Alright so the title is a little sensational, but that's the whole idea. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is all about drawing attention to your site. Through the use of proper code, good content and a little promotion you can get anyone to find anything you want. Sounds easy, sounds boring too, but it doesn't have to be... Any SEO discussion has to start with looking at the two fundamental parties here, your content and your viewer. Ultimately you need to find a way to make the two cross paths.So what is it you're offering? What kind of content are you peddling? Do you have a blog about your favorite foods, how much you hate your life or some combination of the two? The topic itself doesn't matter so long as you can identify what it is. Next we need to do define your reader. What type of person would read this crap? Why should anyone care? ...and so on. Let's say you have a website devoted to samurai swords. It's a fairly random topic and one specific enough that you can easily identify your readers. Clearly this site would apply to samurais, ninjas and other sword fanatics, but who else?
People don't know they wanna read what you write... at least not yet
The internet is a big place full of people of every color, creed and perversion. What you need to do is find out where these sickos hang out and do a little mingling. For instance, if you learn about a popular sword fetish forum online, it may be worth your trouble to make yourself known. More obvious example of this would be sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and others. But of course the more pertinent your content is, the more likely those losers will be to click on your links.Submitting sites to coolness aggregators blindly is like asking the popular girl in school to the prom, she only wants to put out for the other cool kids. If you aren't already a cool kid on Digg, don't bother because no one will want to sleep with you.
Linking is only half the battle
If you really try hard enough you can get a few people to click on your bullshit links in blog comments and on the samurai fetish forum. But the goal is to get readers to your site, so there has to be some substance there. Getting people to your site is only part of the equation. In order for people to stick around and read what you have to say you'll have to entire them. More on that in a minute. First however, you should write the type of articles you yourself would want to read. You probably aren't a professor or technical engineer so don't try to write cut-and-dry posts for professionals. If you are one of these people then you're probably getting paid by someone to make those posts, so what do you care if anyone reads it...
It may sound obvious and cliché but people like images. They want funny crap to look at while they read your post about how awesome the new Shingoku Samurai model is. Relevance is paramount when it comes to images, but it doesn't hurt to have a little fun. Gizmodo is a good example of this. They post an image with every entry and, when possible, they add MS Paint style word bubbles and witty remarks. Even pics of Bill Gates and motherboards can be enjoyable. What you should avoid doing is senselessly posting recycled pictures of Lolcats just for shits. See the funny rabbit picture on the right? Yeah, don't post crap like that without a good reason. Seriously though, images do add a lot of value to your content. Google and the other major search engines crawl and catalog your images as well as content, so making sure they are related can effectively double your opportunities to reach viewers, considering how likely it is that people search for pictures of your stupid samurai swords. Keep in mind that Google's image search displays your page's content when someone is browsing images.
Back to the content...
So you've got a thousand word essay about samurai swords and it's just been pasted from online Microsoft Word, now what? Now you get to go back and basically rewrite the whole damn thing. Whether you're using a WYSIWYG editor or straight HTML you'll probably notice that some formatting got lost in translation between Word and your website. This is good and bad. Bad because you've got to make edits but also good because you can optimize this page while you're redoing the formatting. It's important to note that Google pays more attention to formatting than you do when reading an article. Just look at this page for example, you see the blue sub headings, those have <h2> tags applied to them to give them a different style so you know you're reading a different section than before. Google knows this and will give the text displayed in blue extra weight and importance. The same can be said for <strong> bold tags and <em> italics. Google knows this text is more important, hence the emphasis in the code, and therefore will pay extra attention to it. By properly identifying you're paragraphs with descriptive headers will mean your page will rank better with search engines versus pages that have no headers and ones that are poorly optimized.There are a lot of HTML tags that people avoid using such as lists. List tags are pretty inconvenient. Table tags are only slightly more of a pain in the ass. List tags however can have the same importance as headers and bolding. The entire HTML language is understood by Google and if you're wanting to play their game you should use as many of these tags as you can within reason. Meta tags are an obvious example of this and yet they are ignored in some aspects. Meta keywords and description tags are more or less ignored by more search engines because they tend to be full of spam. Title tags however are a good tool that everyone should use. This tag populates the title bar of your browser, which more people glance over and pay little attention to. Google however, uses this as the link text when your page shows up in a search result string. You have control over what the view sees here, unlike the text below this which is generated by Google based on your search query. Title tags are still a good place to pack keywords and important facts from the content, just don't get carried away.
If your URL has a question mark in it, please cancel your internet service
URLs are, in my opinion, the most important part of your webpage after the content itself. Most people who roam around on the internet and post on message boards and myspace tend to fail horribly at HTML. So? How does this affect you... well if you're wanting to get people to visit your site you'll inevitably be linked to by one of these morons and anything you can do to make these links idiot-proof will only benefit you in the long run. If you use a Content Management System for your blog or website, make sure the URLs it generates are human-readable. Even better, make sure they are retard-readable, meaning they consist only of real words, hyphens/underscores and maybe a few digits. If your URLs end up looking like this then you'll probably never get linked to. There are a good number of people who don't bother trying to code HTML links and only paste URLs directly, if someone pastes a URL with question marks, %20, slashes, etc - then there is a good change it'll be broken and you'll miss out on some free pageviews. Just keep it clean and you'll be better off. Google pays attention to your URLs, just like everything else, so you'll benefit from including keywords and important details.That should sum up all of the really basic stuff anyone needs to know to make a palatable website. There is plenty of more advanced SEO out there for anyone who actually cares. If I can be bothered I may elaborate on this more in the future. For anyone who thinks this is all just bullshit, there is a comment button just a click away...