There have been a number of articles about basic SEO in first week of 2007. Why the sudden interest in SEO, especially after six months of SEO-slamming?

SEO has received a lot of attention in the past few days. Though much of it comes as reaction to comments from Kevin Lee and Dave Pasternack from DidIt.com, the volume of recent articles about SEO and the tone of them show that SEO is important to the search marketing community.

A common thread in most of the SEO-related articles that have appeared in the past few days is the importance of basic SEO practices. While experienced SEOs and search savvy webmasters know and understand the four essential elements of optimization, this is likely a good point to point them out again.

Title:
The title of a page or document is written in the HEAD section of the code and is the first onpage element seen by search spiders and search engine users. When the page or document is displayed, the title appears at the very top left of the monitor, in the same space as the minimize, resize and close buttons on most web browsers. The title of a page or document is used to phrase the reference link from search results.

Tags:
Meta tags matter though not necessarily in the same ways they used to. Though there are dozens of meta tags, the most important is the DESCRIPTION tag. (meta name="description" content="DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION GOES HERE"). Search spiders pull information from the Description tag to use in cataloging and sorting data found on the page. Search engines sometimes pull the short site description displayed under search results from the Description tag.

Robot inclusion or exclusion files are also found in meta tags. These files can be used to instruct search spiders to visit or ignore a page. Websites with private or paid-subscription content tend to exclude search spiders using simple robots tags.

Oddly enough, the least useful is actually the one most people think of first, the keyword tag. No major search engine gives the keyword tag very much (if any) consideration.

Content:
As the cliche goes; Content is

King. Regardless of whether it is news, entertainment, product information, video or other images, content is the reason any website exists. It needs to be expressed in ways search spiders can read and understand.

Fortunately, search spiders are pretty good at understanding the context of site content. The very best format for search spiders to read and comprehend is standard text.

Links:
Links are the artaries of the web, joining virtually every document to every other document, in one way or another. That is the basic thinking behind most algorithmic search spiders at any rate. Googlebot and Yahoo's Slurp are designed to follow links as they find them from one document to another.

Links are critical to SEO success. There are three types to consider.

The first is internal links, or the links within a site or domain. These links lead from Index (home) page to more specific pages found deeper in the site. The link structure of a website is critical for its success. The site has to be easy to navigate and has to allow search spiders access to all important documents or pages within the site.

The second type of link is called out-bound links. These are links that lead to other websites or domains. They are important because they act as references from one site to another both in the eyes of live-users and in the minds of algorithmic search spiders. Google, for instance, judges the relavency of websites based in part by which sites out-bound links are directed towards.

The third and, from an SEO perspective, most impactful type of link is called the in-bound link. In-bound links are those directed to a web document or website, a link from another page. Incoming links are important because they are most often the references seen and judged by search spiders. One of the basic points in Google's algorithm is an analysis of the relevancy of linked pages. Another is the number of relevant incoming links directed to a document.

These are the four basic elements SEOs look at before recommending alterations to web documents. Though there is a great deal more to think about when thinking through an effective optimization plan for any given website or document. Knowing the four basic elements is critical to understanding new practices in SEO, a topic I hope to look at later this week.