Building a successful online brand can be done using a variety of marketing and content-related tactics, but search engine optimization remains one of the most important elements of the process. Through the use of SEO, brands and businesses can gain organic exposure in search engines, which are used by virtually everybody on a daily basis.

The world of SEO can at time feel overly complex and difficult, overwhelming those who are new to the art. While a complex concept deserves complex explanations, those wishing to immerse themselves in the process can generally move in the right direction by learning about four key concepts.

Today, let’s look at the four cornerstones of any SEO campaign.

Keywords

Throughout the early days of SEO, keywords were arguably the end-all, be-all of the game. The process has certainly become much more complex since the advent of SEO, but keyword research and application remains an integral part of the process.

Keyword research is essential in guiding brands, helping them to focus on niches where the most potential growth exists. Likewise, proper keyword usage ensures that you’re pinging search engines with the proper context – which helps content rank more prominently. In essence, keywords are a good guiding post for developing an effective, long-term content strategy.

Links

Building links remains a vital aspect of SEO, and much like every item on this list, remains so due to multiple reasons. First of all, link building helps send signals to search engines that your content is authoritative or otherwise trustworthy; after all, websites tend to link to other websites only when the content is worthwhile.

An additional benefit of earning links is the traffic it can provide. While this benefit isn’t directly tied to improved SEO, it does help accomplish the same end goal; the point of SEO is to drive quality traffic to your website, and traffic from earned links is just as valuable.

On-Page SEO

Improving the look and feel of your website is important – and many of these tweaks are a crucial aspect of SEO. Everything – from titles and meta descriptions to menus and site maps – can have a profound impact on your pages’ rankings in various SERPs.

There are countless examples of websites in the number one position in search results that do not mention specific keywords, yet the on-page SEO aspects are optimized so well that these pages are still pinging search engines with plenty of context. When coupled with the above tasks, on-page SEO is immensely powerful.

Growth Strategy

Optimizing content and pages in the here and now is important, but just as important is having plans for the long term. Brands that succeed on such a dynamic playing field know that the nature of trends is bound to change, requiring new keyword focuses, new opportunities for link building and even a complete overhaul of a website to accommodate additional traffic and features.

Having in place a template for how your brand will grow and evolve over time is crucial to ensuring both growth and continued dominance within various niches.

With so many aspects of SEO to juggle, absorbing all of it can be frustrating and nearly impossible. However, starting with these four cornerstones – and applying them to your efforts – can begin producing meaningful benefits almost immediately, and will maximize your chances for SEO success.