The Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Search Engine Optimization

One of the jobs that is totally hard to explain to basically everyone is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It may sound as simple as organically boosting traffic both in quantity and quality towards a website in search engine results. But there is actually more to SEO than merely providing good traffic to any site. Today with so many affordable SEO packages, it is a crime not to use proper SEO for your website.

The White, the Black and the Gray Hats SEO

SEO originally has two distinct types of practices – The White and the Black Hats.

White Hat SEO pertains to the appropriate manner of website optimization as per the search engines’ best practices. It adheres to Google’s guidelines and algorithm. White Hat SEO is mostly focused on generating high-quality and relevant contents which not only can produce traffic to websites, but also provide significant contributions to enhance web users’ knowledge on various fields. Some of these practices are content marketing and link building, development of mobile and desktop user experience, improvement of on-site strategies, online reputation management (ORM) and a lot more.

On the other hand, Black Hat SEO is the complete opposite. This type of practice can get results fast but without much relevance and value, since the effect is readily fleeting. Its strategy is to look for lapses in the algorithm of search engines and use these against them. Some of these methods are keyword stuffing, hidden links and texts, cloaking, and a lot more.

Due to the demand of both SEO services in one, Gray Hat came to the scene. This type is a mixture of White and Black Hat SEO – thin line between the two. Some examples are blog commenting, submitting web directories, social bookmarking and more.

The Evolving SEO

For more than a decade, search engine optimization has already evolved through the text of time (and search engine algorithms). Gone are the days of “hurtful” practices that can deeply penalize a website. Today, there are different types of SEO services that can definitely benefits the rankings and increase the traffic without the risk of being punished by the search engines. Good thing, some of the classic White Hat practices are still effective. Here are some of the most effective SEO best practices today:

• Building Links – high quality and relevant content with a link from one website to another.
• Online Reputation Management – this is practically self-explanatory
• Organic Search – the key here is good and strategic keywords on rich contents
• Paid Search / Cost per click (CPC) – advertiser will pay the search engine every single time the ad on the search results page is clicked. Learn more about it here.
• Social Media Marketing – Facebook, Instagram, Youtube – you name it.
• On-Site Optimization – fixing codes page errors and enhancing the entirety of the website.
• Internal Linking – linking one page of a particular website to another page of that same site.

Despite the surges of search engine updates in the past years, still, the industry of search engine optimization remained standing and growing. As many experts and old-timers would put it, SEO has become more civilized now more than ever. And it is even more expected to go further in that direction in the coming years. As technology continues to evolve and as search engines become “wiser”, there is hope that SEO will steadfastly adjust as the need arises.