This is the second part of our 2 page guide to learning SEO, see the first part here:

• Learning the basics of SEO Part 1

Understanding on-page ranking factors

On-page ranking factors refer to the parts of your web pages which the search engine is going to read and how you can optimise these elements to include the keywords you want your site to rank for in Google. The SEOMoz developers cheat sheet has a good run down of the most important on-page factors to look at.

Understanding links and link building

Most SEO's will tell you that link building is the most important part of an SEO campaign because Google looks at the sites who are linking to your site to help decide how trustworthy and relevant your pages are and therefore where you should be ranked. Lots and lots and lots has been written about link building. The important thing for you reading about link building today is that you read an up to date and credible source. Link building techiques that SEO's were using 5 years ago are mostly outdated and ineffective now. Again SEObook has a good overview, as do search engine watch. Here's a big list of link building techniques and this post on webmaster world, which is a few years old now but still surprisingly relevant does a good job of explaining the modern link building process.

Reading SEO reports and web analytics

Once you understand the basics of SEO you'll be in a better position to make decisions about selecting suppliers or defining project goals. However to understand how successful an SEO campaign is you'll need to look at the stats. You can draw hundreds of reports and graphs with SEO data but the 2 types of report you're likely to see most often are the ranking report, which shows your sites position in the search results for your keywords. And the search engine traffic report which shows how many visitors have arrived at your site from search engines (you'd expect this number to increase in a successful SEO campaign).

To understand these reports I think the easiest thing is to setup a report for your site and just look at the data and read the help files where necessary. There's stacks of tools for reporting on SEO performance but my favorites are:

For ranking reports: Raven tools (30 day free trial) or Advanced web ranking (30 day free trial)

For search engine traffic reports: Google analytics (free tool)

All these tools are easy to setup with walk-through's for beginners so to learn this part of SEO I'd just dive in and start using the tools.

Need more help getting started?

You might also want to consider an SEO training course or hiring a freelance SEO consultant (like me;-)) to help run you through the setup of your SEO project and explain the steps above as you go along. Reading is great and there's huge amounts of SEO content you can read for free online by for many, particularly 'time poor people having a little help getting you up and running is a worthwhile investment.