Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the top three most important components of your business website success. You can read about the other two components of successful business websites, good design and quality content, in the blog post Search Engine Optimization: The Two Most Important Things Your Website Needs.

The web design, website content, and SEO make up a trifecta of search engine results page power.

Search engine optimization is a process not a single event. With that fact in mind, your search engine optimization or SEO efforts should begin before the design and content development of your website and continue for the life of your website.

But you may be wondering what is search engine optimization or SEO anyway?

SEO is made up of all of the action you take to get found online and improve your search engine results page rankings. It encompasses everything you do to make sure you audience can find you online.

Here are the absolute minimum SEO strategies you need to implement in your business website:

Page Title: This is an HTML title that is unique to each page on your website and is no more than 70 characters in length.

Page Description: The meta description tag is a short keyword-rich sentence that describes why someone would want to visit the page. The description should be no more than 160 characters in length and unique to each page.

Keywords: Each page should target a specific and focused set of keywords. Those keywords should be included in the page title, description, headlines, and main page content.

Headlines: You should use the Headline HTML tags or H tags to format all headlines and subheadines. The H1 tag carries the most importance on the page, H2 has the second most importance, H3 has the third most importance, etc.

Alternative Text: Search engine robots or spiders can’t “see” what you images and graphic look like. Alternative text tags or ALT tags are a way to assign text to an image or graphic that appears in the HTML of the site. The ALT text is great for SEO because it can be crawled by the search robots or search spiders, and it is also used as a tool for the visually impaired when using the Internet.