What Is SEO [Learn A-Z About SEO In 2022]

What Is SEO? Today, the majority of business owners ask how to get more quality traffic for their website. One of the greatest ways to do that is to optimize it for search engines. In this blog post, we will cover everything you need to know about what SEO is and how it works.

Let us dive in-

What is SEO?

If you have researched how to increase traffic to your website, you probably saw this sentence: “Improve your SEO”. But what does that mean?  

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

This is the method that can help you improve the quality and quantity of the audience coming to your website from search engines. SEO increases brand awareness, attracts local customers, and builds credibility and trust for your site.

Now that you know what SEO is, you will want to know how SEO works.

How Does SEO Work?

SEO works by optimizing a particular website for search engines, so it can rank better on Google. Better ranking will ensure that you get tons of organic traffic to your site so that you can improve your sales and conversion rate.  

Generally, is divided into three parts which are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. All of which we will discuss below in much detail. No, let us understand how to do search engines work and evaluate the rankings of a particular website. 

How do Search Engines Work?

A search engine is a web-based tool that allows Internet users to search for content via the World Wide Web (WWW). A client enters keywords or key terms into a search engine and receives tons of Web content results in the form of websites, pictures, recordings, or other online information. The content returned via a search engine to a client is known as a search engine results page (SERP). 

A search engine will filter its index of web pages for content identified with a particular search to give the user the most accurate information. Additionally, a search engine makes an index of billions of web pages with a program called “web crawler”. Moverover, this naturally browses the whole web and stores data about the pages it visits. 

Furthermore, each time the crawler visits a web page, it makes a duplicate of it and adds its URL to an index. A few websites stop web crawlers from visiting them. These pages will be avoided with regard to the index.

This entire process is known as crawling, indexing, and ranking web pages or websites. 

What is the Difference Between Organic and Paid Listings?

An organic listing is an unpaid listing that appears below the ads on the search engine result page (SERP). Organic listing is a time-consuming process to get your website on top of the search engine result page.

In order to get an organic listing on SERP, you need to do. 

On the other hand, a paid listing is known as PPC ads. Search engines show your ads on top of the search engine result page (SERP) close to the organic listing when you opt for paid ads. Additionally, it is the primary way search engines like Google and Bing make a profit.

Paid ads cost money for ranking a particular keyword on Google. That is why most businesses opt for SEO. 

Until now, you may have understood what SEO is, how it works, etc. Next, let us discuss what the different types of SEO are and their importance.

Generally, there are three major types of SEO. However, In this blog, we will take you through over 10 types of SEO you might have never heard about.

10 Different Types of SEO

White hat SEO

This is yet another most popular type. 

White hat SEO simply means that all search engine optimization techniques are done in accordance with the guidelines of Google. Getting results from such types of SEO takes time. It is a long-term process and gives results after 6 – 12 months.  

Besides, if you follow white hat SEO, there is no risk of your site getting banned or de-ranking in case any new Google updates are rolled out. 

All in all, white hat SEO has low risk compared to other types and has high rewards if you do it right.

Examples of white hat SEO techniques include keyword research and using them naturally in the content, natural link-building, blogger outreach, guest posting, and many more. 

Black hat SEO

The next on this list is black hat SEO. 

Black hat SEO is the opposite of white hat SEO. It is a technique that does not follow Google’s webmaster guidelines and manipulates the search engine bots to improve the rankings. Although such techniques give rankings very fast, they are not for the long term. 

Furthermore, it does not stick to the search engine’s list of SEO dos and don’ts and resorts to spammy or paid link building methods such as:   building paid links, PBNs, keyword stunning, and so on. 

However, if you depend too much on black hat SEO, it can get your site blacklisted or its rankings to drop, so it is best to avoid it. 

Moreover, such high-risk techniques give you only short-term results. In our opinion, you should always stick to white hat SEO and work hard to get better rankings. 

Gray hat SEO

This type is often used by SEO companies to give quick results to their clients due to the pressure of ranking a site on Google. Such techniques include a combination of white and black hat SEO. 

Although Google’s or its guidelines clearly says that such methods are prohibited, they are still considered to be spammy by some webmasters, SEO experts, and bloggers. 

Examples of this type include clickbait content that entices the users to click on your posts, excessive and suspicious link exchange between sites, paid link-building techniques, guest posting, manual link building, etc. 

