[T]oday I wish to get deeper in explaining the concept of SEO. If you follow this website you probably ready my earlier article that in short explained what you need to know about SEO. If you did not, you may read it here: Search Engine Optimization – SEO Beginner’s Guide.
Long as it might be, the SEO beginner’s guide was actually my attempt at presenting the Large topic of Search Engine Optimization in a single post.
Without doubt, If you are a newbie to SEO, the article must have left a lot of unanswered questions in your mind. I decided, therefore, to follow it up with a detailed explanation of each of the key components that you need to understand in order to know all there is about SEO.
If you are a more experienced developer who fully appreciates what SEO is then you may skip this narrative and select what you want to learn from the link provided in the first paragraph.
What is SEO?
[S]earch Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of employing tactical methods to increase a website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is often achieved by increasing a website’s organic traffic resulting from its high rank on the SERPs.
SEO is made up of multiple different elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to not only understanding what SEO is but also successfully implementing SEO on your website.
Is SEO About Search Engines and Bots?
When one sees about Search Engine Optimization, what automatically comes to mind is a complex net of bots and how they interact with your website.
When understood this way, One will then be fooled to write their content and optimize it primarily for search engine bots. And this is suicidal for your optimization efforts.
SEO is about people more than it is about the technicalities of search engines and their crawl bots. A very good SEO strategy has readers at the centre of the content and how it’s presented.
The search engine is simply a vehicle that website visitors use to get to what they want. Search engines, therefore, strive to interpret as correctly as they can the need of the website visitor. They will try to render the most relevant information to the visitor.
Search engines are some kind of answer machines that go through the billions of pieces of content available on the internet to evaluate using thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query. This is “crawling and indexing.”
Your SEO strategy should, therefore, focus on optimizing your content so that it meets the needs of the visitors as much as possible. How accurately your content addresses the need of the search engine searcher will go a long way to enhance your Search Engine Optimization objective of increasing traffic.
Types Of Traffic
There are broadly two types of website traffic. Paid Traffic and Organic traffic.
a) Paid Traffic
As the name suggests, paid traffic is where the website owner pays “a source” to direct traffic to his website. These sources could be search engines themselves through their PPC advertising plans or any other popular website where visitors could originate to come to one’s website. This is normally done through banner or text adverts.
b) Organic Traffic
As opposed to Paid traffic, Organic traffic refers to visitors who come to your website after using a search engine like MSN, Google or Bing. These are visitors that have not been referred by any other website through adverts on those websites.
SEO are methods that attract organic traffic to your website.
Why is SEO important for your Business?
To date, the biggest driver of online traffic in the world is search engines. Social media may have burst into our online lives but none of the available platforms drives online content consumption like the search engines do.
Secondly, paid advertisement bring you some traffic in the short term but it’s grossly expensive and understandable in the long run. I would only recommend using paid traffic together with an SEO strategy not as a substitute for Search Engine Optimization.
Certainly, SEO is much slower in bringing you the numbers you want. However. it’s a sustainable way to keep large numbers in the long term.
What is white hat and black hat Search Engine Optimization
Before deciding on what SEO strategy you will be employing, it’s very important you understand these two terms. These terms greatly have an impact on your search engine optimization efforts.
White hat SEO refers to any optimization method you employ to improve your search engine rankings while maintaining the integrity of your website. The employed method should be fair, non-manipulative and generally maintains the search engines’ terms of service.
White hat SEO techniques, besides abiding by search engine TOS, primarily focus on providing value to website users. They do not target ranking at the expense of quality of content.
Black hat SEO on the other side is the opposite of white hat SEO. These are unethical practices that aim at manipulating and unfairly gaining search engine raking. Black hat SEO generally refers to any method against search engine terms of service, used to gain an unfair site ranking in SERPs.
These techniques try to outsmart the search engines instead of working within the guidelines to achieve great ranking.
Please note that Search engines actually provide guidelines to help you have a good white hat SEO campaign. See googles here
SEO Dos and Don’ts
These are some of the dos and don’ts when planning and implementing a Search Engine Optimization strategy for your website.
Dos
- Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
- Stay Honest. Don’t lie to your website visitors.
- Stay away from black hat tricks. If it Doesn’t help your visitors its most likely black hat. Ask yourself if you Would do whatever you are doing if search engines did not exist.
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.
Don’ts
- Automatically generate content
- Participate in link schemes
- Create pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
- Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
- Hide text and links
- create pages to rank well for specific searches to send traffic to your website.
