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I get this question a few times per day, and while I normally direct people to buy SEOBook, which is a great guide to SEO practices, I decided to make a three-part, extremely basic guide to search engine optimization.

Search engine traffic is considered to be the most valuable traffic available to website owners. Giving interested internet users the ability to search for, and subsequently find, research, and utilize an appropriate provider is the very basis of search engine technology. It isn’t often a simple process, but search engine optimization can be broken down to three basic factors: inbound links, technical optimization, and content. This article will focus on the first of the three, inbound links.

Inbound links play a very important role in assigning value to pages on the internet, and in turn, helping search engines decide which pages should be listed, in which position, for which search strings. While there are many concepts that come into play within this basic category, I consider the most important to be referring page authority and anchor text. It has been my experience that these two factors play a major role in whether your website will receive any love from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other big search engines out there.

Referring page authority refers to how heavily weighted a specific website’s reference of your site (read: link) is. There are several quick and easy ways to determine how beneficial a link from a specific website will be. First, check the site’s Google PageRank. PageRank is a metric used by Google to determine a page’s value, based on the quality of the incoming links to that page, the quality of the incoming links to the pages that link to that page, so on and so forth. Google PageRank operates on the assumption that high quality pages will receive more links from other sites than pages that are crap, which may often seem short-sighted. It is, however, the motivation for many optimization specialists, due to its effects on ranking.

Link anchor text is a much simpler concept. It basically consists of the text that is hyper-linked when someone links to a webpage. For example, if 100,000 people link to your website using the text “SEO Is Fun”, there is a great chance that you will show up towards the top of the search results when using that search string. A great example of this is when thousands linked to WhiteHouse.gov using the anchor text “miserable failure”. Sure enough, before it was manually overridden, searching “miserable failure” on almost all major search engines resulted in a biography page on WhiteHouse.gov being the first listing.

Understanding how link building works is important, but it also very important to build relationships within your community. The bottom line is, you will get link love from people who love you, or in some cases, those who hate you. I prefer the former, so I spend much of my time being helpful to other bloggers, commenting, and leading people to sites I enjoy reading. If you do the same, you’ll be well on your way to building your site’s reputation by way of inbound linking, and in turn, your organic search rankings will improve.

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Since this site has been live for all of three hours, I decided to answer a question I receive very often. Hopefully it will save many of you tons of trouble when you get your blogs set-up. While there are several ways to accomplish this, the most effective is in the form of a 301 redirect. There are many reasons to want to get this done. Most importantly, in my opinion, is the fact that Google will actually assign PageRank to both your http:// address *and* your http://www address. This can result in search ranking that is not optimal, and PageRank that is lower than you would otherwise expect, based on your site’s qualifications.

Instead of a long explanation of how it works, I’ll just show you the code to make it happen. Provided that your host has Mod_Rewrite enabled, you should just be able to change the example to reflect your domain name, and add it to the end of your .htaccess file. For more information about this, please feel free to Ask A Question.

To Forward http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com, use the following code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

To Forward http://www.domain.com to http://domain.com, use the following code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=Permanent,L]

That should do it! Using this method will ensure that your Google PageRank is always the highest number possible, and as a result, can yield increased traffic through search engines.

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