Negative SEO

Among the different types of SEO, Negative SEO is by far the worst and unethical. 

Negative SEO is a technique in which a particular webmaster tries to de-rank a competitor’s website so then they can take their place or benefit from it. Negative SEO methods include hacking your competitor’s site and building a  high number of low-quality and unnatural links to it, posting bad or poor reviews about their businesses in various online forums, etc. 

Consequently, if you do too much negative SEO, you may also end up in the hot waters of controversies and legal issues. Therefore, we recommend you avoid this type of SEO. 

On-page

Next on this list is on-page SEO. This is the most common type of SEO and also comes under the ethical catalog of SEO. 

On-page SEO includes creating high-quality and 10X content better than your competitors with the sole purpose of it proving helpful to your website visitors. The on-page technique also includes adding, title, URL, image alt, and meta tags in your content to help Google bots better understand your content. 

Page speed optimization, mobile-friendliness, and security of the website are also a part of on-page SEO. These activities are also necessary while doing technical SEO. 

Making a proper URL structure and having an ordered naming system for those pages that fall under one category, choosing images that are not too big, and writing descriptive file names are just some on-page SEO techniques.

Off-page 

While on-page SEO will help 30% in improving the rankings of your site, off-page SEO will contribute 60%.

According to us, this is the most important type of SEO. The rest 10% of the ranking is determined by technical SEO. 

Off-page SEO refers to activities that you carry out outside your site to get higher up in Google’s SERPs. It includes creating reviews about your business, listing your business in directories, creating high-quality links to the website and inner pages, etc.

If you seriously want to skyrocket the rankings of your site, focus on off-page SEO. 

Technical 

As you can tell by its name, technical SEO is all about handling the technical nitty-gritty of a website. It might sound too intimidating for you if you are a newbie in SEO. But not to worry. Technical SEO isn’t that difficult, even if it sounds like it.  

Technical SEO is all about helping Google bots successfully crawl, interpret and index all the pages of your site for future use. 

Creating a super easy sitemap, making your site mobile-friendly, adding structured data to help web crawlers better scan and navigate your pages based on the type of content are just some techniques used.

Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO stands for Mobile Search Engine Optimization. It is the type of SEO technique to optimize content in the search engine results page to achieve a higher ranking for your web pages. 

Mobile optimization is all about the site layout, site design, page speed, and many more aspects to ensure that mobile visitors can scan and navigate through your site for a longer time. 

In order to rank a website on Google, it must be mobile-friendly.

Voice SEO

Those days when voice search belonged to the realms of Star Trek are gone. Today, we have the power to get our devices, be it computers or smartphones, to respond to our commands.

Once known as Voice Action, Google’s voice search is a handy tool that allows people to tell their questions to their mobile and get answers accordingly. 

Furthermore, with just one tap on the mic icon on the search bar of your cell phone, you can activate the voice search mode to handle user queries. This technology by Google was earlier called Voice Action and was designed specifically for android phones to receive voice commands. 

Since then, this technology has become very popular and available for all android mobile users across the globe. Prior to 2016, the voice search feature used to work only in US English, but it can now recognize British and Indian English, French, German, Italian, and Filipino. 

As of now, it can accept commands and queries in almost any language from any country.  This feature of Google not only gives real-time queries but will also give you the precise addresses of the queries based on location. 

eCommerce SEO

eCommerce is all about improving the overall visibility or awareness of an eCommerce store through different SEO practices and techniques like title optimization, product description optimization, improving website speed, creating proper site structure, etc. 

The purpose of eCommerce SEO is to reach the potential buying audience through organic searches on the relevant eCommerce platforms. Thus, once the site or brand or product gets ranked on Google, your sales and revenue will go up.

Conclusion: There are Multiple ways to do SEO

As illustrated by the 10 different types of SEO, there are many different ways of doing SEO. From on–page and off-page SEO to white hat and black hat SEO, websites can be ranked and ordered in numerous ways, both ethically and unethically.  As long as you know what SEO is and how to do it, then content creation will be easy for your website. We hope this blog has provided you with everything you need to know about SEO. Furthermore, if you want to learn more about SEO and where to start, consider following our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest information about SEO and how to build a strong, ethical foundation.