In simple language, SEO is a method that helps our website or blog post to appear higher in the search result.
Let’s break down the term SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimization.
We will go through in detail on every topic one by one, but if you want to jump to any specific section, here are is the topic structure of this article
- What is a Search Engine?
- What is Optimisation in Search Engine Optimisation?
- What are the rules for implementing SEO on the website?
- Types of SEO: Black Hat vs White Hat vs Grey Hat
- Types of SEO: On-Page and Off-Page SEO
What is a Search Engine?
A Search Engine is a website that lets us search for information across various other websites on the internet.
For example, Google is a search engine, Yahoo is a search engine. Other famous search engines are Bing, YouTube, etc.
Don’t confuse a Search engine with a Webs browser.
What is a web browser?
A web browser is an application that lets users browse the world wide web.
Famous web browsers are Google, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, etc.
Yes, Google is a search engine and a web browser too. It’s a big company.
What is Optimisation in Search Engine Optimisation?
Optimization means tuning. Like we tune our car’s engine for better performance, in the same way, we tune our website to perform well with Search engines
By optimization of our website or webpages, we make sure that they contain information in the way search engines need.
Why do we need to Optimise our website for engines?
Internet users can’t go to any specific website when they want some information. There are more than 2 billion websites right now. And around 5 billion internet users in the world.
So users want a place where they can get a sorted list of websites about their required information. That’s why everyone uses Search engines.
That’s why Search Engines are in great demand. But users will only use any specific search engine if they give the best list of websites for information.
If you search ‘types of podcasts‘ and Google’s first result is about the best podcast on the internet, you’ll be disappointed. And search engines don’t want that.
So a search engine tries to provide what’s best for the user. For that, they make specific rules. If a website follows those rules, it will be rank higher. If it doesn’t, it will be rank lower.
That’s why a website creator has to follow those rules to make its website rank higher in search results.
This process is called as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.
What are the rules for implementing SEO on the website?
There are no written rules anywhere for SEO. The reason is, people know how to bend them.
Basically, Search Engines says, make content that fulfills user’s demand. If your content is better than other’s, I’ll rank you higher.
There are a few SEO rules that are very common
1. Your webpage should load faster.
2. If your website has SSL certification, it will definitely rank higher than the one which doesn’t.
3. Your webpages should have meta descriptions. Because in search results, the meta description is shown below the title.
The list goes on.
Types of SEO: Black Hat vs White Hat vs Grey Hat
As there are three kinds of computer hackers Black, White, and Grey, there are 3 kinds of SEO also.
1. Black Hat SEO
When you bend the rules to rank higher without thinking of users, that is Black Hat SEO.
The search engine which is ranking the pages is a machine that runs on rules and protocols. No human is sitting there to manually check your webpages.
Thus, there is are always some methods to beat the system.
Why people use Black Hat SEO?
People use Black Hat SEO to rank higher quickly and earn their ad revenue or make some sales.
Why can’t we use Black Hat SEO?
Because 1st, it’s illegal. Secondly, the web pages using Black Hat SEO will soon get caught by the search engine.
Search engines are always learning and updating. And that’s why when you use Black Hat SEO, your webpage will be banned once caught.
It’s not good for the people looking for the long run.
What are Black Hat SEO techniques?
Here are some common Black Hat SEO techniques:
1. Using the same content for many articles with stuffed keywords.
2. Putting invisible texts in the background in your articles.
3. Phishing the webpages from other websites
4. Linking your content to non-relevant websites
5. Putting wrong and misleading meta description to get people to click on your website.
Adult website, spammy ads websites, Clickbates websites, scammers, etc usually do Black Hat SEO.
2. White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO is the way of optimizing your page for search engines without using illegal methods.
Everything you learn on this website marketcliff.com is always and will be about White Hat SEO.
So when we talk about what is SEO, we are talking about what is White Hat SEO.
In White Hat SEO we use the right way to rank up our webpages.
The right way of optimizing our Webpage is by thinking about people who are going to visit our websites.
3. Grey Hat SEO
Whatever falls between the Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO comes under Grey Hat SEO.
