First of all - what is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves making your website as attractive as possible to search engines such as Google, with the ultimate goal of appearing higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Typically business websites aim to appear high for a certain set of keywords, based on what they think potential visitors will be searching for. To get an idea of popular keywords and how competitive they, have a look at Google Adwords Keyword Tool. For us, this means we optimise for terms like "web agency London".

How do we do that? There's a lot of different practices involved so we divide SEO in to three categories.

1. Code (Onsite)

This is the bit we take care of when building an e-commerce website and it includes such things as:

• Ensuring all page code is valid
• Ensuring URLs have relevant keywords in them
• Setting a relevant page title (the bit that appears in the tab bar)
• Ensuring images have 'alt' tags
• Using h1, h2 and paragraph tags correctly in your copy

Most web content and e-commerce platforms help provide the basics of this, then the developer will work on finessing the code, or 'optimising' it.

Ensuring your website pages load quickly is also an increasingly important element of SEO, which is why Google give away tools like PageSpeed Insights that highlight areas of performance improvement. This is because Google wants users of its search engine to find what they need as quickly as possible. If Google is serving up results quickly but the pages themselves take ages to load, people will get frustrated and give up. So in recent studies have shown that fast page loading times aremore important than ever and if that doesn't convince you, slow pages also have a considerable impact on e-commerce conversion rates.

Onsite Code is only one element of SEO though.

2. Content (Onsite)

The single most important factor in SEO in recent years is publishing good quality, fresh content, on your area of expertise. The good news is that this is in your control and doesn't require technical knowledge. This is why content production has become a major operation for many brands and why having a good content management system is so important.

Create written, audio or video content that is:

• Original.
• Informative/interesting in some way.
• Long form, good quality.

In the context of SEO, text is currently the most important type of content as it can be analysed easier by Google for keywords. However, video is becoming more popular as a way of increasing SEO and search engines are getting better at working out what videos are about and how good the content is.

All this content on your website is of course also appealing to visitors. For example, a good use of a blog on a fashion website is to show off cool things that are happening or artists that influence the brand, as well as posting about exciting news, all of which better engage the visitor with the brand. For us, we produce a lot of e-commerce content, which gets us a lot of traffic from Google when people search for specific topics such as "e-commerce website specification", but it also means that our expertise is visible when people are browsing the site.

Good content also makes more people link to your website and mention it on social media, which brings me to...

3. Offsite SEO

This is really the biggest factor in SEO in my opinion.

It involves:

• Getting other websites to link to you. If they are large, influential websites this popularity will 'rub off' on yours and you'll see your own site going up in the SERP pages. Also, if the website linking to you is related to your website subject area, this will count for a lot as Google will look at which sites link to you to help figure out what your site is about, rather than just trusting your content. This is why anchor text (i.e. the text used to describe a link) is important. When people link to our website using "e-commerce london agency" it counts for a lot more than using our brand name or just the URL.
• Getting social media likes, shares and +1s is important because these are human approvals of content. Google is watching activity on the main social networks and taking this in to account when ranking sites. They seem to have a noticeable bias to Google+ so this could be a good place to invest time.

To get other people to link to you or talk about you on social media involves means being interesting in some way. You could do this by:

• Writing content for other blogs, in return for the exposure and a link back to your website, otherwise known as guest blogging
• Being interviewed on your subject area for another online blog or publication
• Distrubing an interesting story about your brand or some research you've done.

You may now recognise all this as what is commonly referred to as PR.

The most common function of public relations is attracting favourable attention. This is the same function as offsite SEO, except that search engines only pay attention to things they can see online, so the focus of PR related to SEO should be publications on the internet, which nowadays is most of them.

I think in the near future we'll see the rise of joint SEO/PR/social media agencies that don't treat these elements as distinct departments but more as a joint discipline. That will create an interesting culture clash when we consider the nerdy types that work in pure SEO versus the typical PR crowd.