If you're just starting to learn SEO, it can seem downright overwhelming. The more you read, the more confusing it gets. Just when you think you have a handle on it, someone tells you about something you've never encountered before. In this article, I hope to give you some basic tips focused on several important themes.
On the first day of almost every class you took in college, your professors handed you a syllabus. This outline showed you the major areas that the course would cover, and you could fit everything you learned under one or another of the main headings. That's my plan for this article; think of it as a syllabus for SEO. I have to warn you, though, that this syllabus is not going to last for your entire career as an SEO. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, and certain trends outside of the search engines act to disrupt the entire field (social networking sites, anyone?).
I'd like to give a tip of the hat to Richard Burckhardt, writing for Search Engine Journal. His article on 55 search engine tips led me to think about organizing principles, partly because I can't hold 55 tips in my head all at once. Since I'm not a college professor, these organizing principles will be presented somewhat informally, and will encompass more than one article.
So, without further ado, and quite possibly in no particular order, let's plunge into some of the major themes you'll encounter when you're doing SEO today.
Search Optimization 
