When we buy or build our first website and put it on a server, we have put our business, blog or personal website on display to a wide range of online visitors. But unfortunately, we can’t expect our website to attract hordes of visitors right from the start.

Visitors arrive at a website in many ways. They can type the exact internet address of our website into their browser (usually a small proportion), they can come from other websites that have links to us, they can come from social networks, and most often they visit us through search engines like Google.com.

The cheapest and, in most cases, the best way to attract visitors is through search engines.

Google has developed its own algorithm to rank and display websites in search results for a particular search query. Naturally, we want our website to be highly visible in search engines for the keywords that are most important to us. The higher our site ranks, the more traffic we can expect.

Let’s take a look at an example …

Let’s assume we have a company that sells windows, doors and roller shutters. We definitely want as many people as possible who type the words “windows”, “doors” and “roller shutters” into a search engine to visit our website. We therefore need to make sure that it is high in the search results for these keywords or phrases.

If our website does not receive visitors when we publish it on the Internet, it is not the fault of the wrong hosting, but it only means that the website is not sufficiently well optimised for search engines and, as a result, does not appear high in search engine results.

We usually first make (or have SEO experts make) a list of keywords around which we optimise the website. This ensures that those web users who type these keywords into Google search see our page in the first hits and click through to see the offer or information.

SEO can be divided into two parts

Search engine optimisation is divided into two areas, which need to be done correctly for a good result. These are on-site optimisation(On-site SEO) and off-site optimisation(Off-site SEO).

• On-site SEO: When optimising a website, we can make sure that the page is structured correctly, that the keywords in the main title (H1), subheadings and meta title are properly added, that the text has just the right keyword density, that the images are optimised, that the correct links are made within the page, etc.
• Off-site SEO: Off-site optimisation is mainly about links from other, as closely related as possible, websites to our website.

The main difference between these two branches of optimisation is that on-site optimisation is usually a one-off process (with the exception of adding fresh, unique content on a regular basis), while off-site optimisation is an ongoing process, as we always need to be one step ahead of the competition when it comes to getting quality links to our website.