Search engines. How do they work? No one really knows exactly how your website appears at the top of the search engine of your choice, except for the people who made them. There have been a lot of speculation on which sites appear in your search query; is it the relevance of the search, or the amount of marketing spent on advertising the products on the site? Furthermore, a lot of people do not know exactly what SEO actually is and therefore do not know how awesome it is to be using one. Sure, you might know that it stands for search engine optimization, but what gets optimized? Is it the design? Or the writing? The links maybe? Yes, yes and yes. It’s all of them and more. Today, we will show you two the most used strategies for optimizing the search engine.
- What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is, according to Wikipedia, a special process to increase or even decrease the visibility of a website or a single web page. So, in layman’s terms Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content, so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword. For example, there’s you, the SEO, the search engine and the searcher. If are writing an article about how to make beef casserole, you want the search engine (90% of all cases is Google), to show it as a top result to anyone who searches for the phrase “beef casserole”.
- Overview of the Magic
Why does it even matter to use SEO? Let’s break it down. Research has shown us that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, 68% of which use Google to do so. Now, you should take into account that the first top 5 results in google get 67% of all clicks. You might have an idea now why SEO is so important. There is even a joke going around the internet that exposes how crucial is it to hit the first page of Google: “If you ever need to hide a dead body, you should place it on the second page of Google search results.”
However, to really know how to use SEO, we need to explain how search even works.
I strongly recommend watching an extremely useful video made by Google itself on how the search engine works at this link https://youtu.be/BNHR6IQJGZs. But, to summarize it briefly, the software programmes called “spiders” fetch the most relevant searched keywords from better quality sites by eliminating a number of pre-existing questions (is the keyword commonly searched, does the pages have synonyms for the words etc.). So, the more your desired product or keyword is present in your page the more likely it is to be shown on Google. For more detailed information please watch the video as the guy at Google explains it brilliantly.
Now that we know how search works we can get down to explaining the SEO.
- White Hat vs. Black Hat – 2 Strategies for SEO Explained
To explain it briefly, these two concepts represent how you will optimize the search engine. If you want to work SEO like a get-rich-quick scheme, you’ll probably end up doing what’s called black hat SEO. This type of SEO focuses on optimizing your content only for the search engine, not considering humans at all. Since there are lots of ways to bend and break the rules to get your sites to rank high, these are a welcome way for black hat SEOs to make a few thousand dollars fast. But beware as these approaches ultimately result in spammy, crappy pages, which often get banned very fast, often leading to severe punishment for the marketer, ruining their chance of building something sustainable in the future. Black hat scheme usually duplicates content, has invisible text and stuffed keywords, it cloaks or re-directs the user to another site or page. Furthermore, links from this kind of site usually have no relevant content.
White hat SEO, on the other hand, is the way to build a sustainable online business.
If you do SEO this way, you’ll focus on your human audience, trying to give them the best content possible and making it easily accessible to them, by playing according to the search engine’s rules. Some of strategies for white hat SEO are having relevant content, well-labelled images, relevant inks and references. Your strategy should be using complete sentences with good spelling and grammar. The latter is of extreme importance as this is one of the criteria Google uses to eliminate the sites that are of poorer quality. Your strategy should also be using standard-compliant HTML as these get on the top more frequently.
Last, but not least you should be creative and come up with unique and relevant page titles as these stand out from the crowd of same content pages. Clickbait utilizes this kind of strategy, but clickbait titles can get banned pretty quickly as the content and the title usually do not match. If I borrow the example above, if two people are writing an article on how to make a beef casserole and one uses the title “How to Make Casserole” and the other uses the title “Beef Casserole Explained: How to Make It”, the latter might get more traffic on Google as it more creative.
In conclusion, SEO are an extremely useful and easy to get into processes to maximize traffic on your websites. Use the white hat SEO as your reference point and you will see an increase in traffic in no time. If you would like to increase your traffic even further, you should invest in software that uses complex algorithms to enhance your website visibility. Now go and get that website traffic.