Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
Search Engine Optimization: Simplified Guide to SEO Categories
SEO or Search Engine Optimization can drive business owners nuts! For one, it’s sort of on the technical side, but not really-ish, and the rules surrounding it continuously change. However, it brings up something concerning with all the changes it undergoes: the different types of SEO get frequently misused or underutilized, and it continually gets turned into something that seems way too complicated.
Time for Change
First, a quick vent! It’s time to stop over-complicating SEO by creating new categories/names when a new change happens! Don’t you agree? Things should be updated and maintained vs. creating something new altogether! Build on what we have!
Next, it’s time to consider whether we need all these categories. So, do we? (Answer = Possibly, probably, and no.)
So, ultimately, this post aims to help reorganize all of that SEO confusion by educating future SEOs and their clients! With so many aspects, Search Engine Optimization can spread anyone thin.
Ultimately, the different categories/names aren’t going away because different types of SEO have their purpose!
Onward to the categories!
SEO Category Breakdown
Ever hear of White Hat and Black Hat SEO? If not, then the following two practices ARE two of the most talked-about categories in SEO!
On a side note: you’ll notice that we don’t get into black hat SEO too much because you DON’T want or need to use it. Why? Well, it’s not a good practice because it tries to deceive search engine functionalities.
Next, remember that White Hat SEO encompasses these sub-categories: On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO. Further below, you’ll notice that I break off into different techniques (vs. categories).
→ White Hat SEO
Firstly, White Hat is the acceptable practice we use in SEO. Why is this important to know? It’s important because if you’re going to learn Search Engine Optimization or hire a company to perform your services, it’ll be essential to understand what you need to utilize and what to expect.
White Hat practices and techniques to use:
- Keyword Research – Find keywords related to post/page topics and industry info. Ask yourself what terms you’d search for if you were looking up the same subject.
- Quality Content – Make sure your content serves a purpose! Stay on topic and ensure images are relevant to the subject.
- Alt Text – Fill out the ‘alternate text’ section on images and be descriptive. Alt Text is there to help people with vision issues, and it also lets bots know what the picture contains.
- Headers – Fill out page headers appropriately to accurately glimpse the page topic.
- Meta Descriptions – short descriptions of the URL that get displayed on search engines. Be sure to write about what the reader should expect and include a clear CTA to help with the click-through rate.
- Easy Navigation – Give your website structure! It should be easy for your visitors to navigate if it has a layout. Example: Home -> Main Service Page -> Each Service Provided. However, be sure it takes only a couple of clicks to get to pages deeper on your website. Also, categories or tags can help clarify the site structure for visitors and search engine bots!
- Fast Page Speed – Website page load time shouldn’t take more than a few seconds. (2 seconds MAX!) Utilize website speed tools. They’re there to help you figure out just that.
- Planned Social Media Efforts – Pick a social media network that fits your customer demographic. Then, remember that each social media channel has different guidelines, contexts, how many times to post, and exact image dimensions that work best.
In summary, focus on providing a good user experience by providing quality content on an easily navigatable site. Moreover, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more about user experience vs. trying to please those little bots.
→ Black Hat SEO
As mentioned previously, Black Hat consists of unacceptable techniques used to try and outsmart search engine bots to gain better rankings without merit. BEWARE using Black Hat SEO WILL harm your rankings! If the methods are deceitful and violate search engine policies, your site CAN be de-indexed from the search engine altogether. Also, your website won’t appear on search engine result pages and could be de-indexed/taken out of its database entirely.
Black Hat SEO practices and techniques to avoid:
- Keyword Stuffing – Using the same keyword repeatedly in hopes of a better rank.
- Hidden Content – Hiding text by changing its font color to the background color, making it too small to read, or hiding images in tiny image containers.
- Cloaking – Making your website look different to bots compared to what visitors see.
- Redirecting – Automatically sending visitors to a different site vs. the site they clicked on.
- Duplicate Content – Copying content from other websites and publishing it independently without permission and credit given. (there is also another type of duplicate content (non-malicious) that we’ll talk about below)
- Unrelated Keywords – Using keywords that have nothing to do with the website’s overall topic.
- Link Spam – Having unrelated websites use your website’s URL to create backlinks.
