Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
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A developer friend of mine, before he knew I worked for an SEO firm, told me he thought of SEO as 'snake oil,' not an uncommon view among many Web professionals.
Wilkie, David. Search-This (2004). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
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Writing articles is one of the best way to improve the link popularity of your website - find out why.
Dixon, Nicholas. Webcredible (2005). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
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Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Posts to Increase Your Readership
When you search-engine-optimize your blog posts, you can increase your blog’s subscribers in a long-term way. You don’t have to stiffen your prose to apply search engine optimization — you just have to apply keywords in the right places.
Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2008). Articles>Publishing>Search Engine Optimization>Blogging
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Semantic HTML and Search Engine Optimization
So what is POSH? No, it's not just some new clothing fashion hype amongst web designers - POSH is the acronym for Plain Old Semantic HTML. The term Semantic HTML is used for a variety of things, but it has it's origin in one objective: creating (X)HTML documents using semantic elements and attributes, as opposed to using presentational HTML.
De Valk, Joost. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Search Engine Optimization
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Intelligent Site Structure for Better SEO!
Search engines are one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more important. SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks, and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients fixing technical issues. A site's structure though, is just as important. Your site's structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site's purpose and intent. By creating a good structure, you can use the content you've written that has attracted links from others, and use your site's structure to spread some of that "linkjuice" to the other pages on your site.
De Valk, Joost. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization
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Five Ways to Increase Targeted Website Traffic
Website visitors do not arrive magically… they follow recommendations from others, such as links, display ads, or even offline word of mouth. As 2007 turns into 2008, here are 5 easy ways to substantially increase the amount of traffic coming to your site.
Jason, Chris. ChrisJason.com (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization
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Findability/SEO Cheat Sheet: Quick Guide to Web Standards SEO
A findability strategy cheat sheet that will guide you through all of the stuff you should be doing when creating new websites or even redesign existing ones.
Walter, Aarron. AarronWalter.com (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Search Engine Optimization
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Free Search Engine Tools and Services 
You can communicate information about your site to search engines and see your site from their perspective using some free services and utilities from Yahoo! and Google.
Walter, Aarron. Building Findable Websites (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
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You’ve built a great site-now get the word out! There are plenty of places where you can promote your site for free.
Walter, Aarron. Building Findable Websites (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization
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Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid
Desperation, ignorance, and a moral compass that doesn’t point due north often get perfectly logical, good people and companies in trouble with search engines. Because being listed high in search results is such a desirable goal to attain, many people search for shortcuts to the front of the line—which can land them in serious trouble.
Walter, Aarron. Building Findable Websites (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization
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Overview of User Experience Design Concepts
User experience design has become an essential consideration in the development of websites and technical communications. No longer can we throw together a few headings and numbered lists in CSS and XHTML and hope the result will be worthwhile and meaningful to users. As the web expands and content becomes more accessible, it is necessary to take content and websites to the next level - to provide information that is not just useful or even usable, but enjoyable. If a person has to spend more than a few seconds trying to find what they need they are that much more likely to “Google it” and find a site or help system that provides the answer quicker.
Designing User Experience (2008). Articles>User Experience>Search Engine Optimization
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SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Why It Works Best With Quality Writing
Attracting the attention of Google and other search engines is crucial for bringing visitors to your website. To achieve this effectively, search engine optimised copy should run parallel with good website construction.
Ward, Merlin. Webcredible (2008). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Search Engine Optimization
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Accessibility as Part of The Search Engine Marketing Strategy
In traditional marketing you're looking to define your targeted audience for your business or organisation. In Internet marketing things work in the same way. Unfortunately, with the growing popularity of the Internet in the past years and with the growing number of people building sites, a certain part of the online audience has been overlooked.
