Website SEO is both easy and difficult at the same time.

A lot of SEO is making sure that you get the basics right, otherwise anything else you do will be built on foundations of sand.

Depending on how competitve your industry is and how switched on your competition is, you may only need to get the basics right.

But that’s unlikely if you have to pay Google £1 a click upwards to advertise in Adwords. If that’s the case, your competition will also include websites designed purely to get their share of that revenue by displaying ads – and that kind of website is often “built” by a computer according to the latest rules of the SEO game so they can be surprisingly tough to beat.

But before you get into those realms, take a long look at your site in the eyes of the search engines.

Do a search for your site – for instance, for this site I’d use this search:

site:trevordumbleton.com

Note there’s no space between “site:” and the domain name.

That will bring up the pages that Google has currently got indexed and – importantly – will quickly show you the page titles and descriptions, which is what Google tends to use when your site shows up in the search results.

Doing that search for your site may have put a smile on your face – in which case well done – or you may have had the more common experience of utter horror.

If the titles and descriptions cause you to not want to click on them in a month of Sundays then it’s time to change them.

Start with your most important pages and work through your site in descending order of importance.

If you’re using WordPress, an SEO plugin such as the one from Yoast will help with this task.

If you’re using a different system, a quiet word with your techie should get things on track.

Work on the length of your page titles – they should be no more than about 65 characters long (including spaces and punctuation), otherwise they’ll get cut off by Google.

There’s no precise number of characters any more – there used to be, but Google now takes into account the final width the title takes up on the page, so lots of thin letters like “i” will allow a few extra characters to creep in whereas lots of wide letters like “w” will cut the count down. There are probably some techie sites out there that would take this to a precise science but I’ve never looked for them. Just be sensible!

There are schools of thought that say you should put your preferred keywords near the start of the title but my preference is to make it readable to humans first and Google seems to be using that as a good rule of thumb as well.

Page descriptions are probably the only important part of your site that don’t actually show when people click to visit it.

They’re the short description in the results that shows up below the page title.

Your “allowance” for these is around 156 characters and, again, if you’re using WordPress you can get an SEO plugin to help keep these under control.

Much like page titles, your page description should be relevant to the page.

Which is a polite way of saying don’t use the same description for every single page on your site.

By no means everyone reads the page descriptions in the results.

But that doesn’t make them less important.

Google will bold any words that appear in the description that have been used in the person’s search.

This gives a quick visual clue as to whether the result is likely to be relevant and generally helps tip the balance in favour of clicking one link versus another.

As with page titles, make sure the descriptions are aimed at real human readers first and foremost, even if your SEO instincts want to make them stuffed with keywords at the expense of making them useful to real people.

Apart from anything else, if Google thinks that its computer program can come up with a better title or description than you have, it will use that instead.

So it pays to do your best for these two essential elements.

Once you’ve got those right for most (or preferably all) your site, you can work on tweaking and fine tuning things.

But without the basics right, the chances of anyone clicking through to your site is low.

If you’d like more help with your internet marketing, take a look at my weekly internet marketing tutor group – it’s affordable and you can get your questions answered so you start making money quicker!