- URL Typo – Making a website’s URL close to another well-established URL in hopes of gaining traffic from accidental typos.
In summary, DO NOT use Black Hat SEO tactics, and never buy into SEO services that promote buying backlinks/followers, even if they claim otherwise!
→ On-page SEO
On-page SEO is all about organic results (over time) and controllable editing elements of a website while keeping the user in mind at all times. Good news: there are many ways to do this!
First things first, though! Before you do anything else, sign up for a Google Business Account (if you have a biz) or a standard Google Account if you’re an independent entrepreneur (with an online portfolio, etc.) Signing up for an account grants you access to On-page SEO services the search engine offers.
Pro-tip: Business Account owners, be sure to get verified! It’ll also ensure you are notified of questions or comments visitors leave on Google, Bing, etc. Furthermore, it’ll allow you to swiftly reply to reviews and even show up better in local searches if you’re location-based.
The next most important thing to do is sign up for Google Analytics to track progress and sign up for Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both tools allow you to monitor your website for indexing, error, crawling info, etc.
SEO Checklist:
- Easy to Navigate Website
- Main Page > Category > Sub-Category
- Quality images
- Alt Text
- Short Descriptive Image Name (White-Hat-SEO.jpg > 10846228262016.jpg)
- Dimensions sized to fit website theme (resize smaller for less memory usage = faster site)
- Title Tags
- 60 – 70 Characters (Max 70)
- Meta Description
- 220 – 235 Characters
- Mobile Max of 235 Characters
- Desktop Max of 325 Characters
- 220 – 235 Characters
- Proper Writing Formatting
- Use Headers to break content into smaller pieces (H1 > H2 > H3 > H4)
- Proper use of grammar and spelling errors removed
- Use of synonyms for words (cat = feline = Felis domesticus)
- Internal Linking
- Link to other relevant pages
- Anchor text placed across several words
- Don’t use “Click here” or other variants
- Don’t match anchor text to URL exactly
- Keywords
- Research keywords related to your topic/industry
- Keep the entire website related to the topic/industry
- Use Long-tail keywords (3 – 5 words)
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
- Make preferred URL start with HTTPS
- Can be found in web host settings and WordPress settings
- Make preferred URL start with HTTPS
→ Global SEO
(This type is also called SEO or International SEO.) Global SEO generally targets visitors within a specific country or even globally, depending on the target language and existing translations.
- hreflang Tags
- Place within header tags for each page <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-us” />
- Geolocation
- Use Webmaster Tools to select target countries.
→ Local SEO
Local SEO is a technique that helps businesses in a location-based setting appear better in search results based on their area of operation. Plus, it can have a considerable benefit and impact on brick-and-mortar businesses! The competition for ranking will mostly be other local businesses since that type of search has the user looking for something specific nearby.
- Ensure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) is consistent across the website and all social media profiles.
- Make the phone number clickable on mobile devices
- For multiple store locations:
- DON’T make a new website or numerous social media profiles for ONE business, even if it has various locations!
- List separate locations (by address) on the About Us page
- Then, make each address clickable so the link leads to another page on your site vs. directing them to a completely different website!
- NAP is located on the About Us page and footer (sitewide)
- City and State are located at the end of page titles
- 60-70 characters for title size
Location
Location, location, location! It matters! However, sometimes local SEO gets overlooked.
So, to solve this issue, a little bit of research needs to happen.
Hint: start by going to where your viewers are!
Think about it this way, if you’re into watching people playing games online, where do you go? If you’re a gamer, Twitch and YouTube might come to mind. However, if you’re not a gamer, you might think of Etsy (because you’re a crafter or have a gift shop). The problem with the latter is that you won’t have much luck with Etsy (unless you’re buying background accessories for the video). Make sense?
In other words, research where your ideal customers go online. From there, think about how to make yourself more visible before implementing Local SEO.
→ Off-page SEO
This type of SEO is all about increasing your chances of success on the harder-to-control aspects (that are not part of your site), and its elements help tell search engines what people may think about your company.
Link Building
Link Building is an essential factor in the health of a website, and high-quality backlinks are challenging to get.
Why?
Backlinks take effort because you need to provide quality content that’ll also help further the other site’s quality content. In other words, who will share a post that won’t make their content even better?
