SEO is one of those fields that remain foreign to many people, and even somewhat ambiguous. We hear terms thrown around like “keywords” and “search engine rankings” but never really go beyond that.

In reality, however, SEO is not that difficult to understand and put into practice. Like any other field, there are basic steps you need to learn to get started. Once those steps are learned and mastered, then you can move on to more advanced SEO practices to further refine your website for optimum visibility.

The following is a primer in SEO that lays out the basics. Learn these and your website will be far ahead of many other sites that are hastily thrown together.

SEO and the importance of user experience

When we think about the user experience (UX) of a website, we often think in terms of design, functionality, ease of use and so forth. While all those are definitely important, they do not by themselves satisfy all the requirements for a good UX. What’s missing? SEO.

Why do people visit websites? They visit because they’re looking for information, to buy something or to be entertained. This is where SEO comes into play. It’s said that UX focuses on what the user sees and how the user interacts with a website. SEO, on the other hand, focuses on what the user wants (information, a product to buy, entertainment and how to get some place). However, regardless if you’re talking about SEO or UX, the end goal for everyone is to give your website visitors the best possible experience.

There are ways where SEO and UX intersect, for example: • HTML sitemaps will help users find what they’re looking for if they got lost (404 error pages) and help search engines crawl the site more effectively. A sitemap guides the search engine through all the pages, identifying each page with the correct anchor texts.