What is basic SEO and how does one go about it?
SEO is the short way to say Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of trying to get better rankings in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Those three are known as the big three because nearly all searchers use one of them, so it is the most profitable for you to try to optimize for them.
Americans conducted 7.4 billion searches online in May, up 12 percent from April. Google Sites registered the most search queries performed with 3.3 billion, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.1 billion), MSN-Microsoft (963 million) – Comscore
Search engines take into account many things in your website, optimizing those is called on-page optimization, everything that isnt your website is off-page optimization. Now, while the exact ranking formulae are secret, this is what is widely believed as simple SEO.
First, we want to improve on-page optimization. So we have to pick keywords. There are a variety of tools you can search for which will give you lists of keywords that are usable.
Now you have your keywords. So you now have to see what the top 10 people are doing for them (warning: basic html and math needed...