In short, the quality and relevance of a backlink is a weighted factor in how your website ranks over time.
Link Building Dos:
- Create quality content
- Solves a problem
- Simplifying complicated answers
- Reach out to others in your industry
- Write content that they can’t find but you know about
- Find broken links on their site and suggest one of your pages to help solve the problem.
- Linking from blog comments (low SEO impact)
- Use to answer the person’s question
Link Building Don’ts:
- DO NOT buy backlinks even if they are “relevant.” Search engines know!
- Link power from these sites is spread too thin and will harm your rank
- DO NOT copy content from other websites to use as your own!
- DO NOT ‘trade’ links.
- Will harm your efforts when done with irrelevant industries
- Can’t control how the other person links to your page
- DO NOT use Black Hat SEO tactics
Social Media
That’s right; some social media networks can directly impact SEO.
Confused?
The Direct SEO Benefits
If you use social media to promote your website, sales, etc., and you have high engagement, then you’ve probably noticed an influx in website traffic.
However, if your page/post isn’t indexed on a search engine (like Google or Bing) before you get the traffic, it won’t necessarily improve your search engine rankings. Why? Because rankings can’t progress until content is indexed — once it is, that’s when the data starts to compile!
To get indexed by search engines, you must first meet their requirements. After that, even when you meet all of their demands, you might still have to request individual pages to be indexed and wait for them to review.
The Indirect SEO Benefits
Listing your website URL on social media profiles can help increase website traffic. More likes and shares help keep that post around longer, which can also help improve traffic and brand awareness. Many social networks have their own set of analytics, too, so you can see what kind of content strikes a chord with your audience.
Trust
Next, we all know about fostering and developing trust with customers. However, the same thing applies to customer and business relationships! No matter what, they’ll either grow incrementally over time or they won’t.
So, it is essential to remember that it can typically take a year or two to gain a (recognizable) online reputation for some businesses, but sometimes it can take longer. One thing is for sure, though, it takes a lot of effort!
On another note, having SSL on your website also helps with Off-page SEO because it shows you care about the safety and security of your customer’s data.
Lastly, be a problem solver in your industry, and don’t hesitate to answer those complex questions to show your expertise! Finally, provide the necessary resources to help your customers because if you don’t, another company will!
Reviews
Customer reviews are your time to shine!
Always make sure to respond to both positive and negative reviews. Also, remember to thank those who give you reviews. Reply to their comment(s) to say thanks.
When it comes down to solving an issue, it’s best to comment on their review and then have them contact you regarding the problem. The point of that is to get more details on their issue so you can solve it better. Don’t forget to apologize for their negative experience as well. (Sincere) sympathy goes a long way!
→ Technical SEO
Technical SEO requires a bit more digital knowledge than some of the other parts of SEO. Plus, this type involves how well bots crawl websites, how fast your website loads, using HTTPS, and a few other things. So, like most other forms of SEO, Technical SEO is there to help improve the experience of your site’s visitors.
- Increase website speed
- Use a Content Delivery Network (This helps when visitors are far away from the physical location of your web host’s server)
- Cache Memory
- Optimize images
- Reduce image dimensions
- Compress images (over-compression causes pixelation = BAD)
- Use HTTPS connection (SSL)
- Remove mixed content (HTTPS loading HTTP content)
- Remove duplicate content
- Fix broken links
- Fix 404 and 500 Errors
- Use 301 redirects if the URL move is permanent.
- Use 302 redirects if the URL move is temporary.
- Linking internal URLs appropriately
- The deepest link in a website should only be three clicks away.
- Link harder-to-find pages from your main page(s)
- Mobile Friendly
- Sitemap
- Create XML sitemap
- Submit your domain’s XML sitemap to search engines (via Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools)
SEO Categories Recap
Overall, as you can see, SEO covers a lot, and it can easily get misinterpreted or misused if you’re unfamiliar with each type’s benefits (or downside).
To make things easier, breaking SEO down into specific categories can help set priorities and get everyone on the same page when forming your SEO strategy. In addition, when you know how SEO works, you can make better decisions on which type(s) to utilize.
Final Words
So there you have it, all the (current) categories/sub-categories of SEO and how to utilize them! If you’re looking for more search engine optimization tips, check out these posts:
