From the Wiki definition of SEO:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of websites via natural (unpaid) search results.

My definition:

SEO involves all the strategies you take in order to get your site to PAGE ONE OF GOOGLE, against a PARTICULAR SET OF KEYWORDS.

Notice I said GOOGLE. If you focus on getting your site working with Google, which currently accounts for around 85% of searches, then the likes of Bing and Yahoo will also fall into place alongside – concentrate your efforts where you will make the most gains. More on this later.

Also the ‘particular set of keywords’ phrase is important. What audience are you aiming for? What message do you want to get across? Have you researched what search terms to use? Is the audience large enough for these search terms? Are they too niche? Or even not niche enough and swarming with competition?

Very few people look past page two of any search results. In fact, it gets worse: around 40% of the population click on the very first search result.

But don’t despair, there are strategies to follow to get you there: see my My Top 10 SEO Tips. This is intended to get you started in the right direction and to focus on what’s important – laying the foundations if you like.

I will be expanding on each of the points over the coming weeks to fine-tune your site to get it to where you need it to be.

The SEO Gravy Train
Look online and you will find many, many theories on SEO.

A lot of people have made an awful lot of money espousing their own views and opinions on the best ways to optimise your website and to manipulate the various search engines.

In fact, a whole industry has grown up, simply to deal with this topic, with companies being formed solely dedicated to raising a website’s rankings for a particular set of keywords.

And with anything that involves making money, there are companies who prey on and frankly exploit people’s ignorance of SEO.

Sure, there are some companies out there who provide quality tools and services. But there are also a lot of things you can do to optimise your website on your own, with relatively little effort, and they often won’t cost you a penny. Isn’t that much more satisfying than paying someone else to do it for you?

I am a lone person who simply can’t afford to spend lots of money on Google AdWords, advertising and marketing companies, expensive (often outrageously so) tutorial books, DVDs and marketing software.

Gathering information
There are also huge tomes of books, my favourite one being ‘The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice)’ by O’Reilly Publishing’. There is a lot of good stuff here and I would thoroughly recommend it.

But I won’t read every book from cover to cover, analysing every graph, table and trend. Instead, I pick out the parts I need that will give me the most benefits for the least amount of effort.

SEO is potentially a huge topic and you could easily spend a very large chunk of your time refining and fine tuning your sites to the nth degree.

But at some point you need to draw the line and say enough is enough, it’s time to move on with my life and start earning some money!

My 90/10 rule
You can make yourself cross-eyed researching and trying to second-guess the current status of Google’s algorithms and weightings and constantly adjusting, without really knowing if what you are doing is actually having any effect.

I am a great believer in the 90/10 rule: you can put in 10% of your time to produce 90% of the results. You could then spend the remaining 90% of your valuable time studying detailed graphs, extrapolating Google trends and scrutinising the latest algorithms to squeeze out that extra 10%, which may or may not pay off.

If that’s your bag then go for it. I want to get on with developing my website and spending time with my wife and kids.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t continue to learn, to read around the topic and to constantly fine-tune where it will do some good. Just don’t let it consume all of your valuable time.

Information quality
As recently as 20 years ago, to get detailed information on a given topic meant a trip to the local library or buying specific books.

As a programmer, I remember buying books even in the early 90′s on the subject of Microsoft Access, when trying to learn this new application. They would cost me upwards of £45 each. But I had no choice: the information I needed simply wasn’t freely available in any other form.

Did you know the first web page was only put online on 6th August 1991? And it wasn’t until the mid-90′s that the internet really started to take off, and even then the vast majority of people were using slow dial-up connections (remember them??).

It’s hard to imagine that even in the early 90′s, very few websites even existed! Now look how the internet has exploded. 90% of households in the US have access to the internet using Macs, PCs, iPads and a whole variety of mobile devices.

And then this wonderful resource called the World Wide Web finally matured and suddenly information was everywhere. In short, information became a cheap commodity.

However, because it is was now so easy to obtain and anyone was able to say and publish anything, its ubiquitous nature actually made the quality of information poorer.

QUALITY KNOWLEDGE is now even more sought after than ever before.

So you need to be careful how you interpret this new way of looking at information: it involves reading around the topic, finding sources you trust and filtering out the ‘quick-buck’ merchants until you build up a coherent pattern.

And a major part of getting your own site up there is to provide high quality content yourself. If you do, you will stand apart from and Google will appreciate and like you all the better for it. And believe me, you need Google, Bing and Yahoo to like you if you want to be in pole position.

So be a part of this quality information revolution.

To get you started take a look at my post, My Top 10 SEO Tips. This is intended to get you started and to concentrate on what’s important. The unimportant points will be conspicuous by their absence!

I will be expanding on each point over the coming weeks to get your site to the top of the major search engines.

Have patience, provide quality information, and don’t give up – it will all be worth it! It can take many months before Google and the other search engines start to trust you and elevate you in the rankings. In the meantime, keep plugging away with good content and don’t get disillusioned. One day you will wake up and see your site up in lights!