Getting listed is the easiest part because all you have to do is use an autosubmitter program that sends information about your website(s) to all the major search engines. "Search Engine Optimization" is frequently more about picking as many relevant keywords and making sure that these are SEEN as relevant.
You also want to arrange to have as many high-ranking links to your website as possible. That is, sites that get linked to by CNN, for example, will generally get higher rankings than sites linked to by a bunch of "Free For All" links pages. Some of the easier high-rank places to drop links are your social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, and so on. You tend to be better off having a direct domain, (as in "www.thisisasillydomainname.com" over subdomains like "www.thisisasillierdomainname.wix.com" because those free hosting sites tend to host a fair number of more dubious sites. This can affect your ranking, so it's worth buying a domain name. There are a few "free domain" services out there--like "dot.tk"--but I don't know if or how they affect your search rankings.
In general, I also suggest looking at "Google Analytics" as a tool for analyzing your website--there are too many tools available to list in a simple SC answer, but if you search YouTube for videos on Google Analytics, you'll learn everything you need to know here.
That covers your basic submission and ranking factors. "SEO" will continue to be a big buzzword, but as the search engine optimization companies figure out the ranking rules that Google and the other big boys use (and then use them to "cheat" by getting even poor sites better rankings), those search companies change the rules in order to try to get better quality indexing again. It's a technological arms race, and a lot of companies that claim to do SEO these days either don't keep up or don't really care about more than taking their clients' money. Ask your sponsors and his/her sponsors, and of course, your a2a affiliate network who they trust or got bitten by.
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Getting listed is the easiest part because all you have to do is use an autosubmitter program that sends information about your website(s) to all the major search engines. "Search Engine Optimization" is frequently more about picking as many relevant keywords and making sure that these are SEEN as relevant.
You also want to arrange to have as many high-ranking links to your website as possible. That is, sites that get linked to by CNN, for example, will generally get higher
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