What is SEO?
Search engine optimization or SEO in short, is a set of rules that can be followed by web site (or blog) owners to optimize their web sites for search engines and thus improve their search engine rankings.
In addition it is also a great way to increase the quality of their web sites by making them user- friendly, faster and easier to navigate. SEO can also be considered as a framework since the whole process has a number of rules (or guidelines), a number of stages and a set of controls.
SEO has two major components, On Page and off page SEO.
a) Search Engine Optimization - On Page
On Page SEO refers to settings you can apply on the website so that it is optimized for search engines.
- Optimized titles and descriptions
- Proper URL Structures
- User friendly navigation (breadcrumbs, user sitemaps)
- Optimized internal links
- Text Formatting (use of h1,h2,bold etc)
- Image optimization (image size, proper image names, use of ALT tag)
- User friendly 404 pages
- Fast loading pages
- Google Authorship verification for all pages
- Top quality fresh content (This is always the most important SEO factor!)
- External links (no broken links or links to ‘bad’ sites)
b) Search Engine Optimization - Off Page
Unlike On- page SEO, off-page SEO refers to activities outside the boundaries of the webpage. The most important are:
- Link Building
- Social Media
- Social bookmarking