What and Why SEO
SEO known as Search Engine Optimization is a type of non paid marketing that helps you grow the organic visibility of your website. There are numerous viewpoints on SEO, from the words on your page to the way different destinations connect to you on the web.
We might get good traffic for our website through social media platforms, but as we know that majority of traffic is driven by the top search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, so these are the primary platforms. For this reason, we do need to have SEO done on our websites.
Search engines are smart but they still need some help form website owners. Search engines have got great algorithms to crawl your websites more deeply and produce better results for the people. For this purpose, you have to follow some rules and some SEO techniques to get your site indexed.
In this article, we will discuss the basics of SEO that would help us understand the types, parts, and factors that effects the visibility of our website in search engines.
Types of SEO
There are three different types of SEO techniques.
- White Hat SEO
- Black Hat SEO
- Grey Hat SEO
| White Hat SEO | Black Hat SEO | Gray Hat SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Use techniques and methods to improve the ranking of the website followed by the proper guidelines that don’t cause any conflict with search engines. Stability Level is quite High. | In Black Hat SEO we try to exploit the weakness in search engines for high raking of websites. This techniques are never followed by guidelines and may cause conflict with search engines. Stability level is quite low. | Gray Hat SEO is at a little risk from White Hat SEO but at less risk then Black Hat SEO. It may or may not result in getting your website banned from Search Engines. |
| You need to have a good quality content on your website, good and otimized HTML structure. | Some of the techniques includes spamming, keyword stuffing, hidden text or links. | Gray Hat SEO can improve your sites ranking without negative consequence. |
| White Hat SEO is gradual and steady rise, but its long lasting. | Its not as long lasting as white hat SEO. | Gray Hat SEO changes periodically. |
Parts of SEO
The SEO strategy can be divided into two different categories that include
- On-Page SEO
Doing the SEO on your website and optimizing the different parts of your website that could affect search engine ranking - Off-Page SEO
The involves increase authority of your website by getting links from other websites. The biggest Off-Page SEO factors include how many backlinks you have on your website. The ways you can increase links to your website is to create an awesome content that people could share, the social media sharing that could generate a number of links to your website.
There are a lot of factors that effect On & Off-page SEO of your websites. Here are few factors below that could affect SEO of your websites.
Site Optimization
Site optimization includes following factors.
- Title Tags
Put your targeted keywords in title tags on each page. Title tags are important for SEO in case it briefly describes the topic of the online document. - Meta Tags
Meta tags are the brief extract of the text that describes the content on the page. Meta tags are not seen on the page, in fact, they are in the source code only that helps search engines to index your website. - Meta Description
The meta description is the precise summary that summarizes the content of the page. For on-page meta description plays an important role. It should be around 155 characters or less. - Meta Keywords
They are very specific kinds of meta tags that help search engines understand the topic of the page. The most important part to remember her is while choosing the keywords, you need to make sure that keyword reflects the topic on the page.
Content Optimization
Content optimization includes following factors
- Keyword Density
It is defined as the number of times you use a phrase/keyword that appears on your page compared to the total number of words on the page. Make sure that words have only percentage of 5% based on a total number of words on a page. There is a formula to calculate the Keyword density.
Keyword Density = (number of times keyword / total number of words ) * 100 - Heading Tags
Headings are most prominent words on your websites and they are preferred more by search engine crawlers. It can be a good idea to use the target keywords in your headings as well. - Hyperlinks
Creating internal links to your website can be useful for visitors as well as search engine crawlers. The main purpose of on-page SEO is to ensure that your content is accessible to both potential customers as well as search engine robots. - ALT Text for Images
This text isn’t visible to the site readers, in fact, the alt text is used by screen reader software to help blind people understand the content of the image. In the same way, search engine crawlers use this information to understand the page content. Always be sure write correct keywords as alt text for images. - URL Structure
Always be sure to use the keywords in your URL.
Other Factors
There are few other factors as well that might be of more importance than above-mentioned factors which includes
- Friendly Code
Your website code needs to be friendly and incorrect structured format so it easily readable by the search engine robots. - Navigation/Site Maps
A sitemap describes the list of pages and links on your website. A sitemap can be used search engine crawlers - Mobile Optimized Site
A large number of people use mobile devices to search for the site. If your site is optimized for mobile, it might affect ranking in some way.
Off-Page Factors
There are few factors on your website as well that are important for SEO. Some of the key points are
- A total number of domains that are linked to you.
- You might have links from a specific domain, which is a ranking factor too, but its good to have links from more individual domains.
- Social media marketing. That helps you create a number of backlinks to your website.
Here are some variations in SEO that affect your website rankings.
- Bad on-page and Bad off-page SEO does not rank your website.
- Good on-page but bad off-page SEO does not give very competitive keywords ranking.
- Bad on-page but good off-page SEO give somehow better competitive keyword ranking.
- Good on-page and good off-page SEO gives the best competitive keyword ranking.