What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The question in every mind is “What SEO Stand For”. In simple terms, the process of improving your site to increase its visibility is when people search for products or services related to your business in different search engines such as Google, and Bing. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely your products and services are likely to gain the attention of prospective and existing customers to your business. For example – Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web, collect information about those pages and keep them in an index. This index works like a giant library where a librarian can pull up a book (in case of a search engine is a web page) to help you find exactly what you’re looking for at the time.
SEO is based on optimizing a website’s content, and integration of keyword research, to increase that content’s ranking on SERP.
1 Benefits of SEO for Your Business
There are several benefits associated with SEO, some of which are listed below.
1.1 SEO enables 24/7 Promotion
Effective use of SEO provides 24/7 promotion for your business as it brings in quality traffic, and enhances the user experience for your site. It provides businesses with the right kind of visibility and promotion. It’s only possible if you follow the right SEO trends for your business website.
1.2 Provide More Clicks than PPC
PPC may appear above the organic search results, but the clicks on the organic results are generally higher, as people refrain mostly refrain from clicking on sponsored links.
1.3 Improves Sites User Experience
A search engine monitors different aspects of users’ behavior, such as time spent on a site, to gauge the user experience of visiting a site through organic search results and rank’s site accordingly.
1.4 Helps in Generating quality leads.
By optimizing website’s home page and product content with related keywords, and by creating an active social media presence, a business can increase their brand visibility and generate and convert quality leads into sales.
1.5 Focuses on Marketing and Sales Funnel
An effective SEO strategy focuses on content marketing strategies that complement each stage of the marketing and sales funnel. SEO strategy is helpful in creating awareness, evaluation, and conversion for a product or service.
1.6 Promotes Inbound Marketing
SEO works as an effective inbound marketing tool as it draws prospective buyers toward your brand who are more likely to buy the products.
1.7 Help Attract Local Customers
The local search focuses on local business listings, customer ranking, and reviews. With ineffective optimization of the above factors, businesses can attract local customers to target a specific group of people based in a particular city or state.
1.8 Enables High ROI and Conversions
The primary focus of SEO is to bring qualified traffic to the website to improve the conversion rate. ROI of SEO is based on the return of investment from SEO efforts. A site would have a positive return of investment if the organic revenue generated from the SEO campaigns is higher than incurred cost.
2. Types of SEO
Further below are given 12 different types of SEO & their importance in creating effective organic search strategies to rank higher in organic search listings on search engines.
2.1 On-Page SEO
On-page SEO deals with the technical processes that are used for optimizing a page’s tags, content, images, and internal links, to improve its visibility for search engines. It is categorized as one of the most important types of SEO that affects a website’s organic search rankings and overall visibility.
2.2 Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO focuses on SEO tactics that are applied outside a website to improve its rankings. These include link building, guest posting, social media marketing, and more. The primary purpose of off-page SEO is to increase the trustworthiness of your site. Five different off-page tactics that a brand can use to boost a site’s authority and organic search traffic:
- Link Building
- Content Marketing
- Local SEO (GMB and Citations)
- Reviews
- Events.
2.3 Technical SEO
Technical SEO deals with website and server optimizations that enable search engine spiders to crawl and index websites more effectively and help in improving organic rankings.
2.4 White Hat SEO
Deals with the optimization techniques which abide by Google’s Search Engine. Guidelines. White-hat SEO techniques include authoring useful and relevant content after doing extensive keyword research and earning links from high-authority sites based on the merit of your on-page content.
2.5 Black Hat SEO
It is the opposite of white-hat SEO. It is a practice against search engine guidelines, which is mainly used to get a site ranking higher in search results. Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks.
2.6 Grey Hat SEO
Gray Hat SEO is a combination of both white and black hat techniques. It converts White Hat SEO to Black Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO to White Hat SEO techniques. Grey hat SEO helps build your presence on the web without going through a cycle of black hat techniques. It provides the site more credibility and helps with the Google algorithm.
2.7 Negative SEO
Negative SEO deals with malicious practices that are intended to negatively impact the search rankings of a competitor’s website. This is mainly considered “black hat SEO” for its malevolent nature. These activities include building spammy, unnatural links to the site, content scraping, and even hacking the site.
3. How Does SEO Work?
Search Engine Optimization works by optimizing a website’s content, and conducting keyword research, to enhance the content’s ranking and the website’s visibility. AS search engines work on algorithms and work based on clues to give searchers the exact results they are looking for, and based on this data decide which ones to rank for any given keyword.
3.1 Rankings
When someone performs a search, search engines search for relevant content and publish results for the searcher’s query. As time passes, a web page’s ranking might change due to competition in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) or change in algorithms by the search engine itself.
3.2 Visibility
Visibility is based on how prominent a particular domain is in the search engine results. When a domain isn’t visible for many relevant search queries it results in Lower search visibility whereas higher prominence results in higher search visibility, Both are responsible for delivering the main SEO objectives – traffic and domain authority.