Four Pillars
of SEO

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is basically a mesh-up between the Content Management System (CMS) and the Servers that host your website. A respectable CMS will address the infrastructure and setup of the website to ensure that it is crawlable by search engines, where else the Server that your CMS is hosted on will determine the site load time which is an important criteria to search engines.

The main areas to consider here are:
Crawl: Can a search engine explore your site?
Index: Is it clear which pages the search engine should index and return?
Mobile: Mobile first rendering as Google Bot prioritize Mobile traffic.
Speed: Fast page load times are a crucial factor in keeping your visitors happy.
Tech: Are you using search engine-friendly tech or CMS for your website?
Hierarchy. How is your content structured on your website?

2. On-site SEO optimization

Website should be optimized as a whole and at an individual page level. There is some crossover here from your technical SEO, and you want to start with a well-structured content hierarchy for your site.

Assuming you have a well-structured site, applying sensible optimization is again relatively straightforward. The main areas to focus on here are:

Descriptive URLs: Ensure each URL is simple and descriptive. Use a dash when there is a space between words.
Page titles: Use keywords naturally within the page title.
Meta descriptions: Text descriptions like they were ad copy to drive clicks.
Content optimization: Write content for users, not algorithms with a well balance keywords to content length.
UX / Strong calls to action. Make it easy for your users to know what to do next.
Structured data markup. Schema snippets such as breadcrumbs, author, review that helps improve click-through.

3. Content

Content is king. That’s the saying, right? It’s true in a way. Your website is really just a wrapper for your content. Your content tells prospects what you do, where you do it, who you have done it for, and why someone should use your business. And if you’re smart, your content should also go beyond these obvious brochure-type elements and help your prospective customers achieve their goals.

Keyword Research: Determine the search volume, competitiveness and likelihood of ranking on SERPs
Keyword Density: Creating content that balance out targeted keywords to 500-600 words content.

4. Off-site authority building

Eventually, all SEO rivers run to this one spot: authority building. Building your authority, in large part, involves link building. Links are still a crucial component to developing strong organic rankings; however, links can be the hardest part of SEO to get right.

It really is important here to get your link philosophy dialed in before you start, as this can truly make or break your link-building efforts. While link building is a deep topic that we can’t cover in depth here, if you can at least develop a positive link-building philosophy, you are already ahead of the majority of your competition.