SEO = Search Engine Optimization
SEO FUNDAMENTALS - EASY TO UNDERSTAND SEO GUIDELINES
CHAPTER 1 - THE SEO WALTZ
by Country Graphics Website Design

There is a considerable amount of support available on SEO. It can consume your time and you can spend somewhere between hundreds to thousands of dollars on SEO consultants. I have put together a few easy to understand SEO fundamental guidelines.

The good thing is that you can do fundamental SEO work that will increase the traffic flow to your website pages. Search engines fetch free traffic to all sites, but most sites are not optimized to take advantage of this free service. Stick to the fundamental SEO steps provided in this article, and you'll be on your way to increased traffic to your website's pages.

PAGE ACCESSIBILITY
It is crucial that every page have a unique URL.
Do not use drop down flash menus for your navigation, the search engines can't read them.
Do not use the new CSS drop down menus at this time, you could be scrutinized as a spammer.
JavaScript should only be used for enhancement and not a requirement for the page to display important subject matter information.

THE TITLE META TAG & HEADING 1 TAG
MUST WORK WITH ONE ANOTHER
The page title is the headline in search results, the title words must reflect the page's content. It is useless to have redundant titles and non descriptive wording in the title tag. The page title meta tag is the most essential element on your pages. This wording appears in the browser's tile bar.

There are different beliefs on the amount of characters one should use in a title tag. Major search engines generate from 65 - 70 characters in the headline search results, but the major search engine are always updating their title tag character guidelines.
The title should begin with the key phrase subject matter, and can be followed by the name of the site.

Always keep the subject matter as the main focus. Include as many keywords and keyword phrases as needed to describe the page's subject matter, but try to keep the characters down to 70.

The title tag should be unique for each page on your site, it is essential to reflect the wording that is in the h1 Header Tag /h1 of each page.
The requisite here is to insure the title tag and the headerh1tag, must use the same keyword phrases that describes the page's subject matter.
Making sure this step is taken, will reinforce better search engine results and more traffic to your site.

The h1 to h6 tags are used to define HTML headings. h1 defines the most important heading. h6 defines the least important heading. Your h1 tag  should contain keywords and keyword phrases that represent the pages main subject matter. The h1 tag should be the first words that describe your subject matter on each page. Common h1 tag mistakes are: the page has no h1 tag, the h1 tag is in p tags or other tags, h1 tags aren't explicit enough to describe the subject matter on the page. Make sure that your page begins with an h1 tag. The h1 tag does not need to be visually huge in the largest font. (See more about Tag descriptions at the bottom of page)