Big Mouth Media (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization
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Secret Benefits of Accessibility Part 2: Better Search Ranking
One of the main benefits of Web accessibility is that a Website that's more accessible to people is also usually more accessible to search engines. The more accessible your site is to search engines, the more confidently they can guess what the site's about, giving your site a better chance at the top spot in the search engine rankings.
Moss, Trenton. SitePoint (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization
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Metadata: Seven Tips for Writing Better Keywords
The shift in how search engines treat keywords is significant. They tend to ignore the keyword metatag and rather look for keywords in the actual page content. This means that you need to figure out your keywords before you write any content. Then, you include them throughout your content, particularly in headings and summaries.
McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Search Engine Optimization
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Be a White Hat SEO for Your Intranet: It's Good for Accessibility
The SEOs with white hats conduct legitimate optimising of web pages to make the site come up appropriately in the Search Engine Results Pages (also called SERPs). The back hat SEOs implement tricks to appear high in the results pages even if the web site is not necessarily relevant. The range of tricks is astonishing. But most of the techniques used by white hat SEOs were similar if not identical to the guidelines given by accessibility experts.
NetStrategy-JMC (2006). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization
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Optimize Your AdWords Campaigns
Both AdWords and YSM are much more complicated beasts than the old banner networks ever were, and coming to grips with them can be a bit of a headache.
Oxer, Jonathan. Internet Vision Technologies (2008). Articles>Web Design>Marketing>Search Engine Optimization
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Right to Reply: SEO's Glory Days Are Not Over
In a recent article on Netimperative, Mike Grehan examined if the traditional role of SEO was becoming outdated, given the rise of social media. In this article, Eliza Dashwood, Director of Sales and Marketing, Ambergreen Internet Marketing offers a counter-point to Mike’s argument.
Dashwood, Eliza. NetImperative (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization>Search
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Common Sense SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Checklist
I don’t “really” know anything about SEO. What I do know is the folks at Google and other big search engines are just human beings like us who have created and constantly tweak the search algorithms. Their goal is to give us what we want when searching, the best possible websites relevant to what we are searching for. So let’s set aside all the fancy technical stuff and just use some good ol’ common sense.
Coyier, Chris. CSS Tricks (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization
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Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
Welcome to Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it'd be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites' interaction with both users and search engines. Although this guide won't tell you any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content.
Google (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization
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Do Not Crawl in the DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text 
We consider the problem of dust: Different URLs with Similar Text. Such duplicate URLs are prevalent in web sites, as web server software often uses aliases and redirections, and dynamically generates the same page from various different URL requests. We present a novel algorithm, DustBuster, for uncovering dust; that is, for discovering rules that transform a given URL to others that are likely to have similar content. DustBuster mines dust effectively from previous crawl logs or web server logs, without examining page contents. Verifying these rules via sampling requires fetching few actual web pages. Search engines can benefit from information about dust to increase the effectiveness of crawling, reduce indexing overhead, and improve the quality of popularity statistics such as PageRank.
Bar-Yossef, Ziv, Idit Keidar and Uri Schonfeld. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization
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Ten Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic
In the last six months, we've been lucky enough to help quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites. Many of these campaigns have been constructed around the goal of building search engine rankings, as this is our primary business, but we've also found that our ability has given us great power in the fields of brand-awareness and marketing overall. Thus, the following ten processes are primarily about building traffic and through it, attention.
SEOmoz (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization
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Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization
This guide is designed to describe all areas of search engine optimization - from discovery of the terms and phrases that will generate traffic, to making a site search engine friendly, to building the links and marketing the unique value of the site/organization's offerings.
SEOmoz (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization
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This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below.
SEOmoz (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization
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This presentation describes how creating an accessible website takes care of its (organic) search engine optimization to a very appreciable extent taking reference from the WCAG 2.0 working draft and the Google webmaster guidelines.This presentation was created and presented by Abhay Rautela to the Sapient creative community at the New Delhi office in February 2007.
Rautela, Abhay. Cone Trees (2007). Presentations>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization
