Search engine optimization, or SEO, can be divided into two parts: on-site SEO, and link building.

On-site SEO is the process of optimizing the content of your pages for a particular keyword or keywords. The easiest way to do this is to use a free tool like WebCEO that will analyze your webpage and make suggestions on how you can better optimize it.

At it's simplest, on-site SEO is making sure that your keywords are found (in the right numbers) in the right places. Specifically, the search engines want to see your keywords in:

- Page titles
- Page body
- Bold text
- Top of page
- Bottom of page
- Alt text
- Text links

Link building, the second half of SEO, is at least as important as on-site SEO, but is often neglected. When search engines look at your site, they also look at all of the sites that link to your site. Each site that links to your site gives your site a certain number of "votes", based on several factors.

So, the more quality links you can get to your site, the higher you will rank in the major search engines. But before you can start gaining links to your site, you need to know what makes a quality link. There are several factors that determine a link's quality:

1 - Anchor text
A high quality link will have your keyword(s) in the anchor text, or the clickable text part of the link.

2 - Site quality
A high quality link is one from a quality, unique, content based site related to your site.

3 - Anchor text variation
When building links, you'll want to vary your anchor text. If all of your links have the same text, search engines may discount them as spam.

4 - Slowly but surely
Good things come to those who wait. Building links should be done slowly and steadily. If you build a whole bunch of links at once, you risk the links being discounted as spam by the search engines.