Although learning all the nuances of search engine optimization (SEO) can take years of experience, the basics are really fairly simple to understand. For many websites, and probably yours, these basics can often be enough to generate relevant, targeted traffic from search engines.
Three Broad SEO Goals
SEO Goal 1: Make sure the search engines know that your site (and each of its pages) exists. Search engines prefer to discover sites and pages within those sites via links from other pages and other sites on the web. Therefore, to achieve this goal, make sure someone links to your site from a page on the web that the search engines routinely crawl and index. In addition, be sure to include a sitemap on your site so that each page of your domain will linked to and discovered.
SEO Goal 2: Make sure the search engines understand what your page(s) are about. Use words and phrases on each page that clearly conveys that page's content. If your page is primarily about green fuzzy widgets, the phrase "green fuzzy widgets" should appear in plain text on the page, preferably in the title, near the top of the content in a heading, in the middle of the content, and near the end. Similar phrases and words that help convey the topic of the page should be used as well and the use of headings, bolded words, and lists will help place emphasis on major, relevant concepts. This intelligent structuring of the content will be understood and appreciated by both your human visitors and the search engine bots.
SEO Goal 3: Make sure the search engines realize the value of your content. If you produce great content, promote it and market it, others will see the value in it as well. Some of them will turn around and help you promote it to their followers, and some of those will do the same. This kind of natural promotion of your great content will lead to sharing and links back to your site. The search engines use those links and socialization as a means of determining how popular and relevant your content is. By creating great content, and then promoting and sharing it, you stand the best chance of helping search bots recognize that your content is worthy of ranking.
In short, search engines need to know that your site and its pages exist; search engines need to understand what each of your pages is actually about; and search engines need to feel confident that other people appreciate and value your content. This confidence in your content is gained when search engines notice others sharing it, talking about it, and linking to it.
If you'd like to learn more about SEO, start with the guide that Google published. It is a good "next step" in the learning process. You can download it from Google at http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf. Note: It is a pdf.
