Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

Search engine optimization has changed dramatically over just the last 2-3 years.
A few years ago, it was for the most part sufficient to incorporate a well optimized title tag and have a few relevant search terms (aka keywords) in the meta tags to get a top 10 ranking. Those days are long gone, and yet in my estimation, over 75% of webmasters still hold on to the notion that search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking title and meta tags. It is essential today to understand that meta tags for example, carry zero to little weight in a search engine algorithm.In fact, the keyword meta tag for example, is completely ignored by the Google search engine, other search engines give it very little weight.
The main reason for the big changes has been the abuse of the meta tags on mass and the search engine results pages (aka SERPs) were becoming just a list of spam ridden sites with keyword stuffed meta tags, often not even relevant to the site in question. There are now for Google approximately 100 different HTML, design, on and off-page elements that can make the difference between a top 10 and top 100 ranking.
Of far more importance nowadays for example, is the actual body text content within a page and what I like to call off-page criteria which includes number of inbound links, anchor text of inbound links and whether the links come from "authority" / "high value" sites (in Google's case).
The design, structure and website technology used are also important ranking criteria for the major search engines. Where in a websites source code, and in which HTML tags keywords appear, is just as important as the number of occurrences and the ratio of these keywords in relation to the rest of a pages text content (known as keyword density).
Search engines use so called robots or spiders which go through a web pages source code and store the crawled page in a database. This robot will usually follow the links on a page (assuming it can read and interpret them, but more on that later) and then crawl the linked page, and store this page also in it's database, follow on to the next link and so on.
The favorite diet of these search engine robots/spiders is text. I usually call it spider food. Text embedded in images is unreadable to spiders, so are the text content in Java applets, javascript, css and in many search engines the links/text in image maps and flash objects are ignored. The links in framesets can also cause problems for some search engines.
The following pages are my attempt to dispel the common myths about achieving high rankings on the search engines and is designed to provide the basics on how to achieve a good ranking. Experienced search engine optimizers will not learn much from these pages. The place for SEO experienced webmasters would be my forum which provides up to date SEO technology, tips, views and commentary on modern SEO methodology.
To get the most of this tutorial, a little HTML and CSS knowledge is of benefit.
There is NO simple formula for getting ranked No.1 on Google for example.
Let me make that clear, there is however optimization methodology that makes it far more likely for someone to get ranked far higher than they would be without any optimization.
The best way to use this tutorial is to always click on the "next" button and not jump pages by means of the navigation on the left .
Webmasters may freely link to this tutorial either in part or entirety so long as ABAKUS is credited.
I hope you find this tutorial useful and enjoy it. Be sure to recommend it to friends and/or link to it.