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At its heart, the search engine optimisation process isn't complicated. But because it involves implementing lots of relatively small things over an extended period of time, it's often made out to be difficult. Here's an outline of the main steps of the SEO process.

Analyse your own site

Your own website should be the starting point for any SEO campaign. It's ultra important because even if you get all the other parts of the SEO jigsaw completed, if your site lets you down then all your other work will be in vain.

Your web developer should have done most of the basic on site SEO work. If not, you will need to call on them or whoever maintains your website to make any necessary changes.

Along with meta descriptions, page titles are your advert to the outside world. If you haven't checked these recently - or if you've added pages to your website and forgotten to pay attention to these basic elements - then now is the time to fix them.

You've got about 65 characters at your disposal for page titles and they should be more attractive than "Your Company Name - Services" which is the likely format they're in, especially if your website developer used WordPress without a plugin to handle this aspect.

Likewise the meta description is often ignored yet is the call to action below the page title in the search results. If these two elements read badly, chances are your potential site visitor won't even visit.

There are other on-site SEO factors that your chosen search engine consultant can advise you on but if you're short of time, start with these two first.

Start getting backlinks!

This is a gradual process. In the same way as Rome wasn't built in a day, you won't get this task finished any time soon. In fact, it should be part of your daily or weekly routine for as long as your website is in existence.

Backlinks are the (usually blue underlined) links that point back to your site.

They are important because Google treats them as a vote of confidence in your website.

A few may appear naturally, especially if your site has good content. But most of them will be at least helped by your company and your SEO team.

The search engine optimisation process begins with assessing the number and nature of any links you currently have pointing at your site. Since Google doesn't reveal the full extent of these links, you'll need to use a third party tool such as Majestic or Ahrefs which employ their own private web crawlers and attempt to recreate the same picture that the search engines have. This isn't perfect but it's better than pure guesswork.

You can also use these tools to find out where your competition has acquired their backlinks from. These are often relatively easy for you to recreate on behalf of your own site.

The mixture of backlinks is important - you shouldn't rely on just a handful of sources.

Once that analysis has been done, it's time to start the seemingly never ending part of acquiring new backlinks to your website.