Over the last few decades, the way businesses market their products and advertise their services has evolved rapidly. All thanks to the advent of the internet and its billion-plus users, brands have moved on from traditional marketing, and the attraction towards digital marketing has never been crazier before – presenting new job roles and career potentials. From content marketing to PPC, and social media marketing to SEO, every aspect plays an equally important role. SEO, however, has a lot of aspects from on-page to off-page and backlinking to interlinking. Well, let’s start with the basics first.
You’ve most likely heard the term before but may not have asked the question: What is SEO? We’re going to try and answer it regardless.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of increasing organic traffic on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It is also known as organic search or listings. If you want to rank number one for all the keywords, you need to apply SEO to increase your rank.
Suppose you started a blog for ice cream recipes, but your website doesn’t rank high in the organic search results. There are several reasons why this can happen:
- Your competitors have better content
- You use weak keywords
- You use poor link-building practices
- Your webpage load time is slow
- Your website doesn’t have a good user experience
- Your website is de-indexed by mistake
To rank high on the SERP, you need to understand how search engines work. In this article, you will learn about how Google ranks websites, the different types of SEO, and various SEO techniques you can use to improve your ranking.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO refers to the practices that violate the search engine’s terms of service. It will likely increase a page’s ranking in a search engine result page (SERP) for some time but can result in getting banned from search engines or affiliate sites since it’s against the search engine’s terms of service. Some of the black hat SEO techniques or practices include:
- Keyword Stuffing
- Link Manipulation
- Creating articles, pages, or site landing pages with duplicate content
Word of caution: You might experience short-term success. The traffic to your site might increase rapidly, but Google penalties are getting more sophisticated each passing day and can have crushing aftereffects both on your traffic and ranking.
What is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO typically refers to SEO tactics that are in tandem and in agreement with the terms and conditions of the search engines. And just like the name suggests, white hat SEO is the contrast of black hat SEO. A white hat SEO practice like:
- Creating original quality content and services
- Mobile-friendly website
- Use of clear and keyword-rich meta tags
It will improve your search rankings on a SERP, and also maintain the integrity of your website.
Types of SEO
If you want to rank for a particular keyword on Google, you need to apply SEO. There are two strategies for this:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing website elements. When you do this, there are certain factors that you need to take into account. All these elements are something that you can control as an end-user. The aspects of on-page SEO are:
Keyword Research
Before you do anything with your website, the first thing you need to do is understand what keywords you want to rank for. To do this, you need to do keyword research. In this process, you choose the primary and secondary keywords around which you build meta tags and content.
The primary components for keyword research are:
- Search volume
- Competition
- Relevancy
You can also use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs to search for keywords. Once you choose the keywords, you can go ahead and start optimizing your pages for those keywords.
Title Tag
The title tag is a header title element displaying the summary of your website’s content on the search engine results page. It also influences click-through rates and is the most important factor of on-page SEO. Search engines display the first 50–60 characters of the title tag.
Meta Description
A meta description is a brief description that summarizes the content of a webpage. They are also displayed on the search engine page results. In comparison to the title tag, a meta description gives users more understanding of what your webpage is about. Meta description also influences click-through rates.
URL Structure
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. The best practice is to use SEO-friendly URLs, as they help to understand what the webpage is about. Poor URL structure is a big issue in SEO, which may result in your website getting lower ranks.
Header Tags
Header tags help to identify the headings and subheadings of your content. The hierarchy of header tags goes from H1 to H6. H1 is the main heading of a page, the H2 tag is a subheading of H1, and so on. These tags help search engines to read and understand the content better.
Internal Link
Internal links are links that link web pages together on your website. They allow users to navigate through the website. They are also useful to spread link equity (value passed from one website to another site).
Keyword Usage
A search engine crawls a website using Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP helps search engines look for content and keywords.
For example: If your website is about digital marketing and you have used only the keyword “digital marketing” in it, then the chances of you ranking high for this keyword is low. It is important to add related keywords such as types of digital marketing, skills in digital marketing, etc.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is a way of organizing a website to help both users and search engines understand the structure of a website. There are two types of sitemaps:
- HTML sitemaps: Designed for humans
- XML sitemaps: Designed for crawlers
Now that you have a clear understanding of on-page SEO, let us discuss the off-page SEO section of the ‘What is SEO?’ article.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is another process of improving your rank on the search engine results page. It also helps to strengthen the credibility of your website and build a sense of domain authority and trustworthiness. Other benefits of off-page SEO are an increase in traffic, page rank, and brand awareness.
Link Building
Off-page SEO is mostly associated with link building. Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your site. This is also known as external link building. The key to link building is always content. From an on-page SEO perspective, having quality content allows you to optimize it for relevant keywords and rank. From an off-page SEO strategy, having high-quality content enables other sites to link back to your site.
