There are two basic concepts of SEO -- one concept that marketers have complete control over, and another that they have no control over whatsoever. They are referred to as "on-page optimization" and "off-page optimization," but to more savvy marketers, they are referred to as content and links.

For the purposes of this article, I will tackle the off-page optimization first, which, in my opinion, is responsible for 90 percent of your ranking. There is a number of strategies marketers can employ off the web page to make significant ranking improvements. These factors typically include increasing the number of links from external websites. In other words, the more external links website X has from other credible and relevant websites, the better it is for website X. Each link to website X is considered a "vote of confidence" in the eyes of the search engines, specifically Google.

For example, let's assume website X sells computers and monitors. And, because website X has awesome content and computers for sale, it attracts several links from other computer-related sites, blogs, forums, etc. These links would be considered credible, reliable and relevant and would boost website X's rankings for terms like "computer."

Another concept to consider is the use of anchor text; both for external and internal linking. Wikipedia defines anchor text as the visible or clickable text in a hyperlink. An example of an external link would be the following:

Computers.com is an excellent resource for computers and computer equipment and their prices are very cheap.

Notice that there are two clickable texts (disabled in this example) -- computers and computer equipment. Ideally, the link to computers would point directly to the homepage of computers.com. And computer equipment would link directly to a page on computers.com that sells computer equipment and accessories, obviously. Unfortunately, it's very hard to manage these links on an external site, unless you already have an established relationship with the person who put them there.

On-page optimization refers to factors that are controlled internally with the HTML code on a website. Examples of on-page optimization include the actual content, header tags, meta-tags (i.e., title, keyword and description tag) and internal linking. Let's examine website X that sells computers. It would be wise if throughout its website, it used the term "computer," "PC" and "desktop" when referring to its products. Here is an example of what the meta tags may look like in the homepage of website X:

< title >Computers.com: Home Desktop Computers and PCs< /title >

< meta name="keywords" content="computer, desktop, pc, home, small

   business, consumer" >

< meta name="description" content="Computers.com offers home and desktop computers for users and small business.">

It's important not to flood the tags with hundreds of keywords or keyword variations. While it used to be an acceptable practice, it no longer works and is now considered keyword spam. While it looks as if I am only focusing on six keywords in the above example, the search engines are smart enough to use variations of every word in the keyword tag.

Header tags (H1, H2, H3 tags) are probably the most significant body tags on a website. They tell search engines what the main headline of a web page will be, similar to an outline, and should comprise the targeted keywords. The "H2" and "H3" are respectively sub-headings to the "H1" tag.