Search engine optimization (SEO) is a basic need in the web world. SEO will help you position your website properly to be found at the most critical points in the buying process or when people need your site. The goal of foundational SEO is to create a great, continuous positive user experience.  Communicate to the search engines your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant
searches. Search engines want to do their jobs as best as possible by referring users to websites and content that is the most important to what the user is searching for.

Search engines look for great content, good and strong performance, authority and positive user experience. On the other hand, keyword stuffing or overuse of keywords on your pages, poor user experience and buying or purchasing links are items that search engines avoid.

One needs to focus on your business goals. Knowing your assets and liabilities is also a must. Don’t forget to optimize for multi-channels. Keyword strategy is not only important to implement on-site, but should extend to other off-site         platforms, this is referred to as multi-channel optimization. These multi-channel platforms include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Email etc. Being consistent with
keyword phrases within these platforms will not only help your branding efforts, but also train users to use specific phrases you’re optimizing for. Consistent Domain naming is so important to your overall foundation, so as a best practice you’re better off using sub-directory root domains (example.com/awesome) versus sub-domains (awesome.example.com). Having keywords you’re trying to rank for in your domain will only help your overall efforts.

In addition to optimizing for the desktop experience, one needs to focus on mobile and tablet optimization as well as other media. Creating rich media content like video is easier to get a video to rank on the first page than it is to get a plain text page to rank. Optimize your non-text content so search engines can see it. If your site uses Flash or PDF, make sure you read up on the latest best practices so search engines can crawl that content and give your site credit for it. Meta keywords are pretty much ignored by search engines nowadays, but if you still use them, make sure it refers specifically to that page and that it is also formatted correctly. Your meta description should be unique and also speak to that specific page. Duplicate meta descriptions from page to page will not get you anywhere.Title tags has to be different. Think of your title as a 6-9 word ad,  so do your best to entice the reader so they want to click and read more.

Keeping SEO as a priority, and following the best practices is a necessity. Skipping the basics of SEO will only leave your site’s foundation a mess and prevent you from fully maximizing revenue opportunities. SEO is about understanding what consumers are looking for and recognizing how a brand
can provide value in that moment. Thinking beyond the keyword to understand what consumers truly want to consume – not to mention how, where and when – is when SEO evolves from tweaking meta tags to enhancing your brand’s digital ecosystem. As a result, SEO has as much to do with how users engage on a website as it does with its rankings.