The main aspect of SEO is increasing the rankings that a
website has. In lamence terms, this means manipulating your content so that
your website appears at the top of the results.
That said, let me share a short anecdote. Many years ago, when I was just
learning how to code websites, I didn't really understand the concept of
validating your XHTML. See, I was one of those people who learned how to code a
website using tutorials on the internet, and so I wasn't instilled with the
concept to using valid code. Tiny mistakes in my coding would render my code
not valid. All I had to do was fix little mistakes, and everything would be
okay.
The same can be said of search engine rankings. Visualize valid XHTML as
synonymous to your website appearing at the top of a query's results. One
little error in SEO techniques will render your code invalid. Like fixing
invalid code, changing something to increase your search engine ranking is
usually small, so let me offer to techniques:
First, include a descriptive title bar. When you open a webpage, whether you
know it or not, a title bar displays on your screen. If you are using Mozilla
Firefox, then on the upper-left hand corner of your screen, you will see a
small image of a fox, followed by the title of your website, followed by
"- Mozilla Firefox." This is the title bar, and it is one of the most
overlooked ways to increase your ranking. I can't tell you how many times I've
been to a website whose title bar reads "Homepage." First, the word
homepage includes no information for a search engine. A more descriptive title
would be "Corporate Search Optimization Blog: Howto increase search engine
rankings." Now, when a spider is crawling your website, it will see
something much more descriptive.
Second, determine your link popularity. Link popularity is the number of
quality sites that link your your site. Nowadays a supermajority of search
engines use some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. There are
many free, online tools that you can use to determine your link popularity.
Submit Express offers one (link to: http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/).
While most people would overlook these two simple things, they're a lot like
adding alternate text to an image when W3C renders your XHTML invalid. It's the
little things that count, and these will definitely set you in the right
direction.