Search Engine Optimization is a combination of several elements on your web page that are naturally (i.e. “Organically”) going to be found by the search engines and other off-site elements that affect how your site is seen and ranked by the search engines.

There are 5 Elements that are Essential Fundamentals to Your Website to be “Search Engine Friendly”:

HTML Content

One of the most basic elements of making your site friendly to search engines is to have HTML content. Search engines read your website for search terms that are related to your subject. When they find those terms on your site, they consider you for placement in their rankings. Your website has to have properly written HTML content that talks about your subject matter, products, or services.

Titles, Descriptions, and Metatags

Descriptive elements are built into the code of your website. Titles are the most important element, as they tell the search engine what the page was written for, and appear as titles in the search results. Descriptions appear below the title tag and should be written with your reader in mind. Metatags and meta keywords do not appear in the search results. They should still be used but are not important to all search engines.

Internal Link Structure

Internal Links direct the search bots when they scan a page. A website with properly built Internal Links will direct the search bots to scan the entire site and ensure that all content is considered for search results.

External Links

Inbound and Outbound links are essential. All of the major search engines review your website’s inbound and outbound links for relevance and authority. If your website has a properly developed web of inbound and outbound links, from high TrustRank sites, you will have better visibility in the search engines.

Sitemap

Your sitemap is a list of every item on your website. Building a sitemap and submitting it to the major search engines ensures that they are indexing your content. Keeping an updated sitemap “on file” with the search engines enables them to see when you have made changes to your website. So those are the 5 fundamental elements of search engine optimization. If your site is lacking any of these elements it is not properly optimized for search engine results and you are missing out on valuable visitors.