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I just discovered this firefox extension and it's a must-have for SEO. First because of it's "transparent toolbar", that will give you valuable information on the site you visit. Backlinks, PR, number of indexed pages in Google, Yahoo, MSN... there are a lot of options.

SeoQuake also has a lot of info displayed in the search engines results.

Download it from Firefox.

The idea already hit me a few months ago, millions of users with the Google Toolbar, AdWords, AdSense, Google Analytics...
Google can gather a huge amount of information regarding the behaviour of users.
How long they stay on a web site, did they come back to the search engine and clicked on another site, how many page views/visit, etc... These can be very good indicators to know if users where satisfied and so on...

There is no way to know IF and HOW Google is using this information, but I'm sure they do use it. And if this "traffic patterns" or "user behaviour" data starts to get important for search engines, this is going to be a new challenge for webmasters and SEO professionals.

Here is an interresting thread about the subject: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/33769-1-10.htm

Step 3, backlinks

The best way to get search engines spiders crawl your web site is to have a maximum of backlinks. What is a backlink? Any link to your site or a page of your site from another web site. The more backlinks you have, the more and the faster spiders will crawl your pages.
Ideally, these backlinks should come from pages which are matching the content of your site. If you sell cars and a cartoon web site is linking to you, this will not help you much to improve your placement on car selling.

Use good link anchors. (see previous article, SEO Introduction)

Step 4, see the first results

Check the first results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Do you have some pages indexed? site:yourdomain.com
What backlinks do you have? link:yourdomain.com (this takes quite some time before to be updated)
Check the titles and descriptions used for your pages.
Start checking your placement on your target search terms. You can use a free tool like this one to avoid checking all the pages manually... http://www.iwebtool.com/search_engine_position

After these first verifications, you will probably have to adjust several things and improve your pages to get better positions.

A simple tool on WebRankInfo, to query 17 Google data centers at once. Useful to check your rankings and future rankings.

http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/google-data-centers.php

Nowadays, it requires a lot of efforts to get traffic to web sites. There are billions of pages out there.

You can create a very nice product, with a great design and lots of services, and never get one single visit. Sure, content is king, but a king needs its villagers. And one of the best places to gather villagers is on search engines.
Amongst others: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, etc...

I'll try to give you a few tips to get more visibility on search engines.

Step 1, content, content, content

Search engines (through their spiders) are indexing text content from your pages. So the first thing you have to do, is make sure you have plenty of text, related to the subject of your web site. The context of the words is also very important, so don't just list hundreds of keywords. Write correct sentences, repeating several times the words you want to focus on. Try to use all the synonyms you know. Eventually, don't correct your typos or mistakes, people will do the same typos when they do a research!

Plus:
Always set the value of the alt="" tag of your images.
Set the description and keywords metas. If possible, write different metas for each page.

Step 2, internal links

Make sure to have a good sitemap, linking to your different sections and pages, and inter-linking all your pages. When doing so, give a lot of importance to the anchor text your are using for your link.

For example, if you have a page selling an online HTML training.
DON'T DO THIS:
To join our online HTML training, <a href="001.html">click here</a>.
DO THIS:
Join now our <a href="online-html-training.html">online HTML training</a>.

Search engines algorithms are taking into consideration the text used for the link itself. "click here" is meaningless. But "online HTML training" correspond exactly to your subject, and this specific page, whatever its content, will be considered as an interresting page for "online HTML training" by the search engines.

For the story, it is because of this algorithm that it is possible to do "Google bombs". Try the search "miserable failure" on Google, and you will find as first web site the biography of George W. Bush. I can assure you Bush is not talking about a miserable failure anywhere in its biography. But a lot of "funny hackers" added a link to the site of Bush, with the text "miserable failure".  As so many pages link to Bush's web site with that text, Google consider it as an interresting ressource for miserable failure.
This was done long ago and it is still number one on that search. Living proof of the very importance of the text for your links...

Okay, that will be it for today, now go to work on your pages
To be continued...