It’s the biggest debate in Web marketing right now, and it all started with a blog post from Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz titled, “Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines”. To briefly summarize, Rand argues that anyone who advises you to focus on user experience and let the search engine rankings take care of themselves is tragically misleading you. Tactics like title tags, meta tags, sitemaps, etc., are still extremely important, he states, even if the folks at Google tell you to focus on your users.

Seems fairly reasonable, but this post set off a big debate in all the places SEO people hang out. It prompted responses like this one from Jill Whalen, who claimed Rand’s post “could potentially set SEO back at least a decade.” Others claimed that a balance between engines and users needs to be struck, and in fact, Rand added an update to his post that stated this was his point all along.

At the end of the day, Rand’s post and all the responses to it served as good linkbait, and I think everyone was being a bit over-dramatic to make for good reading. But what’s a frazzled small business owner or website maintainer to do? Here’s my two cents: SEO is one way to drive traffic to your site. Social media, branding, and online word of mouth is another. Do both, and you’ll have the best chance at the most traffic. Franky, there’s enough competition out there that you need to excel at both to be successful.

There. I said it. If you have a basic knowledge of search engine optimization and how search engines like Google work, 90% of SEO – or at least white hat SEO – is common sense. Here’s the least you need to know:

• Link authority is a big part of SEO…so maximize the quantity and quality of your incoming links.
• Search engines rely on spiders to crawl your site…so organize your site well and ensure it is easily navigable.
• Search engines attach value to fresh content…so update your site regularly.
• Search engines exist to find the content that best suits the search query…so create content that matches what your customers are searching for.

Many make SEO seem like a complicated process that’s equal parts art, science, and magic. But as I said above, if you understand these very basic tenets, good SEO will follow logically. Memorize these points, or keep them as a reference. The next time you have an SEO question, refer back to them. More often than not, they will contain your answer.