Ruud Hein over at Search Engine People has begun a series of posts explaining How Search Really Works, in a very basic and understandable way. I recommend it for any beginners out there. As of now, there are only two posts, so it has a long ways to go if he plans to cover the topic thoroughly, but those first two have him off to a good start.

The above link is to the first post, the second can be found here at Keyword Links. That is an aspect of SEO that the beginner often misses; focusing on the elements on the web page itself to the exclusion of all else. There are ways to influence how people describe your content, thus maximizing keywords in the incoming links. But better yet is building your own Web Empire, where you can send hundreds, even thousands of links to your own sites, with complete control over which pages get links and the text in that link. That is one of the beauties of having multiple websites.

This is a good example of why you should put your website content into a database and use modular design. Suppose you want to have site-wide links from Site A to Site B. You can use a simple line of PHP code in one of the components of your site to display a static link to Site B, but then every link has the same text, and links to the same page, both of which weakens their overall value.

Instead, call a function on Site A that returns the number of pages on the site, which will correspond to the counter value in the content database. Then call another that looks up the keyword (or first keyword for use in the META tag) or page title (which should include the keyword) for one of the pages on your site, chosen at random but changing only every week or month. (See my earlier post on Random Elements on how to do that if you don’t already know). Now you have lots of different links, including ‘deep linking’ that has relevant keywords in the link text.