Hello Matt, a recent article of Danny Sullivan suggests that Google uses Twitter and Facebook links as a ranking signal. Can you confirm this? Can you elaborate a little bit more on this? -WebSEOAnalytics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated beast, and it takes a lot of hardwork and knowledge to master it. But you can reap the 80% of the benefits of Search Engine Optimization by following the simple tips below.

Even if you really don’t care much about SEO, you should do at least the bare minimum so you get the benefits of SEO with minimal effort. So here is the SEO quickstart guide for you:

1. Create a well designed website that contains readable urls, relevant page title, meta tags, content, graphics and keywords.
2. Don’t abuse your keywords. Only use them in the context and keep it natural.
3. Get some genuine links to your site. The best way to do it is to write quality content that people want to link to you.
4. Enhance traffic to your site through paid advertising, real life marketing, sharing links whatever makes sense.
5. Submit your site to web directories and to the search engines index.

Search Engine Optimization is, in a way, the process of pleasing the search engines so that they love and rank your sites above others. However, your audience should also be the focal point in the whole process. If you think about it, search engines are only trying to mimic what sites the users will find readable and credible. So you should never overdo it and try to ignore the user in the attempt of pleasing the search engines.

Just like there are several proven best-practices to SEO, there are SEO antipatterns too. Following are the dont’s of SEO that you should watch out for:

1. Don’t ever try to fool the search engines by stuffing hidden keywords in your website. Your site will most likely be banned by the search engines.

2. Don’t try to generate backlinks to your site from lots of unrelated sites in any unnatural or automated fashion. Most search engines also look at the quality of the backlinks.

3. Do not generate artificial traffic to your website to make it look more popular than it actually is.

4. Don’t repeatedly submit your site to the search engines for inclusion in the rankings. Most search engines will find your site by themselves, but you can submit it once and may have to wait for a few weeks before your site appears in search engine.

The general process from going from a layman to a Search Engine Optimization Guru can be listed in the following few steps:

1. Understanding SEO: Some people think SEO is a spammy business. So understanding SEO and its worth is half of the battle when it comes to becomes a SEO guru. While there are grey and black hat SEO techniques, 80% of the value of SEO can be easily achieved by designing and architecting the website well, putting good unique content and being a part of the community. At the least, you need to understand how search engines work, what is a good site, what users are looking for and how to write content that both search engines and users like.

2. Learning SEO Strategies: There are various ways that you can optimize your website for search engines. These include both on-page and off-page SEO techniques. You should have a good knowledge of what a good web-page design is, have a good keyword strategies for your content, find ways to improve your website traffic though various means including paid advertising and social media marketing.

3. Optimizing Search Strategies: Once you have learnt and implemented the SEO Strategies, you can improve on these strategies by optimizing your search strategies. For eg. you can add to site to the search index of various search engines, make it easy for the crawlers to crawl, avoid duplicate content and avoid any spammy techniques that could potentially harm your website rank in search engines. Also, you should be able to automate some of the tasks that you keep doing often so as to be more efficient and productive.

4. Maintaining SEO: Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process. It will never be complete and you can always keep on improving on it. Once the initial implementation and optimization is done, you should find ways to creatively maintain and improve your site’s SEO. Its mostly hit and trial but you can follow general best practices and see what works for you. Every site and its target audience is difference, and you should make sure that you are adapting to the market trends.

Search Engine Optimization, often called SEO in short, is the on-page and off-page design strategies that you can use to improve your ranking in the search engines.

Search Engines love clean, unique and readable content. Search engines needs to make sure that you are not a spammer and you provide valuable content to the use. Search engines love sites that load fast in the browser. There are a lot of things that you can do to prove to the search engine that your content deserves to be ranked higher than your competitors. While some of it means improving your site itself, off-page strategies also have a huge role to play in your ranking. All this art of bettering and promoting your content in the web is called Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is not any rocket  science, but it not easy either. It needs a lot of hard work and understanding of the way search engines work. But a good rule is to focus on the targeted user, and search engines will start loving you as that is what search engines are trying to do anyway.

You don’t need a computer science or marketing degree to be a SEO professional. If I can learn it, so can you.