SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which is very important tool of digital marketing. It is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors (traffic) to a website or a social media platform by obtaining a high-ranking positioning in the search results page of a search engine including Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories:

White Hat SEO – Techniques that search engines recommend as part of a good design.

Black Hat SEO – Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the effect of. These techniques are also known as spamdexing.

White Hat SEO

• An SEO tactic is considered as White Hat if it has the following features:
• It conforms to the search engine’s guidelines.
• It does not involve in any deception.
• It ensures that the content a search engine indexes, and subsequently ranks, is the same content a user will see.
• It ensures that a web page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines.
• It ensures good quality of the web pages.
• It ensures availability of useful content on the web pages.
• Always follow a White Hat SEO tactic and do not try to fool your site visitors. Be honest and you will definitely get something more.
• Black Hat or Spamdexing
• An SEO tactic, is considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it has the following features:
• Attempting ranking improvements that are disapproved by the search engines and/or involve deception.
• Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly.
• Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page the search engine ranked.
• Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO tactic.
• Using hidden or invisible text or with the page background color, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as “no frame” sections.
• Repeating keywords in the metatags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the website content. This is called metatag stuffing.
• Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is called keyword stuffing.
• Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway Pages.
• Mirror websites by hosting multiple websites – all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs.
• Creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. This is called page hijacking.
• Always stay away from any of the above Black Hat tactics to improve the rank of your site.