Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics

Whether you are blogging or developing another type of website, the basics to SEO remain the same:

On-page SEO includes:

  • Good, fresh content
  • Optimized content
    • Meta <Title> Tag containing keyword
    • Meta <Description> Tag containing keyword
    • A reasonable density of the keyword you are targeting in your content
    • Proximity of keyword to beginning of content
    • Keyword appearing in H tags and alt tags (there is dispute over this in the SEO world)
  • Schema markup

google search display with markup SEO

Off-page SEO includes:

  • Quality links back to your site:
    • Organic links
    • Directory links
    • Authority site links
  • Social Signals
  • Integration of products offered by the search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

The trick, of course, is doing all that optimization to make the search engines happy, and still having a site that looks and reads well to your human audience. If your visitors don’t become leads or customers all the SEO in the world is useless.

SEO is a top that changes constantly, mostly due to updates in the algorithms used by Google (primarily) and other search engines.

This barely scratches the surface of SEO. Entire courses are available on this topic because, contrary to rumors: SEO is here to stay.