Search engine optimization is critical if you want your website to rank well. Given how important SEO is it is really quite remarkable how many webmasters don't really know how to do it. A big part of the problem is that the factors that are used to rank sites are kept secret. This has lead to a lot of conjecture about how to get sites to rank well, a lot of it is just plain wrong. Understanding what is and isn't important is a critical part of SEO.
The first thing that you need to understand about SEO is that it isn't nearly as complicated as people make it out to be. In fact over the years it has gotten easier since there is less room for gaming the system. Really SEO is more time consuming and tedious than it is difficult. In fact there are only two things that you need to know about SEO, you need to put up lots of relevant content and you need to build lots of links to that content. Yes there are some other details that you will want to keep in mind. However if you create relevant content and send lots of links to it you will rank well.
In the old days there used to be lots of things that you had to worry about like keyword density and title tags and a whole lot of other things. This was necessary because the search engines weren't really very good at determining what your website was about based on the content. You basically had to tell them what your site was about. Obviously this made it fairly easy to game the system by doing things like keyword stuffing. This doesn't work today, the search engines have gotten a lot better at determining what your site is about based on the content that you put on it. While it won't hurt to include the keywords that you are targeting in the content you really don't have to. If your content is relevant to what you are trying to rank the search engines will figure it out.
The biggest factor these days when it comes to SEO is how many links you have pointing at your site, and our friends at Las Vegas Search Engine Marketing provided us with a great article on link building on our site. Again this has changed over the years. In the past it was strictly down to who had the most links. Nowadays the quality of the links is more important than the total number of them. If you can get a few links from high Pagerank sites that are in the same niche as your site that will be worth hundreds of links from low quality sites. That being said you should still take advantage of links anywhere that you can find them. Building links is the most difficult part of getting a site to rank well and should take up the bulk of your time. In fact you should probably spend about ninety percent of your time building links and just ten percent adding content.