Improved SEO can help your site rank better in search engines and increase organic traffic. Better rankings in relevant terms will drive more traffic to your site.

The SEO community often shares results of tests and experiments, and over the years people have developed a fairly clear understanding of what goes into the algorithms.

Keywords are the terms that you want to rank highly for on search engines. In general, your pages need to highlight these keywords if you want search engines to pick up on the correct subject matter for your site and pages.

Search engines today rely on understanding a user’s intent with a search, and giving them content they are seeking. If your content answers questions that are common pain points in your industry, or trending topics that people are searching, then the search engines should rank you higher. Choosing good keywords can help you formulate good content around those terms that people search for.

Onsite SEO is basically the way that your site is setup to help search engines read and interpret your page content, and to provide your visitors with a good user experience.

Offsite SEO focuses on leveraging other websites and sources across the web to improve your rankings within search engines. This includes things like backlinks, social media, and offsite content.

Onsite SEO is all about creating a good user experience for your users, and setting it up in a way that can be easily interpreted by search engines.

This includes many factors, such as page speed, sitemaps, structured data, responsive design, meta titles and descriptions, and more.

Page Titles & Meta Description tags are the elements that appear in search results for a page. They are one of the best ways to define what a particular url is about, so search engines can better understand the page’s intent. It’s also an opportunity to put some descriptive text in front of potential visitors.

A sitemap is a list of pages on a website, accessible by search engines or users. It typically is organized in a hierarchy of pages, and is stores in .xml format.

Robots.txt is a file on your website that tells search engines to ignores specified files or directories. This can be useful for hiding pages such as Admin sections, testing sections, or pages that are are irrelevant to users on search. It should be edited with caution, because it’s also very easy to block your entire site from search engines if you don’t know what you’re editing.

Backlinks are links from another website leading back to your website. They are important because search engines see them as a positive indicator, and proof that your content is valuable to a specific subject, and therefore they improve search rank. They can also drive additional traffic directly (referral traffic) from the sites that are linking to your website.

There is no specific number to try to reach. More important than the number of backlinks is the quality of the sites that are linking to you. Google is going to see a link from a major news publication as having much more importance than tons of links from some random small site.

Social Media can indirectly improve SEO by providing backlinks and traffic to the website. A Social Media campaign can offer a great compliment to an SEO or SEM campaign. It’s also a signal of authority and legitimacy.

You should not include keywords just for the sake of keyword optimization, but having a natural domain name that includes your keyword can be helpful.

Local SEO is the process of ranking for geographically local searches, which draw on a separate algorithm from national search results. It’s crucial for local businesses because it helps you rank higher on the local map, and helps people searching locally to find your business. Many of the same factors come into play, but additional factors such as online reviews, local citations, and address verification are also very important.