A great website design is important to any business trying to find success online, but if a website doesn’t have a chance at good search rankings, very few people may ever get to see it. To avoid having a website that is not search engine friendly, you simply need to take into consideration some basic SEO principles and good content development practices.

Off-page SEO simply tells Google what others think about your site. For example, if you've got a lot of valuable links pointing to your pages, search engines will assume that you've got great content that provides value for users. People only cite, reference, and share content they like.

Google notes that: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Keyword research is important because it can reveal vital information to grow your business online. Keyword research can tell you what terms people are actively searching for, the competitiveness of those keywords, and help guide your content marketing plan to increase organic search visibility, rankings, and traffic.