Okay...WHAT exactly is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Is it writing code? Is it programming? Web design? Can someone please clarify?

It is making sure Google can read the contents of your website. For example, when you stuff all your text in an image, Google’s automated process won’t be able to read it. However, if you annotate stuff with related information in the code (this needn’t be visible to your visitors), Google can use that.

There’s a lot of similar facets to it (e.g. make sure all your pages use just one way to get there so Google doesn’t spread the page’s ranking across multiple links). It’s not that difficult, IMHO, just a lot of things you can pay attention to, and lots to read up on.

Mostly, I just try to write valid HTML and accessible pages and on providing good content that Google will want to list high.

You’re asking a huge question here.

At a basic level, SEO involves the content that is written and appears on the page and the code that is used to create the page.

You would have to clarify what you want to do in the marketing/advertising world before anyone could answer whether or not you should focus on it. There are a hundred things you could do with marketing/advertising that SEO would have no bearing on and a hundred more things that it would. Learning is an ongoing process if you really want to do it right because Google’s algorithm changes as they find too many people have begun to exploit the loopholes.

You also have to keep in mind that Google does not apply the same weight to the various elements as Yahoo does, so you need to optimize as well as you can for both crawlers. Then once you understand the basics of SEO, you may want to broaden your focus to SEM which is a much larger discussion.

As I understand it, it’s the art of getting the best possible search results for your web site. It’s more of a marketing skill than anything else.

One bad and outdated example is to put a bunch of keywords in ‘invisible text’ on your page so that it appears on more searches. Google’s smart enough to ignore these. Another common and practical technique is to get your page linked from as many pages as possible. A lot of porn sites (in particular) create thousands of sites that just have links to the real sites, to make it appear that a certain website is more popular than it really is.

There are tons of little tricks like this. I try to avoid the ‘trashier’ ones in practice because it can degrade the professional appearance of the site.

Those are both outdated exploits. Now it is about the quality of links, not necessarily the quantity. And the invisible text method will actually downgrade your site ranking because so many people tried this exploit.

In a phrase: voodoo to get Google to put your website higher in search results.

Basically, if you write a really clear, well-organized website that other good websites link to, Google will pick up on this and place you high in search results.

But if that’s too expensive or seems like too much work, you can hire SEO consultants who will advise you that, for instance, using minus signs in your hyperlinks instead of underscores will improve your page search ranking.

I have been doing SEO for about 6 years now and am still learning, actually in SEO you never stop learning due to the constant evolution of algorithms and the overall search model. The thing that seems to confuse people the most about SEO is the fact that the general theory of it is quite simple whereas the actual tactics used to implement it require much skill and knowledge.

Are you planning on getting started in traditional marketing (TV, Radio, Print)? or rather interactive marketing (PPC, SMO, SEO, Rich Media, etc)?

If you are interested in getting started in interactive marketing then you without question need to know as much about SEO as you can possibly retain. If you are looking to get started in traditional marketing then an advanced knowledge of SEO is not entirely necessary, I would still recommend learning more about it (SEOmoz is a good place to learn) because even in traditional media you will at some point encounter interactive marketers.

Feel free to message me with any additional questions, or if you are interested in a weeks worth of SEO educational reading material.

I prefer to call it a “Dark Art”

SEO is an acronym ‘professional’ spammers give themselves

@BBQsomeCows this is the 16th piece of flame-bait I’ve seen from you today so I should really just not even respond. However I take offense to close-minded people that think it’s okay to arbitrarily judge an entire group of people.

http://www.fluther.com/disc/58743/how-can-i-make-my-site-appear-on-google-searches/