By popular demand, I’ll provide a general overview of how the search engine results are ranked so that those who are interested in building traffic through Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. can get have a firm understanding of the basics. Google holds a very dominant share of the search engine market, over 80% I believe, so you only really need to be focused on the Google algorithm for determining your placement. Overall, Google intends on delivering the most fresh, relevant, and authoritative content to people that are searching Google, so you have to have a strong content strategy that establishes you as a popular authority on your niche. You do this by creating interesting, relevant, and fresh content via a blog, articles, tweets, forum posts, and anything else you can think of that will establish you as an authority on your subject throughout the internet. Your goal should be to provide the best information out there for your particular type of business. If you search the web and find a lot of competition for the niche you are targeting, keep narrowing your niche until you are confident you can be number 1 or number 2 in that category.
For example, if I tried to target the keyword “Magento”, I would have to compete against a ton of heavyweights that can throw gobs and gobs of money into an SEO campaign to suck up a lot of traffic. However, if I target “Magento Florida” or “Magento Orlando”, I’ll be targeting less people, but those people will have less competition to get their business, plus I will be more relevant to what they are looking for which results in more targeted leads.
The second most important concept is generating one-way links to your site from other sites that are relevant to yours. Not only will these links drive targeted traffic to your site, but they will also boost your SEO. How many links you get and the quality of those links are combined to calculate what is called PageRank. This essentially works like a system of voting, however, not all votes are equal. They work more like endorsements. One endorsement from a leader in your field is going to be worth more than 1,000 endorsements from people that know nothing about what you do.
So, the bottom line is to create great content and spread it everywhere you can to get it linked to. Here are some sample resources to do just that:
Site Directories
http://www.dmoz.org/
http://dir.yahoo.com/
http://www.jayde.com/
Article Sites
http://www.articlesnatch.com/
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.isnare.com/
Blog Directories
http://technorati.com/
http://blogs.botw.org/
http://www.blogcatalog.com/
Wikis
http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://www.wiki.com/
http://www.wikispaces.com/
Social Media/Bookmarking
http://digg.com/
http://delicious.com/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
Local Business Listings, Yellow Pages, and Review Sites
http://www.google.com/local
http://www.yellowpages.com/
http://www.yelp.com/
Free Classified Ads
http://craigslist.org/
http://www.backpage.com/
http://www.kijiji.com/
If you would like to learn about more advanced techniques like keyword density analysis, internal linking structure, or more, please visit http://www.seochat.com/