Last Wednesday Eric Enge put together a great article called "An Introduction to SEO Best Practices" for Search Engine Watch's Search Day subscribers. In the article Eric boils SEO down to four crucial components.

No, these are not some super-secret SEO tricks that will get you a #1 ranking in just 19 days. In fact, the article does not offer any specific SEO strategies whatsoever! How can an SEO article that doesn't talk about SEO provide anything of value? Well, there is a lot more to SEO than meets the eye!

Eric provides four key areas that every marketer and/or website owner needs in order to effectively be able to SEO their site:

1. Subject-Matter Expertise: If you are not an expert on the topic of your Web site, then invest the time to become one, (or employ one).
2. Information Architecture: Design a site that enables users to find the great content you have in a fast and effective manner.
3. Technical Implementation: Learn how to deal with the idiosyncrasies of search engines to get the best results.
4. Marketing: Formerly known as "link building," in 2007 we will begin to think of this as marketing and promotion.

In the article Eric expands on each of these components providing additional detail and insight into the marketing process and its necessities. Online marketing can seem so vast and complex that we can often get lost in the maze of options and not really know where to begin. Eric breaks that down into digestible chunks of information providing every site marketer with a foundation for which to build an exceptional SEO campaign.