What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of optimizing your website to get organic, or un-paid, traffic from the search engine results page. SEO meaning involves making certain changes to your website design and content that make your site more attractive to a search engine. You do this in hopes that the search engine will display your website as a top result on the search engine results page. Why is SEO important? Because more traffic means more chances to make a sale and higher profits.

The way search engines rank pages is a well kept secret. However, they release guidelines on the sort of things they look for in a high-ranking site. These guidelines can be divided into three main categories: on-page, off-page, and technical.

Website Content

Before diving into the SEO categories it's important to talk about content. The content of a website is effective in both attracting the search engines and helping your organisation make connections with site visitors. SEO can be emphasised even further through your visual and written content.

The more quality, relevant content pieces that you have on your site, the more likely search engines will be to rank your pages higher on the search engine results page. Similarly, the more engaging and effective content you have on your site, the more likely your visitors will be to spend some quality time on your website and maybe even make a purchase.

The secret to creating content that is optimized for both the search engines and your human site visitors is to create a variety of different types of content pieces that are well-written and on topics that are most relevant to your audience.

Another important thing to consider when creating content for your site is SEO keywords and phrases as these are what the users enter into the search engines. So trying to summarize all the content of the page and put it down on simple words and phrases is an efficient way to obtain the primary keywords.

1. On-Page SEO Optimization

On-Page SEO is about page and content optimization and that has to do with the source code of the website.

The reason it is called on-page SEO is that these changes are visible to readers. If you add in a header tag, they can see the header. If you change your sentences around to add more keywords, those changes are visible. Thus, on-page SEO is a balance between giving the right information to search engines without compromising the information that your customers are reading on the page

Here are just a few of the on-page SEO factors that can help you improve your search ranking:

• Title Tag: The title tag on each page tells the search engines what your page is about. This should be 70 characters or less, including both the keyword your content focuses on and your business name.
• Meta Description: The meta description on your website tells search engines a little bit more about what each page is about. This is also used by your human visitors to better understand what the page is about and if it’s relevant. This should include your keywords and also provide enough details to tell the reader what the content is about. It should be ideally between 50–160 characters.
• Sub-headings: They make your content easier for visitors to read and help improve your SEO. You can use H1, H2, and H3 tags to help search engines better understand what your content is about.
• Internal Links: Building internal links, or hyperlinks to other content on your site, can help search engines learn more about your site. For example, if you are writing a post about the value of a specific product or service, you can link to the product or service page in your blog post.
• Image Name and ALT Tags: If you are using images on your website or within your blog content, you will also want to include your keyword or phrase in the image name and alt tag. By including this information, you also help give your SEO definition. This will help search engines better index your images, which may appear when users perform an image search for a certain keyword or phrase.

When strategically placing your SEO keywords and phrases on your pages, it’s important to avoid over-optimization. Google and other search engines will penalize your page if it attempts to use keywords too many times throughout the content.

In addition, you want to make sure that each piece of content focuses on just one or two keywords. This helps ensure that your content is specific and relevant. Trying to tackle too many keywords at once may negatively impact your search engine optimization as it often makes for un-focused and thin content.

2. Off-Page SEO Optimization

Off-page SEO techniques is about website promotion. It's anything that’s used outside of your site to improve the ranking.

These are the things you do not have direct control over, but there are ways that you can improve your chances of having these factors work out in your favour.

Here are a few of the different off-page SEO factors that can impact your search engine rankings:

• Trust: Trust is becoming an increasingly important factor in a site’s Google ranking. This is how Google determines whether you have a legitimate site that visitors can trust. One of the best ways to improve trust is by building quality backlinks from sites that have authority.
• Links: One of the most popular ways to build off-page SEO is through backlinks. You want to be careful here as spamming sites with your links is a quick and easy way to get your site banned from the search engines. Instead, take the time to build relationships with influencers and fans who create quality content and will link back to your site in their own content.
• Social: Another important off-page SEO factor are social signals, such as likes and shares. When it comes to boosting SEO, you want to look for quality shares from influencers. The more quality content you publish, the more likely you will be to get people to share your content with others.

3. Technical SEO

The main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website through crawling and indexing.

In fact, crawling refers to a bot that scans a webpage performing an analysis of it. When the crawler goes through a website, it visits all the links contained in it and follow the instructions included in the robots.txt file. In this file, you can find the directions for the search engine on how it should “crawl” the website.

Once it has extracted the page content, the crawler will put it on the index of the visited pages and organises all the information. The information is then used to measure the relevance of the page compared to similar ones. When a user enters a keyword on the search engine bar, the search engine will search on its index the pages that match the search query.

This process results in ranking, and if you did a good SEO job, your website would get a better positioning than your competitors.

A simple example of technical SEO is site speed. People do not like to wait for slow websites. If your pages load slowly, you will be ranked lower than a comparable site that has faster pages. Caching your website on a CDN or lowering the file size of your images are just two ways this can be improved. Another example is mobile friendliness. If your site looks bad on a mobile device, search engines can detect that and lower its rankings on mobile-specific search engines.

How to Approach Optimization

SEO is such a big topic that it's common to come across many different opinions about the most effective ways to approach site optimization. And though many of these tactics can work, and the idea of which is “best” is largely subjective, there’s one distinction to be aware of: white hat vs. black hat SEO.

White Hat SEO

It refers to the correct, ethical way to optimize a site following three criteria:

1. It follows search engine guidelines: These are the rules that Google has laid out to define the proper way to optimize a site. The main idea behind this is not to be manipulative.
2. It focuses on a human audience: This has to do with making changes that are beneficial to a site’s visitors. Tactics like publishing high-quality content and improving page load times improve the value that users get from a site, and the ease with which they can navigate it — making them upstanding, Google-approved strategies.
3. It takes a long-term approach: Strategies that follow Google’s guidelines and create a positive user experience are often more time- and work-intensive than black hat methods. This means that it will take time to see the results you want. But on the flip side, white hat SEO also has a much more lasting impact. That’s because when you use strategies that are designed to improve your overall site experience, you can achieve steady rankings for your target keywords.

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is essentially the exact opposite of white hat SEO.

1. It violates search engine guidelines: Black hat tactics violate Google’s guidelines, and in many cases, are directly referenced in these guidelines as practices you shouldn’t use.
2. It relies on manipulative tactics: While white hat SEO involves looking for ways to improve user experience, black hat SEO relies on manipulating Google’s algorithm to improve rankings. To put it simply, if a tactic is designed to make Google think that a site provides more value to users than it really does, it’s deceptive — and it’s black hat SEO.
3. It focuses on “quick wins”: Many of the strategies involved in black hat SEO are focused on exploiting loopholes in Google’s algorithm that can lead to improvements in rankings without much work. Sites using black hat strategies are at risk for losing their rankings every time there’s a new algorithm update — making this a much more short-term approach than white hat SEO.

So, the biggest differences between these two approaches are that white hat SEO follows Google’s guidelines and improves user experience, while black hat SEO violates those guidelines and is typically done with complete disregard for human users.

As life is not always black or white, neither is SEO. In fact, in between these two main practices resides a less known one called Grey Hat SEO which involves using technically legal methods to improve your site rankings, but which are ethically dubious, and could one day become black hat.

Conclusion

We've explored what SEO is and how important is to tailor the content of a website, be it find out what are the relevant keywords and phrases, build relationship with other businesses and the importance of crawling and indexing. SEO is certanly time consuming but it's a practice that everyone from individuals to big companies should adopt if they want to grow and make their product be found, as in fact, using search engines is the way people engage with the web nowadays.