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The SEO Playing Field: The Search Engines
One of the first items that you need to become intimately acquainted with is knowledge about the Search Engines.
There are tons of search engines and meta search engines out there. All of them vary in some way or another with the algorithms that they use to determine which site to list where. They also vary a great deal in what category of traffic that they will send to your site. Some offer versions of their engine in different languages or dedicated more to the needs of different countries and industries. If you know your clients, you will know which search engines you should tailor your SEO towards. If you do not know your clients, you will probably just want to optimize it for the big three and hope for the best. (More about knowing your clients later.)
It is important to know that Google, Yahoo, and MSN make up the vast majority of all web searches on the Internet. Google makes up 70% of all search engine traffic on the Internet alone, and the other two make up most of the remainder. You might just decide that you are going to only optimize your site for Google, since that is the greatest of the search engines, but that might be a mistake. (More about that later)
In very general terms, here is a description of the top three search engines and how to optimize for them. There are obviously pages and pages of articles that can be read to give you more hints on these three search engines as well as for the multitude of other search engines out there (and also to lead you down false paths).
SEO for Google
Google is the most complex algorithm of them all. It takes into account a multitude of criteria including common things such as the title of your site and the quantity and quality of links pointing at your site to more obscure criteria such as how long your domain name is registered for, how long other sites have had links pointing to you, and what type of page rank they have given you in their quarterly update. By design, it is very hard to move up quickly in Google, and it is very easy to get blacklisted if you do things that the Google algorithm regards as spam.
SEO for Yahoo
Yahoo uses a combination of the terms on your page and the quantity of sites linking to yours. The quality of the links are somewhat important, but the quantity of the links far outweighs the quality in the Yahoo search algorithm. You are always in much better shape having more people linking to you, no matter the method of obtaining those links. You have to be careful, though, that your technique does not damage your ranking in other search engines, most notably Google.
SEO for MSN
MSN is the easiest to optimize for. MSN weighs the page content the most, including, especially, what terms appear in your title and header tags, as well as in various other important places throughout the site. Links matter, but not that much. It is the content that moves you up. You can spam your desired search term all over your pages, and you will move up in MSN. Be careful, however. Yahoo and especially Google frown on this practice, and you can normally ill-afford to alienate the both of them.
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Ecommerce Development