SEO SYSTEM

Above the fold
The most important area of your site is what is known as "above the fold".  This is pretty much what you see on the screen without scrolling down.   There are two reasons for this.      

Visitors
Visitors will see that and make a quick decision about your site.  For a site trying to get adclicks, this can be a great place for ads.  As a general rule, the higher up an ad is, the more it will get clicked.   Many of noomles templates are designed to take advantage of this, and it is a good choice for a thin content site.  

Sites with better content, do well with other setups as they will actually have a chance at keeping the visitor around for a while and fueling their interest enough to click on an ad.  You will have to experiment.  Different templates work better with different sites.  Sites like this tend to do better if they have enough text visible to lead a visitor in.  Experienced surfers will often jet immediately if presented with something that looks like a parking page, novice users will tend to just click through.

search engine views
Search engines often see a limited amount of text.  Anything above the fold is generally considered more important.   Some engines determine this by a character count and others have more sophisticated systems which actually can tell what is above and below the fold.  Text in this area is very important.   With many noomle sites the only visible text is the article title.  For most purposes this should be a carefully selected phrase or word. 

Throughout much of this site, I have broken this rule as I am more interested in presenting the information to a select audience than having overwhelmingly high ranking.  Sometimes what is of most benefit to the user is actually the priority.

Page Titles
Page titles are considered very important by most search engines.  While some may ignore meta tags, page titles are huge clues to content.   The actual content on the page should be related or you are probably going to get penalized, however.

Site Name
Your site name is the easiest thing to optimize for.   If your site name is LadiesRedHats.com for instance (no idea if this site exists) then your best chance of getting indexed is for "Ladies Red Hats".   This should be your main keyword and site name (or at least be contained in it), if at all reasonable.  An exact match is best.  It should also be in your description meta area for the site.  It should NOT be listed in your keyword list, since it is already your main keyword.   This can be seen as stuffing.

Site Names with low searches
If your main keyword (site name) doesn't get searched much (exact searches on adwords keyword tool) then your site is probably going to get less traffic and you should not expect much out of the site unless it has extremely competitive ad potential.  You can try and optimize for a related term, but it is more difficult.   This is a huge part of the reason why some names are simply more valuable than others.   
Low search frequency terms can be optimized easier, you will have to determine whether it is worth the effort to do so.  As a general rule, these are less competitive and give a fair chance for top slot.  Additional content and articles can help you broaden the scope if necessary.

Sites with high searches
Sites with high searches can be tough to rank in due to the sheer quantity of established sites.    Noomle does a good job of cutting through that noise, but keep in mind many of your competitors are quite skilled at SEO, have long standing sites, numerous backlinks or combinations of these advantages.

Using URLs
You can give it a shot however.  You will know within a week or two whether google is going or one of the other engines is going to put you into the winners circle on the front page.   (over 90% of searchers use first page results, and most of those the top three slots).

If you can't break in you have some options.    Leverage your URL, particularly if it is a one word site.    You can use subdomains as part of your title.           

Example of Url use
An example of using URLS.   Say you have BusinessSchool.com a solid two word keyphrase.   However this is a tough field as there is a huge amount of money to be made in providing educational services.  There are 118 million search results and 300+ advertisers for this phrase and it gets over 40,000 searches a month.  You will get type ins, however capitalizing on the organic search is more difficult due to the competitiveness.  You may find that you are unable to get it to place without a lot of extra work.

However by using the adwords tool you find that “business school rankings”, “business school admissions” are possibilities, along with much more niche geos like BusinessSchoolNewYork.  

You can leverage this by creating a site url such as   BusinessSchool.com/NewYork/ or BusinessSchool.com/New_York/    
In the eyes of the search engine this is roughly equivelant to BusinessSchoolNewYork.com
This is one of the big reasons Generics are much sought after by knowledgeable end users.  They get both type ins and a huge amount of SEO potential.    

Non dot coms will not get the type ins (unless they are in their native tld) , but they can often be optimized using this method.

Videos
Videos will be explored in a separate area of the website.  Other important bits of optimization knowledge involve using images, tags, and specialized tools to attain specific goals.
publicity. 

There are a number of ways to let people know about your site.  Getting the word out is all about using every tool that is available to maximize your online footprint.   The first tool is:

RSS

Using rss you can go into broadcasting mode.   Your site produces a live feed every time it is updated, this can be used both for creating sitemaps and for sending out publicity.

TWITTER

A social networking tool designed to post short messages on the web.  There are a number of useful tools available for generating publicity.  The twitter stream gets picked up by many search engines and can be used to get your site noticed faster than more conventional methods.

RSS + Twitter

By combining your rss feed and a twitter account, you can have the work done for you.  One service that can be used for this purpose is RssToTwitter.com  You simply input the location of the feed and it will broadcast directly onto twitter for you directly through a twitter account of your choosing.

A multisite rss feed is also possible (with a bit more work), to combine all of your site rss developments into a single feed.

There are many other methods of getting publicity including article directories, social networks and more.  Squidoo lenses, formum linking and many other techniques can generate an array of backlinks which leads to traffic, recognition and sales.   

Inbound links work best when relevant.   If you are broadcasting a combined feed, the best approach is to organize around a single vertical for each broadcast node.  

These methods will be explored in greater depth in future articles