When discussing search engine marketing, people talk about offsite and onsite methods. Onsite search engine optimization involves the website while offsite search engine optimization involves things that are done not using the website like link building.
If you are limited in terms of time, you are better off focusing on offsite SEO techniques like link building, which will get your search engine ranking up quickly. You also have to spend some time on onsite SEO techniques, though.
Onsite search optimization requires you to pay close attention to the title, description, and URL format of your website. These are not the only things that matter but they are the ones that will get you the best results. Things like images, sitemaps, and internal links won’t affect your ranking with search engines as much. Your website’s title is the first thing potential customers see so it needs to be search engine optimized. The same applies to the description of your website.
The formatting of your URL is also important. A lot of websites rely on virtual files instead of actually generating web pages so file names can be nothing more than a bunch of code without any actual information. If you rewrite your URL so that it is optimized for search engines and contains keywords, you will get better results.
After you take care of onsite search engine optimization, you have to consider how to use offpage optimization techniques like link building. This is not actually a way to optimize your website but instead it is a way to link your website to other sites to increase traffic. Some links are better than others, though. The anchor text that people can click on needs to have the right keywords in it. A link back taking people to your website that only tells people where to click is going to be ignored by search engines that are looking for keywords to rank results.
Don’t forget that overusing keywords in all your links is actually going to hurt your site’s search engine ranking. Search engines look at a large number of links with wording just like the anchor text as suspicious. It is good to use the most important keywords half the time, less important keywords in around 30% of the links, and generic terms telling people where to click in the remaining links. Be aware that some websites end up banned from search engines if they contain links that include repeated keywords so that is something you should avoid.