Do you know that search engines are so good that over 93% of the people using the internet rely on Search Engines to find things?
In this world of digitization, people often visit search engines for a variety of purposes like booking flights, railway, or bus tickets, doing research, looking for the answers, shopping, entertainment, etc.
So, search engines play a key role in solving the problems of the users with the help of information on Search Engine Results Pages(SERPs). There are a lot of search engines out there like Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, etc. But around 85-90% of the people use Google, as there are 3.8 million searches per minute which leads to 5.6 million searches per day on Google. Now, you can only imagine how Google dominates Search Engines.
Basically, Google’s mission is to bring the best possible information in front of the users. So this paves the way for the term SEO to come into the picture. Let’s see what it is:
SEO is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization which means improving the visibility of your websites on Search Engine Result Pages(SERPs) or you can say in easy words as online searches. In other words, SEO is optimizing your website in such a way that it will get the quality and quantity of traffic due to which it will rank on the Search Engine Result Pages.
The best thing about SEO that it is unpaid which means you don’t need to pay anything to get in SERPs, unlike paid ads where you need to pay to Google for getting on search results. Now we will see how this SEO works.
How SEO works?
Search Engines like Google wants to provide the best possible information to the users. i.e. delivering the results which are not only of high quality but also relevant to what the user is searching for. So for doing this, search engines will scan or crawl the websites as to what they are about. This will eventually help them to deliver better results on SERPs. They will collect the information from all the webpages of your websites and indexes them.
Now the indexing work is being done by the Search Engine algorithms. These algorithms will take into account hundreds of factors through which they decide the page rank for particular webpages. This page rank will be considered for positioning your website on SERPs. Search Engine Algorithms are designed in a specific way so that users can get a relevant and efficient search experience.
So by keeping in mind the search algorithms, you can rank your website higher in Search Results. Now the question arises like why you need to rank your website higher in search results? Let’s see the answer to it.
Why do websites need to be SEO optimized?
Over 94% of the people that use Google only click results on the first page. If they don’t get on the first page, they don’t bother clicking on the other pages. They would rather adjust their search terms and start searching from the scratch. Again on the first page, 63% of the people click on the top 3 results only, and they won’t visit the other pages.
When people search for something that is relevant to them and they see your website on search results, they are gonna click and visit your webpage and these are not the normal visitors. They are the ideal visitors which are actually looking out for what you offer. These users are most likely to convert into customers, subscribers, buyers, etc. This is the reason why optimizing your websites for Search Engines or doing SEO is very important.
Since now we have seen the basics of SEO, we will now dive into the techniques through which SEO can be done.
Types of SEO
1. On-Page SEO
It refers to the content on the website. The content can be in the form of Text, Images, audio, and video. Based on the On-Page SEO factors search engines can decide if your webpage is relevant to searches done by the users. Improving the content by doing keyword research and keyword optimization are basic things required to do On-Page SEO.
2. Technical SEO
It refers to the technical part which means improving the site’s backend structure and foundation. This will provide the best user experience so that the users will spend more time around your website which in turn will lead to more engagement and increasing your website traffic.
The common technical factors affecting your website include site speed, mobile optimization, crawling and indexing, structured data, UI/UX, etc.
3. Off-Page SEO
It refers to how good your website has a relationship with the other websites or how good your authority in the search engines. You need to build links with the other websites having higher authority that means you need to have good quality and natural backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the more will be your site authority and with more authority, your ranking ability will also increase.
Black Hat vs White Hate SEO
While doing the SEO, there are ethical as well as non-ethical ways through which you can rank websites. We can call it White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO respectively. You need to know both these techniques so that it would be easier for you to rank your website on SERPs.
White Hat SEO
It is the SEO done by keeping into account Search engine guidelines and recommendations. You can also say it’s an ethical or correct way to optimize the website for ranking in SERPs.
It involves creating high-quality information that really dives into the subject by dissecting it into a 1500-2000 word article that is written for the audience. Also, backlinks are created naturally by using methods like guest posting and doing it on high-quality websites.
White hat SEO is a long term process since it’s not manipulative and can be done consistently over a period of time. This eventually creates a lasting impact on SERPs.
Black Hat SEO
It is the SEO done in an unethical way by violating Search Engine guidelines and recommendations. You can say it’s a short-term way to trick Google to give you better search engine rankings and therefore website traffic.
Some common Black Hat techniques include:
Keyword Stuffing: Instead of writing a natural article, the article is stuffed with different keywords and include very little valuable content.
Cloaking: By using this technique, you can present the content in such a way that search engines will different content and the users will get a different one. Thereby tricking Google to rank in a faster way.
Article Scraping: Using other’s articles to publish them on your website by saying that it’s yours.
Autoblogging: Using software/plugins to generate automatic blogs or mini-blogs.
Black Hat SEO short-term strategy that involves manipulating Search engines so that your website would rank on the SERPs. You might get success initially but eventually, your website will be taken down by Search Engines as their algorithms are smart enough to find such websites and penalize them.