I also like to tell people what basic SEO is not: 1. SEO is not keyword frequency. Although the page you are optimizing needs to contain the search term you ar

I also like to tell people what basic SEO is not: 1. SEO is not keyword frequency. Although the page you are optimizing needs to contain the search term you are trying to rank for it shouldn't be saturated with that term. The first four words of the <title> tag, the <h1> tag and maybe an <img> alt attribute are a few good places to put a good keyword. 2. More links isn't necessarily better. A couple good links from one or two good pages can really boost your rankings more than a lot of links from unimportant websites. 3. Meta tags won't help a page rank higher. The <meta name="keywords"/> and <meta name="description"/> tags aren't used as ranking factors but it's good to include them because they do signal "about-ness" to an engine. Some things that might hurt your SEO are frequent server downtime and site inaccessibility, cloaking by user agent, links from spammy domains and acquiring links from known "link sellers". Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors