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Clients have often asked for some clarity around what is SEO and why is it important to my website? As a business owner of  website you need to at least understand the fundamentals of SEO even if it is just to ensure that you have an idea of both what you are paying an expert to do as well as being able to check to some degree the effectiveness of SEO on your website.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation and quite simply it is about ensuring that various elements on each page of your website an links to your website from other websites do their job in telling a search engine what your website is about as well as what any particular page is about.SEO is broken down into two primary components; On-Page Optimisation (stuff that happens directly on your website) and Off-Page Optimisation (stuff that happens outside of your website but affects your website such as links to a page within your site). This article is dealing with the On-Page factors.

SEO starts off with some strategic decisions around factors such as what is my goal when a visitor hits my site, who is my target market, how do they purchase, will they research my product/service first, do I want to target specific locations. Questions like this will ten lead you into understanding what keywords are going to be researched to drive traffic to your website and achieve the goals set out for your online business model.

This is where the physical aspect of SEO starts or what we call "On Page Optimisation" so called because we are going to take each individual page and ensure that both the visible and invisible elements are optimised correctly to ensure that we providing a clear message to search engines on what our site is all about.

Note: Without doing SEO search engines will still rank you but the difference is that they will rank you on what they interpret your site to be about. Depending on how you have organically laid out your site and the text you have used Google will make assumptions based on what it finds in the Titles and text and may get it wrong.

On Page Optimisation starts with keyword analysis to decide what keywords relevant to your business, product or service are most commonly used by people searching online. For example if you have a service called telescheduling which is your cleverly branded version of telemarketing you may well rank number 1 in Google for it but after doing some keyword research you may also find that there have been no search requests in the last 12 months for that term simply because it is not a common term that people would use when looking for outbound call centres.

Armed with a good set of keywords the On-Page Optimisation process continues with looking at both the visible (stuff visitors & Google see) and the invisible (stuff Google sees) elements and ensuring that they are well crafted into page titles, headings and descriptions. I say well crafted because we need to understand that not only are we telling search engines what our site is about but we are also selling a click to our site to real people.

This is a time consuming process as there are an absolute bare minimum of six factors being; titles, descriptions, heading, content, alt tags and internal links and this is for each page. There are some automated software programs available and my only advice there is to stay away from them  There is no alternative to the human creation of well crafted elements on your website. Remember, Google wants you to be naturally good not artificially ok.