»What is SEO?

I personally consider SEO technique as every Web Master’s best friend and one of the most potent weapons for Digital Marketers to enhance visibility,revenue,credibility,influence and brand awareness of respective website or a blog.

The abbreviation stands for Search Engine Optimization,

SEO can be defined as Optimizing contents on the web page/website TO RANK AS HIGHER AS POSSIBLE ORGANICALLY ON THE SERP (SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGE) of Google or any other search engines like Bing

Google uses crawlers/spiders/bots to validate the quality of the content on the website or a web page and on the basis of validation the crawler indexes and ranks your website.

Crawler is basically a software which crawls through every page on your website, takes a snapshot of the page, indexes/stores it orderly (like words arranged in a dictionary) in the Google data center’s servers and later ranks if the content is original and provides value to the readers and it also checks if all the Google webmaster guidelines are followed.

If you are looking for techniques for instant ranking and you are ready to pay for the same then you can consider Google Ads but since its an instantaneous and paid method, your ranking will be affected once your ad campaigns stop appearing on SERP. In short “You will rank as long as you pay”.

Unlike Google Ads, SEO is a bit longer process, it tentatively takes around 3–6 months for SEO to show positive results if done right, but having said that the organic ranking achieved by SEO sustains for longer duration too, your ranking will sustain as long as your competitors come up with a better optimized content than yours.

Having understood the basic definition and properties of SEO, your next question might be,

»Why SEO ?

I will say Why Not !!

Two most promising factors of SEO are first one being its organic and secondly you do not have to pay Google to rank your page.

But you have to pay the Webmaster working on your domain’s SEO (Webmaster is the person who manages the website and works on the same to achieve ranking through optimization)

If not all i will try to list down the few benefits of SEO to answer your WHY,

SEO done right will result in,

• Higher leads for your business since your brand’s visibility increases in SERP.
• Higher leads can result in higher sales and in turn contribute to higher revenue.
• Better brand awareness because of better ranking and visibility on SERP.
• Enhanced credibility,goodwill and influence of your brand because brands that show up in the first page of SERP have better impact and create a better and lasting impression than the ones on the second or other consecutive pages.
• The ranking results achieved through SEO stays for long term.

After gaining the basic knowledge pertaining to SEO,

Let’s dive a bit deeper and discuss,

»Techniques of SEO

In this section i will give you an overview on the three techniques to achieve SEO,

Whitehat technique — As the name says,its the most advisable and recommended method to rank your website as per the norms laid out by Google for the webmasters in the GOOGLE WEBMASTERS GUIDELINES (The guidelines educate you with fair and recommended practices to rank your site and also the DO’S and DON’TS to rank your site higher) Click on the following link for detailed explanation of webmasters guidelines) https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

Blackhat technique — Again as the name says, this involves opting for technical shortcuts and malpractices to rank your website. Its never advisable to go with this method since you will end up penalizing your site and your site may even be taken down by Google. For details on penalties and risk involved with this practise click and go through the link mentioned in the whitehat method.

Greyhat technique — it is the mixture of both whitehat and blackhat technique which can be avoided as well.

In short, The only SEO technique which should be considered is Whitehat,

• If you are a daring personality and are confident enough to think that you can pull off the trick with blackhat or greyhat, you must know that Google Crawlers are a very smart and most sophisticated piece of software, they know it if the content on your website is copied and in addition to this Google has around 1500 algorithms to decide and fairly rank the most deserving content organically.
• Yes, You may be able to achieve ranking in a short duration by indulging in Blackhat and Greyhat but it is short lived success and it is just a matter of time until the crawlers take a note of your deviations from recommended practices and penalizes your website.

Having discussed the methods of adding yourself in Google’s good books,

Let’s move ahead with the next topic?

Ready?

Good !!

In the next topic i will give you simple definitions about the different types of SEO.

»Types of SEO

SEO can be broadly classified into 5 types based on the implementation,

1. On Page SEO — All the optimization done by a webmaster on his/her own website, web page
2. Off Page SEO — The process of driving traffic to your content by optimizing your page or site with quality links/backlinks of your site posted on other relevant sites without spamming
3. Universal SEO — Optimising all of the website’s content inclusive of words, images, graphics in such a way that all the components (images, words, graphics) start ranking on the SERP for a particular Google Search.
4. Local SEO — This is the fastest way to be listed on google, Local SEO search results are the results which are shown when you search for any product/service in a specific locality.

Refer to the below pic for example,

Here i searched for “Best salon near me” and google gave me the local listings with ratings.

The key to rank on local SEO is by focusing on as many updates and positive reviews as frequently as possible.

5. Technical SEO — This method has go to do more with the dashboard/technical specifications of the SEO tool being used by the webmaster.

Okay now lets move on to the next core topic of SEO.

Shall we?

No?

Information overload ?

I can understand, i too have been there.

So, lets wind up for today?

Meanwhile if you have anything to add onto my above article please let me know in the comments,

If you want to have a discussion, Kindly comment, i am all ears and i promise to revert back.

I am open for all your reviews and feedback.

Signing off for now.

Take Care.

Rahul Singh.