DYI SEO - A Few Basic Tips on Search Engine Optimization to Get the Eyeballs Rolling

You want more hits on the content you publish. You want higher click-through rates. You probably want to make sure your site is Optimized for Search Engines. You want SEO - Search Engine Optimization.

At least for me, this term (SEO) used to be one of those concepts that seemed so sophisticated that maybe I was not going to be able to attain full understanding of it. I mean... If I was to really, truly understand this, I would have to pack my bags, leave behind my loved ones and move to Tibet for 7 years and study with a monk to then come under full understanding.

Then, like with many things in IT, I cracked open an instance of Google Chrome and did a few searches... Then I learned a few things... cool things about SEO and what it entails.  The bullet points and links below are the few recurring themes that I was able to come across while researching the concept of SEO from a newbie's perspective. In other words... let me do the math so you don't have to.

I did spend an hour or so reading through the links similar to the ones below. This task definitely increased my understanding of SEO (by a lot more than when I started to write this post).  It also inspired me to go ahead and apply several of these tips and techniques to this blog.  As a way to measure progress (if any), I went to the Alexa site to rank my blog site.  My ego got a little bit bruised when I realized that Alexa ranked my site in the 26,256,809th spot.  But then I thought about it for a little bit.... How many sites are on the internet right now?  Well... it just so happens that there is an answer for that.  At the time of typing this post, there were about 1,230,000,000 sites on the internet. That means if my site is ranked somewhere in the 26 million slot, then my blog site is in the top 2.135% of websites in the world!  Not bad for a "once-in-a-while" posting job!  (Ego Health Status = OK).

• Key Concepts
• Very nice basic instruction set from the folks at shoutmeloud.com
• Interesting Tips
• Free key word checker: SEO SERP Workbench an app for Google Chrome
• Plagiarism checkers
• (will add other tools as I revisit this post - I want to see how my little SEO improvements increase my site rankings)
• Search Engine Specific Tips
• Optimize Your Blogger Blogs by changing your template's title.
• More Blogspot tips here.
• Great things come in threes... so here is one more for good measure.

Finally, in the interest of raising the global intellectual IQ on this topic, if you spot any out-of-date descriptions or erroneous information, please, kindly use the comments section to politely point out the issue (keep drama to an absolute minimum).