There are several aspects to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but the biggest pieces are on-page content factors and backlinks.

1. On-Page content:
   Keyword density of your content.  That is, you want people to find your page when they run a search on Google, Yahoo or MSN.  If you keep your web pages very narrowly focused then the search engines will prefer your pages.
2. Backlinks:
   Backlinks can be from off-site pages (like a Hubpages article) or on-site pages (like another page on your site).  When you are getting your site up and running in the beginning your pages won't have any respect or authority with Google, Yahoo, or MSN.  As a result they will count but not very much.  The best backlinks will be from an already established website.

Types of Backlinks

For Google there are 2 types of backlinks - ones that pass page rank and ones that do not.  Page rank is how Google measures the importance of any given web page.  The importance of any given page is largely determined by the number of backlinks pointing to that page.  However, after years of spammers posting links on every site they could Google provided sites with a way of controlling which links were legit and which were garbage.  There is an additional tag for the href tag in html named "rel".  If rel is set to "nofollow" then the backlink does not pass any page rank and does not increase the page rank of your page.

The number of backlinks needed for any given page to rank well in Google is dependent on several factors.  The primary factors are:

• Keyword:  The number of backlinks to top pages for any given keyword have pointing at them.
• Quality of Backlinks:  A backlink from a Page Rank (PR) 6 site is better than a backlink from a PR 1 site.  The scale is not linear - 6 PR 1 backlinks do not equal 1 PR 6 backlink.  I've heard some gurus suggest that PR is a log scale so 1 PR 2 is worth 10 PR 1 backlinks and 1 PR 3 is worth 100 PR 1 backlinks.

You shouldn't ignore social bookmarking or pings (especially if you have a blog).  However, that's for a later hub.  Right now I want to talk about two less obvious but effective means of building backlinks.

The first method is building backlinks on blogs via comments.  You might say "this is less obvious than ... what?"  Everyone knows you should build backlinks on blogs and forums.  However, most will automatically apply the "NOFOLLOW" tag to your links so the comments might be good for driving traffic but they aren't much good for SEO purposes.  Read on, I've got a solution for that.

The second method is a loophole.  Basically you find site with high PR and create profiles on them with a link to your site in the profile.  Now the trick is to find sites that are "DOFOLLOW" and high PR.  That research is worth a lot alone.  However, there's a tool out there that will create these profilies - with links and anchor text - for you automatically.

Blog Backlinks

There are a lot of blogs out there.  Some provide "DO FOLLOW" backlinks but most do not - by default in the software (such as Wordpress).  A free tool for building "DO FOLLOW" backlinks is CommentHunt.

CommentHunt lists itself as a search engine for High PR blog backlinks.  However, my experience - while limited to just a few keywords - has been that the blogs are PR 0 to PR 2.  Not exactly high page rank.  Still this strategy can be worthwhile and best of all it is free.

High PR Backlinks

One of the latest backlink building strategies today is to find high PR sites that provide you with the ability to put up a profile page with a "DO FOLLOW" link in the profile.  There are a couple of sources for these sites. The best source is a tool called the Brute Force Linking Loophole.

This software is great.  The main drawback is that it can tie up your computer for an hour creating all of these backlinks.  But just think - if it takes the computer an hour on autopilot to create these links how long would it take you to do it manually?  The author's conservatively estimate 3-4 hours.  Read my full Brute Force Linking Loophole review here.