When explaining SEO to someone who is not familiar with it, it’s easiest to break down the concept by splitting it up into 3 distinct, easy to understand sections. In general, the 3 core pillars of SEO are:
- On-Site Optimization
- Off Site Optimization
- Content
Each of the three core pillars play a significant role in successfully optimizing a website and Firestarter SEO treats each of them with equal importance.
On-Site Optimization
Typically On-Site Optimization begins following an audit of a particular website. The audit will provide information related to the structure of the website that search engines may view negatively such as broken links, 404 errors, and missing title tags. By fixing errors such as these, the next time a search engine crawler visits the website it will see a better organized, more authoritative, and more trustworthy website and ultimately rank the site higher.
Off-Site Optimization
Off-site SEO relates to the work done off the actual site being optimized. Arguably the most important piece of off-site SEO is link building. When a search engine crawler visits your site, or in this case visits a different site and finds a link to your own site, it views this link in a favorable manner. A link to your own site on a different site shows a search engine crawler that your site has a relative amount of authority and can therefore be trusted. Trusted sites rank higher and therefore, link building and off site optimization can have a huge impact on how high a website ranks.
Content
The third pillar of SEO is content. It can be said that SEO changes on a near daily basis. One thing that we at Firestarter SEO have learned though is that content is still king. Content represents the easiest and most effective way to feature keywords on a website. At the same time, consistently adding keyword rich (but not keyword stuffed) content to a site will significantly help the site rank higher. Adding content especially in the form of a blog will also help a site grow and expand into numerous more pages. It’s important to remember that search engines and their crawlers prefer to rank larger, more content rich sites than those that aren’t.
