Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of using different strategies and techniques to increase the amount of visitors to a website, by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine. SEO techniques are generally placed into three different categories: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to the optimising of the content of a website, so that it’s useful for both search engines and human users. This means writing good-quality, meaningful content that is relevant to what users are searching for. This can include:

• Relevant keywords in meta tags, image alt text, headers, and title tags
• 0.5% – 2.5% keyword density in webpage content
• Up-to-date, well-written content
• Multiple media types (including images, videos, and audio)
• Sufficient navigation (including a navigation menu, breadcrumb navigation and/or pagination)

off-page seo

Off-page SEO is everything that’s “not SEO”, but is still important for the success of a website. Usually, this is in the form of link-building. Diverse, high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites mean a lot for search engine rankings. These can come from things such as social media marketing, content marketing, ratings and reviews, and directory listings, to name a few – anything that helps build up a brand and direct traffic to a website.

technical seo

Technical SEO is everything involved in making sure that web crawlers can crawl a website and understand its content. Here are just some of the things that technical SEO entails:

• Submitting sitemap.xml to major search engines
• Including robots.txt
• Optimising Core Web Vitals
• Using a findable, search engine-friendly domain name
• Including an SSL certificate
• Fixing broken pages and links
• Including a custom Error: 404 page
• Optimising site architecture
• Short, descriptive URL structure
• Using structured data markup, such as Schema or Microformats2
• Validating HTML markup for semantics and accessibility
• Responsive and mobile-friendly design

tl;dr

SEO, yay

References

Ellis, M. (2023, July 13). What Is SEO?. Moz. https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo

Goodwin, D. (2023, December 6). What is SEO – Search Engine Optimization?. Search Engine Land. https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

Perricone, C. (2023, February 24). The Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO. HubSpot Blog. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/technical-seo-guide