OK I have a website how will people find it.
SEO is the term used for Search Engine Optimisation. This is the process of optimising a website to get the best possible ranking on the search engines. There really is only one search engine that needs to be mentioned in my opinion and that's google. Although the principles are the same for other search engines such as yahoo, bing and ask
If you want to get noticed on the internet then you need to be indexed on google. The term indexed is when google finds your website and then starts crawling through all the available links and pages taking note of important words or phrases that are worth indexing. When you have been indexed by the google search robot(another technical term for a program that automatically searches your pages), you may be lucky enough for someone to find your website through google.
How to get a good ranking on google.
There are a number of factors involved in ensuring the pages on your website are correctly optimised for google and other search engines. I will list them and explain how to tackle it.
Url's
Your url's should be clean and decisive. If your site has url's such as http://www.mysite.org?bla&blis&ksdsk&sdsdk then is doesn't really make much sense to me as a human looking at it and google is pretty much the same. However if the actual page that the url is referring to had some really useful keywords such as http//www.mysite.org/seo_for_beginners/ then this would be much better and google will be much happier to index the page and store the url.
Keywords
Keywords are a way of summarising the key words and phrases that the page contains. For example the keywords for this site would be seo, search engine optimations. These pages are included within this pages source code in the meta tags, maybe that is why you are looking at this page now.
Title & Description
Your title should refelect the content of the page or site. Try to keep the title relevant and the description short and snappy. Try to put important keywords into the title such as Search Engine Optimisation for beginners.
Content
Your content is what google will look for when indexing the page. Don't bamboozle your visitors with loads of text(says me) but try to keep the content brief and within the context of the website.
Links
Create a section of each page that enables the search engine to find other sections of your site the structure of your website should be that you should be able to get to any page on the site in as few clicks as possible.
Canonicalisation
Phew that's a word and a half. Basically don't have two sites with exactly the same content. www.webworx.co.uk and webworx.co.uk is as far as google is concerned two seperate sites with exactly the same content so the power of the indexed pages is split between them. Use a 301 redirect to redirect webworx.co.uk to www.webworx.co.uk it will pay dividends.