Simple Seo = Quality Search Traffic

Hi All,
I found a really informative write up on how easy it is to apply and practice search engine optimization techniques to your websites/pages.
I just had to share it with you. many thanks to Mary Laww for this wonderful info.
Like i always say, "simple makes life easy". Enjoy

Why being a 'Simple Simon' and keeping SEO simple is the best way to 1st page results.

"Simple Simon met a pie man going to the fair...", a lovely nursery rhyme I tell my little one each day. And how apt. to the SEO industry, even today in March 2010. Because simple is key to SEO; and yes although there are hundreds of different factors to a good search engine ranking, and you could beat yourself up reading, analyzing and looking into every 'nook and cranny' of every possible factor, actually keeping it simple gets the best results.

But, to put a bit of relevance to this, and to adapt the nursery rhyme; you as the webmaster are Simon, and the search engines are the 'fair', and so you need to keep it simple, and try hard not to get caught up in the over-complication of SEO.

Lets take a look at how 'some' people in the industry complicate things; and not to put to finer point upon it, those that claim wildly that Google, Yahoo, Bing have had an algorithm modification (to 99.9% of readers this means the search engines have just decided to change a few things, and it makes some sites appear a little higher and some sites a little lower) then I simply say, stop looking at ‘algorithms’ and just concentrate on what worked back in the day, because it also works today, and its all about just keeping it simple.

Yes, of course, over the years there have been changes, but keeping it simple has always been the key. Anyone remember Inktomi? The 48 hour paid for inclusion service that got you into MSN in 2 days. That was a lovely tool, and if you were happy to pay for it you would get refreshes of your website every 48 hours as well. If you don’t remember that then you are probably a bit newer to the search engine ‘game’, so you might remember how in years gone by it was a tad bit easier to get your website ranked well in Google. BUT, was it really that much easier, no not really, so I must emphasize ‘the tad’ part.

What else has changed over the years? For Google not much really, well when I say not much, what I mean is – from the perspective of a webmaster, from a business owner – squarely focused on wanting to get more visitors to her website, nothing really has changed over the years.
Yes, yes, we all know the ‘gurus’ who will say A has changed, T has changed, ZZ has changed etc, and yes they may be right – but who really cares, because from the webmaster and business owners perspective all is ‘as was’. And again, back to the theme - SEO is a simple approach, but there are many that will deliberately attempt to over-complicate it.

Simple SEO 1 - Get yourself a nice title tag for your website, fill it with some nice keywords but obviously so it makes sense for your business.

Simple SEO 2 - Now add a nice description and a set of keywords; all part of the meta tags.

Simple SEO 3 - Make sure your pages have plenty of content, with keywords splattered about that match up with the title, the description and the keyword meta tags.

Simple SEO 4 - Get some lovely websites to link to yours.

Before I go on I would like to stress how a lot of SEO’s might tell you “to ignore the keywords and description tag…blah blah blah” and yes you can ignore them, of course you can. You can also not build a website, not sell anything online and really why did you even bother any of this to begin with, can you even remember?
Sarcasm aside, yes most search engines do ignore them, we “think”, but some still take some note of them which means I recommend you include them, just like back in the day. It will not hurt, and it can only help