
SEO Defined
SEO is also referred to as search engine optimisation. SEO is the strategy you implement in order to make the pages in a website rank higher on search engines such as Google.
The main difference between paid ads and search engine optimisation is that with SEO, you’ll achieve organic ranking. Basically, with paid advertising, you have to pay for your position but with SEO and organic rankings, these are unpaid and natural. SEO is all about optimising the pages on your website so that they rise through the search engine result pages to the top of the results whenever someone enters a relevant keyword.
For example, if someone wants to get a recipe for vegan lasagne, then they will simply type this in Google. If your site has a recipe for vegan lasagne, then you’d want that person to find the page on your site with the recipe before any other person’s site. In order for this to happen, you need to make sure that your page is on top of the search engines for the keyword, “vegan lasagne”. This is not a simple feat but it is at the core of SEO.
To make things a bit simpler, the vast majority of searches online are done using Google or another similar search engine. Google is the most popular search engine since 75% of all searches are done on it.
So, if you want to get your website and pages to rank highly on Google and other search engines, you have to learn how they work.
The main point of this post is to help you to understand how search engines work so that you can properly optimise your pages and websites so that you can get more organic traffic.
On Page & Off Page SEO – The Main Aspects Of SEO
When doing SEO, there are two very important aspects and these are off page and on page SEO.
On Page SEO is as you’d expect, everything to do with your website’s pages and your content. This has to be optimised so that you can enjoy increased rankings. You’ll have to select the right keywords and properly use them in your pages and throughout your content. When you post high quality content on your website and ensure that your titles, headlines, meta tags, description etc are well written and keyword rich, these are all a part of on page optimisation.
On the other hand, off page optimisation is about what happens off of your site and in particular, your backlinks. In order to build high quality backlinks, you’ll need to create relationships and content that other websites naturally want to share with their audiences. This does take a significant amount of effort, however it is very necessary for SEO.
White Hat & Black Hat SEO
Personally, I believe in taking the high road and doing things for long term success. However, there are other persons who want to achieve quick success and move on from one project to the next quickly.
So, in the SEO Hampshire world, if you want to achieve fast gains then you may be interested in doing black hat SEO. This type of SEO is a bit sneaky and it uses strategies such as link scraping and stuffing your content with keywords to achieve fast rankings. However, this may only work for a short time but will ultimately be penalised by Google who may potentially blacklist your website.
It is a much better long term strategy to do white hat SEO if you want to build an online business that continues to be successful for many years.
When doing white hat SEO, you have to create premium content while keeping in mind the rules of Google and other search engines.
For one, you should never duplicate content. If you try to duplicate content on your site, this will eventually cause a Google penalisation.