There is nothing magical about Search Engine Optimization, it is all about working hard and smart to get your pages and site to get good rankings on search engines. The companies that are experts at doing it have spent thousands of hours understanding how SEO works and their advice when followed works because it cannot not work. SEO is a quantifiable, repeatable process that contains two different but interconnected components: On page SEO and Off-page SEO.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is a strategy for increasing your search rankings by securing links to your content from other websites. This may include your own websites. The most valuable links are sometimes called “Authority Links” because they tie into elements of search that seek to compare how authoritative your website is compared to other sites. The more links you secure from reputable websites, the higher search engines will rank you.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO indicate the things you optimize on your website to improve your rankings with search engines. If they are intelligently applied, they will improve the rankings of your site. Here is a list of the on-page SEO elements that matter most:

Keyword Density

Keywords are the primary information detailing exactly what the page is about. Their placement and repetition in your pages is a key factors in search engine optimization. Search engines call up your web page whenever someone searches for your keyword or keyword phrase. The use has to be moderated though, because over-repetition will cause the search engine to think that you are trying to deceive it into giving your page a high ranking and the opposite will occur.

Titles

The importance of the actual title of a page cannot be overstated because it attracts readers and also tells the search engine exactly what the page is about. So as an SEO element, its value is unsurpassed. To maximize the SEO effectiveness of your titles, you should make each unique, and include at or near the beginning of the title the keyword that you want to rank.

Heading Tags

Heading tags when used in conjunction with the title and other SEO elements including keywords and META description, help tell search engines the subject and content of your page. They also allow certain words to be made to stand out on a page and give readers an ability to immediately understand the content of the page. They are a key element in helping to improve search engine rankings. The most important heading tag is the H1 tag which should be wrapped around the title of the article.

META Descriptions

Your Meta Description is the brief description about your page that appears when it comes up on a search result. Viewers read it to determine whether they want to click on your page. Although meta-descriptions do not impact your search engine ranking they are extremely important.

Meta Tags

Meta Tags are HTML or XHTML snippets of text that provide information about a web page. They don’t show up on the actual page, but reside in the page’s code, placed as tags in the head section of an HTML document. Meta tags specify page descriptions, keywords and other metadata that is not provided in the other head elements and help to tell search engines what the page is about.

Although this is not a complete list of SEO elements that need to be considered, these elements should never be overlooked in any SEO strategy. Focusing on a combination of off-page and on-page SEO elements will help your content be best positioned for optimal placement on search engines.