What is SEO? How does it work?

You must have heard a lot about SEO if you want to rank your website/blog on Google. I have also explained that SEO is an important part of Digital Marketing in my previous article. So, what does SEO stand for? Search Engine Optimization. A one and the only method to get your website/blog organic traffic. Let’s begin and guide you through all about SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of making your website rank high on Google. Higher your site ranks, the more organic traffic to your website, which leads to more sales to your business. Simple as that. But, the main question comes around this is how does it really work? Let’s go through that.

How SEO works?

There are three major parts to SEO working:

What is crawling?

Crawling is a process of discovering web pages. It follows the links on the pages to discover new web pages. Basically, it works through links. Let’s say, a web crawler found this page and there is a link on this page. As soon, as the crawler reaches that link it will lead to that page. This is how a web crawler works and discovers new web pages on the internet.

What is a web crawler?

A web crawler, spiders are a type of search engine bot. All search engines have their own web crawlers and their job is to crawl and index the content of a website.

What is Indexing?

Discovered webpages are included in the Google search index in an organized manner which is called Indexing. The purpose of indexing is to show results as soon as the query is made.

Let’s assume, that pages are not stored with Google and a search has been made on Google. Will it be easy to collect all relevant web pages on the internet and present them according to the search query? I guess you must be aware of the answer. No doubt, it is possible but it will take time.

That is why Google stores it with them and shows the result in a blink of an eye as soon as the query is made.

What is Ranking?

The position of a website/blog on the Search Engine results page (SERP) is called ranking. There are various ranking factors and this is where SEO plays a vital role.

The reason most brands and individuals focus on SEO is so they can improve their ranking on SERP.

There are three major parts through which we can optimize a website according to search engines.

What is On-page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to the optimizations made on your website. Following are some of them:

What is Off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO refers to the practice made away from your website. To make it a bit simple, it means you work on other portals and websites to improve your website authority and ranking. Following are some of the Off-page optimizations:

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the optimizations made on website technical elements to ensure that search engines can crawl & index your webpages correctly. Following are some of them:

These are some of the optimizations we need to take care of while performing SEO for a website. Moreover, this is not an overnight process. It takes time but if you did it right, slowly and gradually you will start getting results.

So, do you think this is it for SEO? What if I say, there are some more factors that we need to take care of? Yup, you heard it right. This is why it is said, SEO is vast and big and it needs to take care of many factors. To prevent our website from getting penalized by Google, we take care of these techniques while performing SEO.

These techniques are called Black hat and White hat techniques.

What is Black hat SEO?

It is a practice used against search engine guidelines to rank your website. Basically, we should never use this technique to keep our website safe from being penalized. Let us dig into it and know some of these techniques.

Keyword Stuffing

This refers to the practice of filling your content with irrelevant keywords. Adding the same keywords repeatedly where they add no value to the content and are just used for the sake of getting ranked.

Cloaking

This is used to manipulate search engines. It shows one piece of content to users and different pieces of content to search engines.

Invisible Text

It means using a list of keywords through invisible text which can’t be seen by users. But, search engines can still detect and index them.

This can be done by using the same text color as the background color.

Spam Comments

This is specially used to create free backlinks. But, these backlinks will be “no follow”. So this is a real waste of time. Creating a quality backlink requires a “do follow” backlink which will pass link juice to the linked website which is not the case here.

These were some of the black hat techniques which we should avoid. Instead, work according to the search engine guidelines which will help our website to rank higher in SERP.

White hat SEO is the perfect way to do that.

What is White hat SEO?

White hat SEO is a genuine way to perform SEO for any website. It focuses to target a human audience rather than manipulating search engines.

Some of the major techniques used in White hat SEO are:

Well Structured website

A well-structured website is which is easy to navigate. All your categories and sub-categories should be organized manner for a better user experience.

Quality Content

I guess I don’t need to describe this in detail. You all are aware of the phrase “Content is a King”. And this is what we need to do. We need to create quality & original content that is helpful for users.

Keyword Research

We should use relevant keywords in the content while taking care of keyword density. Meta title & description of a webpage should also contain a relevant keyword.

Page load speed

This is the important factor that is mostly neglected by the user. But, we need to focus on this a lot. Google has already said “Page loading speed will be one of the factors while ranking a website/blog”.

So this should be taken care of to improve our rankings.

These were some of the white hat SEO techniques. White hat consists of a huge list. So, it’s really tough to cover all those in a single go.

But, we can say all the genuine techniques we apply to perform SEO are covered under the White hat.

Hope this article will provide you with some quality information regarding SEO. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments section and we will take care of the rest.