How does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work?

SEO is not complicated, as the name says it is the process of optimizing (tweaking) your website so that the search engines (google etc) "LIKE" it and "TRUST" it and therefore want to rank it highly in their natural search results.

Now to make the search engines "LIKE" your website, you need to optimize it for the keywords you wish to appear for. Secondly you need to check you have no errors on your pages (broken links etc). Now to be liked you must be careful not to use any of the bad techniques out there such as keyword stuffing (adding your keywords too many times). There are many other Black Hat (Bad) techniques which you must avoid.

Which brings us onto the "TRUST" element. Now to gain trust, as stated, you must avoid using any bad techniques (avoid buying bundles of links, these are frowned upon by Google). The way to gain trust is by link building. Effective link building takes time and it is important that all links are relevant and are trusted by Google (a quick check of this, is to see if the website you are linking to / from has a page rank). Google views all links it can follow as giving a thumbs up to your website. This shows how important it is to get it right. If you link your website to a bad website which Google doesn't like, this can adversely affect your standing with them and in reverse if you have a link to your site from a website with a great relevance to your own which is also well established with the search engines this will give your site a good tick from Google.