Here’s a quick overview of the Big Five SEO disciplines:

1. Analytics and intelligence

Remember the Scouts’ motto? Be prepared. Good planning for SEO starts with an assessment of where you are today. Before you begin your SEO you need to go through your site’s analytics and understand things like who’s visiting your key pages and what search terms they‘re using to find you. You can then use this data as a benchmark and compare your performance against it later on.

2. Keywords and content

Content counts for a lot: we’re not playing trick-the-spider anymore. That said, you’ve still got to make it easy for search engines to do their job by using the right words in the right places. Clearly, you’ve got to do your key phrase homework, but you can’t just pack your site with key phrases.

3. Site architecture and on-page elements

How you present your content matters, so make sure it’s organized sensibly. Break it down into themes so the search engine spiders know what to crawl over. And don’t forget to optimize behind the scenes, it’s just as important as the front-of-house stuff.

4. Usability and web design

You’ve optimized your pages and developed the right site architecture. You've got yourself a strong foundation, but it'll only work if your site is usable for human beings (not just search spiders). Your customers are people so your website has to treat them like ones.

5. Link development

Not all links are worth the same to search engines. A link from your best friend’s website isn’t going to get you very far (unless your best friend is Amazon). Cultivate good-quality links to push you up the search results pages.

To get the full description and practical advice, please download the whitepaper “The five essentials of SEO”