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At it's heart, all search engine optimisation is about website SEO. Or, if you want to get really picky, making sure that every single page of your website is SEO'd correctly.

The reason for that is that Google doesn't particularly look at the big picture of your website when it is delivering search results. It wants the most relevant pages for its users because we're all pushed for time and don't want the hassle of trawling through page after page of a website to find the result. We use Google to do the heavy lifting for us. Which is where making sure your website SEO is spot on comes into play.

Website SEO Factors

There are two different main sets of factors at play in website SEO. These are split into on page (anything that's physically on your website) and off page (everything else).

You're in control of the on page SEO factors which means that Google can and will take umbrage if you do naughty things such as try to hide text, deliver different pages to Google than you do to regular visitors, link to "iffy" websites etc.

This means that it pays to keep your on site website SEO squeaky clean. Play by the rules and make sure that your site is of at least as much value to human visitors as it is to robots such as Google.

Make sure all the obvious things are correct on your website SEO:

• Page titles
• Page descriptions
• Headlines
• Image names and the "alt" text associated with them
• Links to your own site and other sites
• The main content of your page
• That you're using valid HTML (use a website checker to help with this)

Once you've got all those factors right - or at least as right as you can get them - then it's time to move onto off site website SEO.

Or at least almost time. One thing Google are taking increasing notice of nowadays is how long your visitors spend on your site before clicking away. This means you need to do things to keep them on your site longer. Since you can't handcuff them to your site you'll need to do other things such as have more written content and you should also consider videos to keep your site visitors engaged.

Offsite website SEO is a complicated game. It sounds simple: get more links pointing to your website. But that simplicity hides a multitude of sins.

Not all links pointing back to your website are counted because (although it tries hard) Google doesn't index every single page on the web. If it's found a page with a link to your website then it will take that into account. If it hasn't found a particular page then - until it eventually finds it - the page will count for nothing as far as your website SEO is concerned.

Whilst there are ways of speeding up whether or not Google crawls the pages with your backlinks on them, the general school of thought is that you should let that process take place as naturally as possible rather than try to force it. This allows Google to find your backlinks in its own time rather than finding tens or hundreds or thousands of links pointing to your site one day and then no new links for weeks or months.

The anchor text (the blue underlined links) pointing to your site are important. The actual text should vary, even if it's you creating most of your backlinks. Whilst the temptation is to make every single link the best possible anchor text, that's not natural and won't help your website SEO as mixing the text up a bit would do. So instead of making all your links "perfect" for SEO, experiment with plain links (http:// followed by your website name) as well as text such as "click here". This mixture is more natural and will help your website SEO more than being perfect. Weird but true!

Make sure your website is in tip top condition with this website action plan and if you're using Wordpress take a look at this Wordpress SEO guide.