SEO – or search engine optimisation – is the process of optimising your website for search engines. What this means is that during the process of SEO, you will tweak your website in such a way search engines are able to examine it, see what the subject of the website is and make sure that when a user makes a search query that your website provides the answer to, the search engines will show them your website.
“My rule of thumb is build a site for a user, not a spider.”
Dave Naylor
Managing Director: Bronco.co.uk
What’s involved in SEO?
There are two divisions of search engine optimisation. These are:
- On-site SEO, and
- Off-site SEO.
On-site SEO
On-site SEO is about making certain alterations to your website that make it much more user friendly for both search engine spiders or bots, in addition to humans. These techniques include:
- Content quality and no keyword stuffing
- Page titles and meta descriptions
- Headings and content formatting
- Images and other multimedia elements
- URL optimisation
- Internal links
- Page loading speed
- Mobile friendliness
- Comments and on-page SEO
Off-site SEO
As the name suggests, off-site SEO is about the search engine optimisation techniques that don’t happen on your page. These include:
- Link building with High-Quality Third Party Sites
- Social promotion
SEO no-no’s
As with anything, there are best practices when it comes to SEO techniques. These are called White Hat SEO Techniques. However, there are other techniques that are used by some webmasters to try and trick the search engines into giving them higher rankings when, in fact, they don’t deserve them. These are called Black Hat SEO Techniques.
What needs to be noted is that these Black Hat Techniques were not always seen as being bad. In fact, they were considered to be legitimate SEO techniques at one stage. However, with the change in Google’s algorithms over the years, these types of techniques came onto Google’s radar.
Examples of Black Hat SEO Techniques include:
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of filling your content with irrelevant keywords in an attempt to manipulate where the page ranks on search results pages.
Cloaking
Cloaking involves showing one piece of content to users and a different piece of content to search engines.
Sneaky Redirects
Along the same lines as cloaking, this might include redirecting a search engine crawler to one page and all other users to another page.
Poor Quality Content
If content is of a poor quality, and is of no value to the searcher, this is another common practice in black hat SEO.
Paid Links
Search engines like Google strictly ban the buying and selling of links. They state on their website that every link that is intended to influence PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme. This is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Abusing Structured Data/Rich Snippets
Black hat SEO involves providing inaccurate information in structured data to fool search engines and users.
Blog Comment Spam
As the name suggests, this black hat technique involves including a link to your website in blog comments.
Link Farms
A link farm is a website or a collection of websites developed solely for the purpose of link building.
Private Blog Networks
A private blog network (PBN) is a bunch of authoritative websites used solely for link building. They are similar to link farms in that they both aim to exaggerate the number of links pointing to a website.
SEO is a great tool for website owners to use in order to get their websites to rank. In fact, it would be a non-negotiable for every website owner to put in place. However, there are right ways and wrong ways to do this. Do it the right way and you’ll be well on your way to making sure that you climb high up the search engine results pages so your website can market to your desired audience.