Search engine optimization basically entails the process of optimizing a website to become search engine friendly. There are very many ways of doing it, but here are the 3 simplest and easiest tested and proven tops for optimizing a website for the search engines.

The 3 ways that I’m talking about here, are the free and DIY (do it yourself) methods. Of course that if you have a reasonable amount of money to spent, you can go by the SEO agencies which can do this job and you can expect quicker results. Before you get going, I would recommend checking your blog or website value right now. In this way you’ll have a base to measure your achievements over the time

A great way to obtain valuable one way links is to submit to article directories. Basically, most article directories have a ‘do follow link’ hence the search engine bots will follow the link to wherever they will be redirected. Most article directories allow for the inclusion of 2 links in the resource box. The internet today has so many article directories, most of which have very great search engine rankings as they have been well optimized. When you submit to an article directory, ensure you clearly read and understand all submission guidelines and rules as each article directory has its own unique requirements such as the word count and stuff. Basically though, most would accept articles of 500-700 words.

The word count of an article plays a very important role, and so is the grammar and quality of the article in determining whether your articles will be accepted by an article directory or not. This is because if an article gets rejected constantly, the editor might end up deleting that article permanently from their database so that you can never resubmit it. In case your article gets rejected, the editor of the directory will drop you an email and explain everything to you. Be advised that it take from 1 day up to 3 months for an article to be approved and published on an article directory, hence you have to observe utmost patience.

Pro: A lot of article directories where to submit content, for most good ratio between what you offer / what you get, very appreciate by the search engines
Cons: Free article directory might take a lot of time until they publish your work, additional work as the content has to be unique (cannot copy/paste from your blog)

Second comes directory submissions that are also known to offer great quality backlinks. When submitting to the directories, you might want to ensure that the descriptions and titles vary so that they can be unique before the search engine bots. Further, use your major keywords in the descriptions and titles so that they can be search engine friendly. While there are many directories today, leading directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ are a must for submission as they guarantee some very valuable high quality links. After a successful submission to the directories, you will get a very detailed report explaining all that you have done.

Pro: More than a million directories to submit your site, usually good ranking, most of them offer good quality for free
Cons: If you do manually submission it takes a lot of time,  some require a linkback from your website, inclusion in top ones may cost a lot (for a beginner website or blog)

The third easy way to optimize your website and earn high search engine rankings is through social bookmarking, which basically entails saving the webpage so that you can share it with all people who care to. By social bookmarking your website, you will get an opportunity to make the site visible to people around the world, meaning your products and services will also be visible to a very wide gamut of people. Social bookmarking websites basically use votes to rank articles and websites.

Therefore, if your article gets many votes from viewers, it will rank top on the front pages. It goes without saying that for it to rank on the front page, you have to write very interesting titles and description, and the content has to be very interesting and informative. This way, people who find you have given them useful information that aided in their making of an important decision will not hesitate to vote for you, meaning you will get good rankings.

Pro: You can have a large amount of social network friends / fans / followers to distribute the content, easy to build a network is you base it on trust and reciprocal help
Cons: There are a lot of automate tools (e.g. automatic twitter follower) out there which let you the impression that somebody is reading what your write, but actually they are not