If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or to sign up for email alerts.

Being something of a pureist Web 2.0 guy, I have criticized SEO quite a bit in my blogging career. As most of us find out sooner or later however, most professions have varying tiers of professionalism and excellence. This is true of search engine optimization as well. SEO, taken to its most excellent conclusion is really about truly optimizing sites for content, structure and essentially honesty.

Two years ago I would have laughed at the thought of SEO being anything more than structured “trickery” by people being paid to “force” do-nothing sites to the top of the Internet ladder. As I discovered much later, this is not true for the real SEO professionals. Top notch SEO involves structure and rules just as in mathematics or any other “rule driven” science.

The search engines operate on rules which can of course be manipulated by the unscrupulous, but not nearly as easily these days. For the average person with a website SEO knowledge can mean the difference between having a popular site and one that no one on the planet ever sees. Aside this, anyone who practices proper SEO techniques not only has a better chance of search engine positioning, but a much better site when all is said and done.

I am no SEO expert, but fortunately my partner Mihaela Lica is. This is how I discovered essentially how SEO should and can be done to make a good site even better. Any great SEO professional will tell you first thing that content is king, and this holds true for many other particulars as far as rules are concerned. Just a simple blog entry can be optimized for the best possible positioning by following a few easy SEO rules. Most professionals in this field would never take the time to deliver such a message because this knowledge is their stock in trade. Mihaela gives out these tips like candy . Perhaps out of kindness, but I think out of a desire for people to do things the right way and to make the Web a cleaner environment.

I wish I had known some of these simple tips when I first started blogging. Tags, links, descriptions, keywords and the like were just terms to me then. As far as Wordpress and other editors were concerned, all I wanted the suckers to do was get my post out accurately and quickly. Fortunatley for the new blogger, WP 2.5 and others offer excellent SEO features and plugins galore. I took so much for granted at the start, when following some professional advice could have saved me a great deal of time and worry. Real search engine optimization is not about tricks and puffs of smoke - it is about helping the search engines index your pages correctly. In the end, the best content is still king, if it is shown to the engines properly.

Special Note: Here is a copy of Mihaela’s Free eBook as a Primer for beginners. Special thanks goes out to Yvonne Russell for her fine editing work on this project.