Luke Hubbard

Search Engine Optimization, often called SEO, is the art of gaining high rankings in search engine results. Search engines rank results based on three basic principles: linking, content, and architecture.

Luke Hubbard Ponders SEO in Paris

Linking is by far the most important aspect of SEO. Gaining a link is a statement that your site provides value and someone finds it useful. If your site gets a lot of quality links, then it shows the search engines that others find your site relevant and useful. Note that a link from a high-quality website will make more of an impact on your rank than tons of links from trash sites. Also, relevancy from the linking website is also considered. For instance, since my website is generally about Internet marketing & advertising, a link from AdAge would probably impact my search engine ranking more than a link from icanhascheezburger.com.

Content is the actual text, images, videos, or whatever else that’s on the site. Obviously, strong content provides value and thus will gain links. it is important to keep content focused on an overall theme in order for robots and humans to understand what your site is about and to find it useful.

Architecture is becoming a less important part of SEO as technology evolves as it concerns both web masters and search engines. Web masters have better tools to keep their sites clean and well constructed. The search engines are becoming smarter and overcoming obstacles that used to give them problems such as identifying and reading inline frames.

One way to see how Google views the value on your site is to check its page rank, an algorithm that assigns a number value between 1-10 to web pages. You can check a website’s page rank using the tool below.

Remember, a “10″ is a perfect score and Google doesn’t give out many of them. Check out the ranks for Google, MSN, Apple, NewYorkTimes.com, and PerezHilton.com for fun.

Here’s a great article on link building opportunities that I found on Search Engine Watch. 

Don’t Overlook These Link Building Opportunities – Search Engine Watch (SEW).

In Summary, the article basically says that you shouldn’t scoff at any link building opportunities including links from new sites, sites with low page rank, or temporary pages. Basically, all links have a value and can help your overall site traffic goal.