SEO techniques don't have to be as hard as they often seem when other bloggers or strategists make them. The bottom line to understanding what SEO does for your website is simply search engines crawling for fresh content on your blog or website and then ranking the sites appropriately based on the Page rank, back links and quality of content. How Google exactly does this "behind closed doors" isn't that important. All you need to know are the fundamental habits of search engine and then you will be able to efficiently do what you need to do in order to get the crawler's attention.
Keyword Research
First of all, you need to know how to find the appropriate keywords that will get you ranked pretty good in the search engines. The keyword research isn't that deep and you can use a simple tool like Google Keyword tool to help you find out what the competition is doing in terms of ad competition as well as how popular that keyword is on the internet. The more competition, the more valuable the keyword.
Now what you will be doing is taking a keyword and placing it in the search bar in quotations so you can see how many sites occupy that keyword. The more sites, the more difficult is will be for you to rank in that keyword. An average site will do good with keywords that have 1,000 or less occupying a keyword.
Backlinking
Backlinks are very important when ranking higher in keywords, because it gives you more relevance in the search engines. The more links pointing back to your site, the more attention you will get from Google. It's not to say that you can't rank high in the search engines with content alone, it's just to say that you give your site added support with backlinks.