize their website to have any hope of appearing here.

Google used to be called "Backrub" before Google, this indicates that Google ranks webpages higher if other websites are helping them out by linking to them and directing visitors there.

The aim for me, the website owner, is to get as many links from important websites back to my website using the clickable text "donkey" to show Google that my website is important for people typing "donkey".

These links are the main deciding factor for Google (and many other SEs) to determine where your website should sit in the "donkey" search.

There are many different ways as discussed above, such as onpage optimization (to make your page actually ABOUT donkeys), and this forum is basically a big debate on how and where to get the BEST QUALITY links and share strategies for getting these links.

-Dave

You should check out this pdf: http://www.google.com/webmasters/doc...rter-guide.pdf

Yeah, so to break this down very simply. You need to get other sites to link to your site. This can be done with a variety of methods as described above.

Probably the most common is blog commenting. So, how does this get a link back to your site? Often, when you want to place a comment on someones blog post they ask for four details from you:

Name
Email Address
Website
Comment

Now, the NAME you put down will actually be the clickable link back to whatever you put in the website box.

So, you can do it like this:

Name: John Smith
Email: whatever@whatever.com
Website: example.com/page8
Comment: This is a great blog!

(I hope you are more creative than I am!)

When you post your comment, it will look like this:

John Smith
Comment: This is a great blog!

See how the name John Smith links to the website URL you put down? If you use an anchor text link in the name feild it will benefit your SEO a little more, but sometimes the webmaster won't approve it, so you really have to look at what others are doing.

This is just a basic way to get a link.

You could write and submit articles to article directories including Ezine Articles who allow you to put links in your reference box.

So you could put something like "Thanks for reading this article, you can check out more about [ANCHOR TEXT LINK] here!".

There are other means for getting links, like social bookmarking. Digg.com, Multiply.com, which let you say "hey, go to this site, it's good: [ANCHOR TEXT LINK].

Basically the more links you get, the better. The better quality links will be ten times better than normal ones (ten times better is a guess). Quality is determines by Page Rank, DoFollow, Contextual, Unique Content. etc etc. but this can be learnt in time.

Hope this clarifies the absolute basics around link building for the newbies

We were all where you are now so keep at it.

Create QUALITY... Keep our net clean!

wow that is a big question...SEO is an art and a science and I cant tell you in this post all about it because then the post would be truncated probable :-(

To keep it short, make your website relevant for the search engines to boost it in the top rankings..This usually means onsite and offsite optimization...I encourage you to read up on information and even courses.

I do offer a SEO training course online called The Professionals Training Course to SEO and it will cover it all in a step-by-step format...You can read more here The Professional's Training Course to SEO

Good luck and if you have any questions feel free to let me know anytime...

Johan