What Is SEO and How Does its Work?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. We will teach you how to rank websites on Google. SEO encompasses everything to do with getting a website, pages, and posts to rank higher in Google and other search engines.

The goal is to have related websites that cover a similar topic like your site’s message and content well enough to like back to it.

Links work much like a popularity contest with the sites that have garnered the most links generally getting a better ranking.

Search engines attempt to first understand the meaning behind a search term and then to deliver appropriate search results that will answer the searcher’s question correctly.

To do this, search engines will use 100’s of metrics to judge the value of each page/post on a site, rate it, and see whether it is useful and relevant.

A high percentage of searches are unique and increasingly results are personalized in the search engine results pages (SERPs) including sites previously visited by the searcher about the same topic.

Google and other search engines have automated bots that will crawl around the web visiting one page after another, looking for new content that has been updated and introduced on a site.

When one website links out to a new site that Google hasn’t heard of before, the Googlebot, it’s spider, will crawl over to the new site and explore it too. The more popular a site is, the more frequently it will be crawled, and results updated in the search index.

There is paid traffic and organic (free) search traffic. Paid traffic means traffic is coming from ad clicks where you’ve paid for the advertising.

Organic search traffic is the ranking position for search terms with results that show your page and people click on it and visit the site. Paid traffic is obviously costlier, but in the early months of a site, organic traffic is almost non-existent.

Intentionally building links to your site is viewer poorly by Google. When building too many low-quality links too fast, the search engine can penalize the site.

Sometimes people buy private blog network (PBN) links which are currently quite effective for quicker ranking but are risky to use because they are against Google’s terms of service and will cause a search penalty when discovered.

People who use them gamble that they make more money that way than using organic search than less dangerous link building methods to get traffic.

SEO falls into three main categories: black hat, gray hat, and white hat. With the black hat, this is the most dangerous form of link building and short-term strategies that may work for a few weeks or months, but is quite likely to get your site banned shortly after.

Gray hat SEO in the middle. The gray hat strategies aren’t as risky, but some are borderline questionable, and the site owner has to decide how far they wish to go with their link building process.

White hat SEO means either no link building at all relying on naturally occurring links coming in or in some cases, people building links they feel are reasonable.

Black Hat

Black hat strategies include hacking into websites to inject links onto pages where the security has been compromised. Doing so crosses the legality mark, and this is why it’s black hat.

Other strategies are very short-term typically finding loopholes to exploit to maximize gain until the loophole is closed. Using negative SEO by building links to a competitor’s website using anchor text unrelated to their site like “sex here,” “Viagra free” and other things that Google will dislike is a common tactic.

Gray Hat

Gray hat is an SEO process where people buy links from PBN networks and pay for links in various ways. Some people consider any attempt to get a link to be gray hat by default. Other people feel that gray hat is shady link building schemes like PBNs but stopping short of using illegal black hat tactics to rank a page on a site. Most link building for niche sites is the gray hat.

White Hat

Depending on who you ask, white hat is either no link building on purpose at all, or building inoffensive links without actually paying for it. White hat includes approaching a site to offer a guest post for free in exchange for a link or producing an infographic and getting other sites to publish it and link back to your site. These methods while intentional link building, do not involve paying for the link which is a key criterion.

The webmaster tool (or Google search console as it is now called) is a central control panel for your websites separate to what the web host provides.

You’re able to tell Google about the site’s intention and which country you’re targeting. When you’re targeting US customers, then this is set up within the Webmaster Tools.

Warnings about bad content quality or suspicious links are often added to an account in Webmaster Tools, so it should be set up for your sites as soon as possible.

Yes, Our SEO experts update regularly with latest google algorithem updates and new techniques.

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