What Exactly Is SEO?
SEO or “Search Engine Optimisation” is the process of getting your site to rank better within the search engine results.
There is a major difference between SEO and paid advertising. Paid advertising costs money. To get your website ranking high with paid advertising, all you have to do is bid for the keywords you want to rank for. With SEO, you rank organically. Therefore, you’re not paying to get your website ranking high for any respective keywords. Consider a website optimisation agency to gear you on to the right path.
For example, when someone is searching for “Paleo meatloaf” within the search engines, they are likely looking for specific recipes of it. If that’s what you are looking to rank for based on your website’s content, you’ll want to be ranking as high as possible for it. To have anyone find it from organic results, you’ll need to be ranking high for the right keywords. This isn’t something that comes easy. However, if you integrate the right SEO strategies into the mix, you should experience success with it.
The truth is, Google dominates the search industry. As many as 75% of all searches start with Google.
To fully understand how to get your website and its respective content ranking higher, you’ll want to learn the in’s and out’s of how search engines work.
The goal of this article is to give you a proper understanding of how search engines work. That way, you can implement effective SEO strategies into the mix and get a lot more traffic to your sites because of it.
Some Important Elements Of SEO – On-Page and Off-Site SEO
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is all about getting your website fully optimised to rank as high as possible with on-page elements. This includes optimising tags for your posts, pictures, titles, and more. You should be researching different keywords and targeting the right ones in your content. That way, you can get your website ranking higher for the right content. Essentially, anything that you do to optimise your content on your website is considered “on-page SEO.”
Off-Page SEO
This is the optimisation that you do off your website. Believe it or not, but there are plenty of things that happen off your site that can impact your SEO. This includes link building, guest posting, and more. You should be doing a good mix of on-site and off-site SEO to get the best results.
Strategies: Black Hat vs White Hat
I’ve always been someone that is concerned with building long term and sustainable businesses. This is truly the way to go when it comes to a lot of things in life. While it’s not a principle that everyone follows, it’s one thing that you will have better success with when it comes to SEO. A lot of people might want to take shortcuts with their SEO, but that’s not something that yields positive results.
When you are talking about SEO, you want to ensure that you are focusing on slower gains rather than quick gains. Quick gains are typically referred to as “black hat SEO.” These are the strategies that might yield you quicker than normal boosts in your rankings, but they will falter much quicker. Some of the most prominent black hat tactics including keyword stuffing, link scraping and more. While you might be able to get short term boosts with your rankings, they won’t be long lasting. Google will eventually find out what you are doing and punish your website’s rankings because of it.
By focusing more on white hat SEO, you will be focused more on crafting high-quality content and your visitors themselves. Instead of focusing on trying to ‘game’ the algorithm, you will be generating real clicks and traffic increases because your site deserves it. Google will reward you for creating content for your human audience.
Duplicate content is something you need to be on the lookout for. A lot of black hat techniques involve reusing content to get more legs out of it. This is a no-no when it comes to Google and your rankings will suffer if you use duplicate content on your site.
