Where to start SEO?

Start with building a website that has useful and meaningful content, adheres to web standards, has a good structure and inter-linking and is easily crawlable.

Once you have that it's 2/3 of the battle.

The last third is backlinks.

I would suggest that you hang out in this forum for 2-3 months.

Build yourself an "Ultimate SEO Strategy Checklist". Do it in msword or notepad.

You WILL absolutely need to organize the hell out of every single thing you do. That is the ONLY way you can do SEO effectively. This is because SEO is really "data entry". You're dealing with tons of data/information, so you need to organize it and have a daily execution list that tells you where to input this "data" (backlinks/content) everyday online.

Learn about these 2 things:

1) on-page SEO (header tags, title tags, page titles, meta tags, image tags, alt attribute tags, keyword density, page loading time, etc - if you use wordpress btw they have a plug in to make this a lot easier called "wordpress seo" by yoast)
2) off-page SEO (backlinking, different types & properties, what anchor text is, why you shouldn't go over 15% anchor text, why naked urls are so valuable, where to get backlinks: articles, blogs, social media, social bookmarks, no-follow vs do-follow, which is better, and all the things that will get you banned by google)

Make an SEO checklist of ALL the social media sites you're a member at (join them)
As many video sharing sites as possible.
Start a few blogs and always work on them. Build your own little private blog network if you must, I'm working on mine now (but definitely don't join private blog networks).

FOCUS ON building as much online real estate as you can. You want links in as many places as possible (good **RELEVANT** links mixed with some lower quality ones - NO SPAM) but DO NOT RUSH this process. Doing over 50-100 links a day can get you in trouble with google. It really depends on a few things however. My site is ranking fairly well now so I can be aggressive with backlinking. Newer sites you can not to do this or you will flag google to penalize your site.

Learn why aged domains help you in ranking. Try to only deal with aged domains when you rank websites.

Learn what a keyword rich url is, try to only deal with these types of urls/domains.

Get a book on SEO. I read only one, it helped me A LOT. Book is called "Outsmarting Google" you can get it at Barnes and Noble. Although you're never going to feel confident with SEO till the application process. Once you start applying the techniques, and seeing that they actually work, this will motivate you to learn more/be more effective with your SEO.

This man goes into depth about what he believes is the best way to rank a site, which is basically how to build authority sites. Making MASSIVE sites full of quality content.

Organize yourself so you can do all this stuff fast/efficiently on a daily basis. Stay away from automation software till you 100% understand what you're doing.

Most of all get good at keyword research.

I'm leaving a ton of things out, but this may be a good starting point for you.

Good luck! - Red

Focus on creating content for the people. Okay, I know that there might be some people out there who will say that just creating content is not enough. I actually agree with that, because no matter how good a thing is, if nobody shares something about it, then it's just good as nothing. That's why you have to link. But do remember that your links are supposed to be something that support what's on the pages where you're going to place them. Well, there are affiliate links, but do remember that you have to follow the guidelines set by the search engines (mainly Google) on how you're going to do your optimization.

Above post already answer your question, the point is create useful contents for your reader.

Two type of SEO there. On page and Off page. On page is done by creating a user and search engine friendly website. And off page SEO is done by building links in other websites. Links usually build by doing social bookmarking,directory listing,forum posting,article marketing,blog commenting.

Aside from joning forums, reading SEO blogs can help widen your knowledge about this.

Good advice so far. The entire span of SEO is darn huge, and includes lots of different items. How easy it is to get good results depends greatly on the topic of your site. In general, the more specialized your topic is, the easier it will be to get good results from Google.

When you produce a site with valuable information, then people who are interested in that topic will naturally create links to the site - the best possible style of natural varied external links.

Lots of great answers and I'm kind of in the same boat and I'm trying to learn what to make sure my seo guy is dong and not doing.

nice this is good for us .....