I'm not an expert in SEO, far from it. But this week I read a great (repeat, great) beginners document on SEO, and felt there were some great kernels of wisdom in there that are worth sharing in short form. The entire document I read can be found at SEOMoz. Those guys rock - thanks for a great document on SEO.

Background: What Is SEO

Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing your website so that your potential customers can more easily find you via search engines. Since search engines involve people typing in certain words to find relevant content, and search engines rank popular sites most highly, SEO is about

• The relevance of your content to the keywords that the searcher has entered
• The popularity of your site, often measured in links from other sites.
  

While the practice of SEO is still a little arcane, it seems there's definitely some core concepts that you can stick to reliably - and it's not all about keywords!

Links Matter. But Not Always.

Some think that SEO is all about volume of links to your site and keyword density on your pages. This isn't false, but it's not true either.

For example, not every link is worth the same. A link from a large, trustworthy site like CNN is worth a great deal. But links from known bad sites, such as link farms (where groups of people link to each other for the sake of building link volume) can actually lower your search ranking.

Apparently, links from sites or groups of sites that are considered "subject matter expert" pages by the search engines are worth a huge amount too.

Think About What Would Your Customers Want

Many things cited as SEO advantages are also advantages to your customers. Valid links, working tools, accessible HTML code, fast loading times, well structured navigation, easily found and focused content - they're all good for SEO.

This also all good stuff for your customers, and it helps with SEO for two reasons:

1. The search engines can find their way around, since the site is well structured and easy to navigate
   
2. People are more likely to link to your site if *GASP*... it is ACTUALLY useful and easy to use.
   

So if you try to make using your website a great experience for your visitors,  you'll find long term SEO benefits too - which is pretty cool, since it makes sense that good sites should be rewarded.

High Quality Is Key

Creating a high quality site that's worth visiting and linking to is a pretty big part of online success, and it's a strength for SEO too. From the quality of your web design to the quality of your content, it all matters. And not always because it matters directly to the search engines, but because it matters to people, and it is people that provide the links that the search engines pay attention to.

So those were three points that really struck me as interesting. Ultimately, it seems to me that SEO could be summed up in a sentence: "Build a really useful, high quality and easy to use site, and you'll get traffic from search engines." Naturally that's pretty simplistic, and it's a huge field and discipline that most business owners will probably need help in (read that guide, seriously).

There are also a number of technical concerns there, which you'll need to learn or get someone to look at. But technical stuff is easy. Creating high quality content is not - so which do you think you should start with?

Aside: We are an SEO Friendly System & CMS - Hooray!

On a final (geeky) note, I was pretty chuffed that with GoodBusiness we've got a lot of the SEO friendly features that SEOmoz.org mentions. For example, 301 redirects on the web page level for duplicate content is there. Friendly, human readable links for blog posts, products and catalogs - check! Google sitemap creation, yep! We've even totally covered the website metrics and analytics they recommend.

Excuse me while I go pat the team on the back =)