Search Engine optimization is all about impacting how visible your website is in a search engine’s organic result.

How do search engines work?

They have bots that crawls the web by following links from one site to another. The crawler arrives at a page, reads the code and stores the information, called index.

The initial goal to be index, so that you can be ranked. The rank is the position you appear in, when someone conducts a search query. Rank is determined by importance and relevance. An algorithm churns many variables to decide where your page lands.

The aim in SEO is to optimize those variables to improve your ranking. They include, but not limited to:

• topics covered
• page links
• website programming
• mobile friendly

The quality of the pages linking to you are also evaluated.

Variable outside your control include:

• user search location
• trending topics
• current events

Essential optimization techniques

Search engines are built around the their ability to index pages, so make every page on your site accessible to crawlers, and that the crawlers can get to every page.

Text is preferable to everything else, because it is easily parsable by crawlers.

Links are important to crawlers: have at least one regular, text-based hyperlink to every page on your site.

Flat site hierarchy is better than deep site hierarchy. Don’t create to many levels of depth in your website, because it is more difficult for the crawler to crawl everything.

Siloed content is content that is nested very deeply in the hyperlink structure of the website, and doesn't have any direct link from the main page; this tells crawlers that that content is not important.

Even if it can go against some of SEO optimization techniques, make sure to make your site easy to navigate for human visitors. Make important content clearly and prominently.

Use natural language in your URLs:

clothingsite.com/mens/pants/denims

VS

clothinsite.com/productid=123

Create unique title tags for each page, and include a clear topic.

Make sure each page has a unique meta description. It is often used as a short text that is shown under the search results. Create meaningful sentences that would entice visitors to click.

Use heading tags in order: <h1>, <h2> etc.

Give every image a name and an alt tag description.

Finally, use a sitemap, both in html and xml format, alongside a Robots.txt file.