What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a practice that is carried out with the aim of obtaining targeted visitors from the results of free search engines.
The most famous of these practices is creating high-quality content, optimizing content to top search engine results for a specific keyword, and creating backlinks or backlinks.
In short, SEO is preparing your site to appear in Organic Results.
What is The Benefit of Search Engine Optimization?
The Search Engine Results Page, or what is known as SERP, is divided into two main parts:
- Paid results or pay-per click (PPC) ads
- Free Results (Organic)
The goal of SEO is to improve the ranking of your site in the second section (free results).
In order to get the largest possible number of targeted visitors to your site.
The main benefit of SEO is to get targeted visitors to your website, online store, or even your company for free, month after month.
How do Search Engines Work?
Search engines such as Google, Bing, and others use programs called search spiders or robots (bots - spiders) to discover the Internet and collect information in order to discover new content and websites.
These programs or search spiders start crawling on a site known to them and continue to track links from article to article and from site to site to another to discover as many links and content as possible as well.
The content on those pages, along with the context of the links they follow, helps search spiders understand and build on what each page is about.
These sites or pages are classified in a huge search engine database called the search index (Index).
When the user searches for a keyword in the search box,
The search engine uses complex algorithms to extract the most accurate and useful results for that search term or keyword from its own search index called index.
There are a lot of factors that go into search engine algorithms, and these factors evolve all the time to keep pace with change in user behavior and advances in machine learning.
Here is a list of the most important of these factors, according to a survey based on the opinions of search engine optimization experts:
What are The Types of SEO Strategies?
1. White hat SEO
White hat SEO strategies are the best and safe way to improve your search engine rankings.
The methods you rely on here are the methods that Google recommends that you use to help your site rank better in the results.
These methods include, for example:
Create high-quality content: High-quality content brings leads who are interested in your business. This helps greatly in improving your ranking to help you reach more targeted visitors.
Promote your brand on social media: Social media helps you also direct visitors to your site. You can also enhance your presence there by sharing articles and news of your website from time to time to attract potential customers to your page to help you build a distinctive brand.
Helping Google find and understand your site: Now, is high-quality content enough? No! If Google has trouble rendering your site (remember that Google is a bot that reads code; it doesn't see what we see), you will have SEO problems.
You have to make sure that your site is indexable (you can use a robots.txt file to tell Google which pages you want to crawl and which pages you don't want to be crawled and include them in the search results), and that Google can crawl your site correctly, if it is You have a proper Sitemap.xml sitemap that contains all of your important pages.
A good internal link structure for your site is also something you need to keep in mind. Pages of interest should be found in the header menu & footer and by page-to-page links.
This can be down to the user experience (it's so annoying when you can't navigate the site smoothly!), but it also helps Google understand which pages are important and which aren't. As well as fully discover the content of your site.
2. Black hat SEO
Google is very clear about what you should not do. They have good and concise advice. “The rule of thumb is would you feel comfortable explaining what you did on your site … to a Google employee.”
Unlike white hat SEO, black hat SEO methods depend mainly on not following Google's rules and guidelines. Sure, it may work at first, depending on which method you use, but it is more of a short-term strategy.
Google updates its algorithm regularly, and if you do something that you know will get you in trouble eventually, well, it most likely will!
Most of the popular black hat SEO techniques no longer work today, and relying on them will only hurt your chances of getting a better ranking.
But it's good to know what not to do sometimes, so let's take a look at some of these sneaky tactics.
Hidden texts: Don't think you're fooling Google by making the text of certain words match the site's background color. In the past, this has worked. But Google soon discovered these deceptive methods and updated its algorithm to easily detect such things.
Cloaking: In short, it is to show a copy of your site to visitors and a completely different copy to Google search spiders with the aim of deception only and misleading users and search engines.
Copy content: This can also appear as duplicate content. If you see a great article somewhere, don't think you're not the first to think, "Oh, if you publish this article on my site, I'll rank well too!".
In any case, Google will quickly notice this. This is where the importance of having unique and high-quality content comes in!
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
The difference is that SEO or Search Engine Optimization is primarily based on getting visitors from organic search results from search engines. On the other hand, the goal of search engine marketing (SEM) is to get visitors and appear in both organic and paid (PPC) search results.
Therefore, search engine marketing falls under two main sections:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Paid Search Engine Advertising (PPC)