Every day I make the rounds through the various SEO forums, and every day I run into forums that read something like this:"Google Hates Me!" "Why is Google mad at me?" "Gone from Google, please help!" "Indexed yesterday but now I'm nowhere to be found" "Am I banned from Google?" "Stuck in the sandbox for 6 years" "I'm going to take a long walk off a short pier"O.K. so I'm exaggerating a bit, but you get the point. It seems as if a lot of newbie optimizers (and even some fairly experienced ones) are having trouble settling down into a stable optimization strategy. There are various reasons for this, the main culprit being a basic misunderstanding of how search engines work and what the main factors are in determining organic search engine position rankings (SERPs). Without resorting to pseudo intellectual banter and highbrow terminology I'm going to attempt to narrow down the basic tenants of search engine optimization.