Search engine optimisation or SEO is the task of optimising the visibility of a website to search engines. You could have the most amazing content on your site, but if it's not structured in a way that search engines can easily find it, you'll be swimming against the stream.

SEO is more than a task though, it's a discipline. In fact, there is a massive industry that was created by the need for websites to be found on search engines.

The process of optimising your site for search engines can be divided into two group of tasks: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is all about making sure a website is technically sound and easy to crawl by search engines. Here are some important items to look out for:

Title tag

• It's displayed in the browser heading
• Include keyword in title
• Use the tab test. If your browser has a lot of tabs open, will you know what the pages are about just looking at the tab title.
• Screenshot of the tab test

H Tags

• Include at least 1 H1 tag in your content
• Format the rest of your content properly with appropriate formatting tags i.e heading, bullets, quotes etc.

Page url

• Make it human readable
• Again, include keywords
• Will you know what the page is about by just reading the url?
• Screenshot of SEO url list vs non-SEO urls

Image ALT tag

• Allows search engines to understand the image content and context to the content
• Used to identify image content when file cannot be loaded

Meta description

• It is what search engines show
• Make it descriptive
• Make it enticing
• Make it relevant

Sitemap

• Create an xml sitemap and submit it to search engines

Page content

• Most important
• All other SEO activities rely on this
• At least 300 words unique content
• Monitor duplicate content
• Help your audience with your content

As mentioned earlier, there is an entire industry built on SEO. Following the list above should be the bare minimum you are doing to get your site SEO ready.

Off-page SEO

Search engines are continually trying to improve their search results. Having a website that is built properly and can easily be indexed is only one of aspects that causes a site to rank highly.

In order to serve their users with search results that will actually be useful, search engines also take into account what other internet users think of a site. The perceived quality of content is where off site seo comes into play.

Even though there are many strategies for off-page SEO, two of the most important are social signals page authority.

Social sharing

When a site has quality content it is much more likely to be shared on social media. Everytime a link is shared on a social media platform, it serves as a signal to search engines that the page content is usefull or popular enough to be promoted by users. These interactions are commonly referred to as social signals.

Having your site's content shared on social media channels not only increases the chances of it being seen by search engines, but also by people. And that's the point, right?

Page authority through Link building

Link building is one of my he most difficult SEO tasks. Many consider it an art. It involves a strategy to get other websites to link to your content. Similar to social sharing, inbound links from these websites build page authority.

There are two main ways to go about link building. They have varying degrees of impact.

Editorial or natural

These type of links are earned the hard way: by producing quality content. They happen 'naturally' because other websites wants to link to your quality content.

Manual link building

This strategy envolves some hard graft. Reach out to other websites and suggesting they link back to your website. This is very much a manual process. It is a good idea to include some type of a value proposition when reaching out. Make it worth their while to link back to your site.

As you can see, it all comes down to links. Just make sure its the right kind.