Here are some strategies for link-building:
- High-quality content creation – Other sites will link back to yours if your content is original, well-structured, and reads well.
- Off-site engagement – Spend a lot of time on other websites similar to yours. You can search for other sites that have relevant content. You can share your content with them they can share their content with you. You can also achieve off-site engagement through social media and collaborating with bloggers.
SEO vs SEM
Before we continue this ‘What is SEO?’ article, it’s worth addressing something many people get confused about — the difference between SEO vs SEM. Both are critical components of any successful digital marketing campaign, and SEO is actually a subset of SEM. The main difference is that SEM employs paid search engine advertising to target specific demographics.
Supreme Free SEO Tools to Improve Your Marketing
Before we get started, it’s important to outline exactly what SEO tools are, and how they can help your marketing campaigns. SEO tools are defined as any tool or program that allows you to complete a step in the search engine optimization process. So, for example, keyword research is a huge part of SEO.
A tool that most marketers can’t go without is an effective keyword tool for SEO. Other tools that are important to the SEO process include a free SEO checker, backlink tools, page speed tools, and more.
5 free SEO tools that marketers can’t live without
The time is here, it’s time to reveal our list of top free SEO tools that marketers (and you) can’t live without.
- Google Analytics
How Google Analytics works: Google Analytics essentially uses a piece of JavaScript tracking code that allows the program to collect information about how users interact with your site by dropping cookies in their browsers.
Benefits of Google Analytics: Google Analytics is truly a catch-all tool that is beneficial to just about every area of your marketing campaign. Here’s how it can help each area of marketing:
- SEO: Google Analytics helps to track page traffic, which is affected by page rankings, which is determined by how you optimize your website with SEO.
- PPC: Google Analytics and Google Ads can be linked so that you can keep track of ad success within the platform
- Web Design and usability: Google Analytics tracks things like dwell time and bounce rate, which can help you gain valuable insight as to how your website design is performing. It also tracks things like site speed, which falls under usability. You can also link Google Analytics with A/B testing tools which can help you determine what design works best on a page.
- Content marketing: Google Analytics gives you insight into how long users stay on a page, how many users complete one of your set goals (like a conversion) on a page, and more, which helps you understand the value of your content.
Why Google Analytics is important to SEO success: Google Analytics provides a treasure trove of information that can help your SEO campaign in countless ways. It can help you determine whether or not your current campaign is working by allowing you to compare metrics in different time frames, as well as helping you visualize increases or decreases in specific metrics.
- Ahrefs
How Ahrefs works: Simply plug in any website URL to see the metrics mentioned above.
Benefits of using Ahrefs: Ahrefs crawls the web constantly and can provide you with extremely beneficial information that can propel your marketing campaigns.
The tool offers everything from cost-per-click (CPC) metrics, keyword difficulty, and domain rating to traffic value, organic traffic, and even keyword search volume. It helps you track backlinks, keywords, and traffic with the click of a button.
Why Ahrefs is important to SEO success: It helps you find keyword gaps in your content, see how you stack up against your competitors, measure traffic value, and more — giving you insight into how you may be able to improve your SEO campaign.
- Moz Link Explorer
How Link Explorer works: Simply plug in a URL and gain insight into the links to and from that site.
Benefits of Link Explorer: Link Explorer is much more than just a link checker. When you get into paid versions of the tool, you’ll have access to tons of other beneficial metrics including spam scores, link-building opportunities, and top-performing content.
Why Link Explorer is important to SEO success: Links are a huge part of SEO, and Link Explorer helps you keep a close eye on the links pointing to and pointing away from your site.
- Ubersuggest
How Ubersuggest works: Simply type in a keyword that is important to your company and get tons of alternate keyword suggestions in addition to search trends, search volume, CPC, the probability to rank, and more.
Benefits of Ubersuggest: Unless you want to spend hours upon hours coming up with keywords for your SEO campaign, a keyword tool for SEO like Ubersuggest is crucial.
It helps automate the process of keyword research, as well as giving important metrics to help you decide which ones to use. You can also use Ubersuggest for your PPC campaigns to determine what keywords to target with your Google Ads.
Why Ubersuggest is important to SEO success: If you don’t target the right keywords with your SEO campaign, you won’t be able to rank in search engines. When you don’t rank, that means no traffic and no traffic means — you guessed it — no conversions.
- Responsive Design Checker
How Responsive Design Checker works: Simply plug in any URL to see if it’s responsive.
You’ll be able to test how the site will look on just about any device, including tablets and smartphones.
Benefits of Responsive Design Checker: It’s super intuitive, easy to use, and gives you the information you need quickly, and all in one place.
Why Responsive Design Checker is important to SEO: Without a design that’s responsive, users won’t be able to search your site on mobile devices or tablets. Responsive design is crucial, especially because 198.8 million users used their mobile devices to shop.