In Grey Hat SEO we bend the rules just enough so that it won’t degrade the visitor’s experience, but on the hand, helps to rank higher in SERPs.
Grey Hat SEO is not legal, but webpages don’t usually gets punished for using that.
The example that I can think of here is doing guest posts on other websites to get a backlink to your website.
Google is against it, but it’s a legit way of telling people about your website if they want to visit.
Personal suggestion is you should always do guest posts. It widens your incoming traffic and creates backlinks.
We’ll learn more about link building in Off-Page SEO
Types of SEO: On-Page and Off-Page SEO
On the basis of where the optimization of the webpage happens, we can divide it in two ways: On-Page and Off-Page SEO.
What is An On-Page SEO?
Every SEO technique we use on our content and website, for example focusing the right keywords, is an On-Page SEO.
What are some common On-Page SEO practices?
1. Freshness of content
Keeping your content fresh by editing it from time to time and updating the new information.
2. Mobile-friendliness
With around 5 billion mobile phone users around the world, it is necessary for your page to be mobile-friendly.
If your webpage doesn’t align with Mobile phone screens, users will have to pinch-zoom it. It will create a bad experience for the users and search engines won’t like it.
That’s why if your webpages are optimized Mobile friendly, the search engines will rank them higher.
3. Structure of the Webpage
The structure of the webpage consists of its title heading, subheadings, etc.
If all of them are systematically managed, means the user will be able to get a good flow of information from it.
4. Putting a meta description
Meta descriptions are important. The result shows after a search contains the title of the article with the meta description.
The meta description gives the user an overview of what kind of information does the webpage holds.
If you don’t put a meta description yourself, the search engine will extract the starting of your content as a meta description.
But by not putting the meta description yourself, your website will suffer from lower ranking.
5.Giving an alt attribute to images
Google gives high value to the alt attributes of the images. It’s the information that the search engine will show if the image doesn’t get displayed.
Thus if the user has internet of very less speed and can’t get images to load, it will get some information regarding what the image is about.
6. Speed
It’s the main factor that Google openly stats for its ranking.
The speed of the webpage is the time requires to load on the user’s screen. The load time increases if the server is bad, or the images are too heavy.
High load time results in a lower ranking.
There are so many On-page techniques that we can discuss, but you get the idea here.
What is an Off-Page SEO?
Every SEO technique that helps to rank your webpage higher but is not implemented on the webpages itself is called as Off-Page SEO.
What are the common Off-page SEO factors?
1. Age of your domain
The older your domain is, the higher trust it will get by search engines. This will increase your page Authority and Domain Authority.
2. No of shares
The higher the number of shares your article gets, the higher your website ranking will go.
3. Social media presence
If your website has a high social media presence, it will positively affect your ranking.
4. Bounce Rate
Your webpage should have a lower Bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage that tells that people are coming to your website but then quickly exiting from it.
As the bounce rate goes higher, your ranking goes lower.
5. Backlinks
This is the most important Off-Page SEO entity. The links on other websites on the internet that redirects to your website are called as a backlink for your website.
If you get a backlight from a higher ranking page, for example, a Government website, or Forbes, or Newyork times, your ranking will go up.
But if you get a backlink from some non-relevant, spammy website, your ranking will get a serious hit. And trust me, it happens a lot.
So you have to manually ask the website owners by contacting them to remove your link or submit that URL to google to disavow that backlink.
Conclusion
You get the basic idea of what is SEO, Black Hat, Gray Hat, White Hat SEO, the On-Page and Off-page SEO practices, etc.
Now you can assume why SEO is vital for a blogger or for someone who wants to rank higher in SERP
SERP stands for Search Engine Result Pages
There are lots of acronyms that are used in digital marketing and SEO conversation. You can get the idea for them by this quick 5 min read.
Seo acronyms
SEO efforts take time to be seen visibly. It takes around 6 months for a webpage to rank for a keyword.
So if you want to get started, don’t quit quickly if the result doesn’t show up.
As Bill gates said content is the king, keep creating good content and practice SEO techniques on them. It will rank up.
Podcasts are on a boom nowadays. If you are thinking to start a YouTube podcast, Read this article: How To Start A Podcast On YouTube Easily Step By Step