by Jonathan Marshall In an effort to help online marketers increase their understanding of search engine marketing, I want to highlight some fundamental areas. These are the core concepts surrounding search engine marketing. Content Starting off with arguably the most important part of SEO. If you are creating a website or working on a site you've already created, the content is one of the crucial factors for successful search engine marketing. The pages you create should provide valuable information that references very specific terms and concepts that are specific to your website. Titles and Meta Tags In the early days of search engine optimization, marketers thought that meta-tags were the primary way to attract search engine traffic. Meta-tags are HTML tags that help describe the document they are located within.

Today, while the meta-tags are important, we know that search engines also look at a site's content, internal links, and link popularity. Keyword Market Analysis A Keyword Market is the total number of unique searches on the Internet that are relevant to your website. A Keyword Market is defined by the top-level or root keyword that is generally most relevant to your business. Top-level keywords may contain thousands of vertical keyword markets. Market analysis also helps determine if your key words are shared by other competitors, and if they are, what you can do to differentiate yourself from them.

Link Popularity The number of outside websites that link to your website is another contributing factor that help search engines calculate your relevancy for a specific search term. Link popularity and gaining new links from outside websites to your website are two determining factors that can improve search engine rankings. Link Structure As the Internet has become more popular, websites have turned to new technologies like dynamic HTML, Flash and well designed graphics to improve the user experience. Good navigation through your website is key. Search engines use the links within your website to crawl and index the pages those links direct the user to. Complex Sites and URL's As websites have grown larger and more complex, companies have begun using dynamic publishing systems to help them manage sites that contain hundreds or thousands of web pages.

Popular programs by companies like Microsoft turn a website into a database driven application capable of publishing and managing large amounts of content. Link Submissions These search engines and directories provide a free submissions page where you can submit your website and a few pages of your website to be included in their results. Make sure that you read the search engine's submission guidelines and not submit your website unnecessarily or excessively, because it can be removed completely for a number of things listed in the guidelines. All of these concepts are taught in San Diego seo training seminars by SEO experts.