Types of
SEO
Let’s start with a quick definition of what
is SEO.
SEO is the process of making a website
easier to understand by search engines and friendlier for users. The overall
goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic from search engines by
improving the positions the website appears in the SERPS for various search
terms.
At the beginning (think early 2000), SEO was
simple but over the years the whole SEO process has become complex.
When optimizing a website for search
engines, you have to consider hundreds of rules to satisfy the various search
engine ranking factors and at the same time keep your users happy.
To make it easier to handle, the SEO
industry has come with different types of SEO. Each type is responsible for a
number of SEO rules.
What is important to understand is that these subsets of SEO are not a different process, it’s just a way of breaking down a complicated process in several smaller processes that are easier to manage.
So, the various SEO types are:
·
Technical SEO
·
On-page SEO
·
Content SEO
·
Off-page SEO
·
Local SEO
·
Mobile SEO
·
Ecommerce SEO
The most important are Technical, On Page
and Off Page SEO as shown in the diagram below.
Technical
SEO is exactly what the name implies i.e.
technical parameters that affect the visibility of a website in search engines.
The main goal of technical SEO is to ensure
that search engine crawlers can crawl and index a website without any problems.
The
most important technical SEO guidelines are:
·
Check and optimize your robots.txt to
make sure that search engines can correctly access your website.
·
Add and verify your
website with Google Search Console and specify your preferred domain.
·
Use the COVERAGE report to find and fix
crawl errors.
·
Create an XML Sitemap and submit to all major search engines.
·
Optimize your site structure and URL
structure.
·
Follow SEO Friendly web design
·
Create websites that load fast on both
desktop and mobile devices.
On-Page
SEO
On
page SEO has to do with the page itself and how
to make it friendlier to search engines and users.
It should be noted that while search engines
look at a website as a whole, ranking is performed on a page level basis.
That’s why it’s important to pay attention
to the optimization of each and every page on your website.
The
most important on-page SEO guidelines are:
Optimize
your page titles. This is a critical SEO factor. Page titles
are shown in the search results and should be interesting for users to click.
The title of a page should also give search engine bots enough clues on what
the page content is all about.
Optimize
your H1 Tag. While the page title is shown in the
SERPS, the H1 tag is what is shown as the top heading of a page. An optimized
page has only one H1 tag and usually it has the same values as the page title.
Optimize
your headings. Besides the H1 tag a page needs to
have sub headings (H2, H3) for the different sections. In case of long form
content, subheadings make the page easier to read by users and scan by
crawlers.
SEO
for Images. Any images used on a page should be
properly optimized, otherwise search engines cannot understand what they
represent. Things like optimizing the filename, file size and ALT text are
critical for image SEO.
Page
formatting. Publishing a page with text and images
without spending time to beautify the content is not a good SEO practice.
Although Google cannot ‘see’ a page like a human, they have ways to understand
how a page looks or if it’s full of ads and popups and this is taken into
account during the ranking process.
Content
SEO
Content
SEO is a subset of on-page SEO. Content
SEO is all about the quality of the content and how to make it better.
Because this is a very important SEO success
factor, it is considered by many as one of the types of SEO. In many cases
though, you can find content guidelines under on-page SEO, which is also a
correct approach.
Publishing great content that users love and
search engines can understand, is the winning combination.
To
achieve this, you can follow these guidelines:
Start your content creation process with
keyword research. Find the SEO keyword that are important for your website
and incorporate them in your content.
Go one step further and look for long-tail
keywords and semantically related (or LSI) keywords, and add them to your titles,
headings and main content.
Publish content that is thorough and long
enough so that users can get what they want and search engines to have
enough clues to
understand the context of your content.
Link out to other high-quality websites (if
it makes sense) and to other pages of your website to help users learn more
about a topic.
Make use of schemas and structured data
to pinpoint to search engines important parts of your content.
Off
Page SEO
Off-page
SEO is all about promotion. While the
previous SEO types concentrated more on the website infrastructure and content,
off-page SEO has to do with techniques you can use to promote your website on
the Internet.
Websites that are popular are more likely to
rank higher on Google than less popular websites.
The
most important off-page SEO methods are:
Link
Building. Link building is the process of
getting SEO backlinks from other websites.
These backlinks act as ‘votes of trust’ and
increase the authority of the target website (provided that they don’t have the
no follow attribute attached to the link).
Brand
Promotion. Google likes to rank known brands high
in the results because people trust them.
Besides promoting your website to get
backlinks, you should also work on promoting your brand and encourage
conversations about it in the various social media networks and forums.
Google can pick up these signals and reward
websites that people talk about.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a type of SEO suited for local
businesses only.
In other words, if you have a website and
your goal is to get clients visiting your local store, then you should optimize
your website for local SEO.
Everything that is mentioned above is valid
for Local SEO, with the addition of the following guidelines:
Make sure that you have your business name,
address, contact details on all pages of your website.
·
Add the Local Business schema on your
homepage
·
Create a Google My Business Account
·
Register your business with trusted
directories such as Yelp, Yahoo small business, Foursquare and other.
·
Promote your website on local directories
and websites (for example online local newspapers).
Mobile SEO
Mobile SEO is again not a different type on
its own, but a subset of SEO specific for mobile devices.
It’s a fact that more than 60% of Google
searches are now performed on mobile devices.
This is a huge number and a good indication
that the Internet is moving away from the traditional desktop and goes to
mobile devices.
This is also the reason that Google decided
to create a mobile-first index and start indexing the mobile friendly version
of a website instead of the desktop version.
When working on Mobile SEO, you need to make
sure that:
·
Your website is mobile friendly. Running the
mobile friendly test is a good starting point.
·
The website loads fast on mobile.
·
The website is easy to use on mobile.
·
The user experience on mobile is not
disturbed by interstitial banners, other methods of aggressive advertising or
popups.
Ecommerce
SEO
Ecommerce is a huge industry. When it comes
to search engine optimization, optimizing an ecommerce website is more complex
than working on a blog or corporate website.
You have way more pages to optimize and it’s
much more difficult to promote an ecommerce website.
The most important ecommerce SEO factors
are:
·
Optimization of an online shop starts with
the homepage and category pages. These two page types have to properly optimize
before you start working on your product pages.
·
Optimize your product pages based on the results of your keyword research.
·
Optimize ALL visual elements of your store
(images, videos)
·
Add the necessary schemas (product, offers
etc.)
·
Promote your store on social media networks
·
Think of creative ways to get people to link
to your product pages
·
Start a blog and publish content related to
your products and how they can help people solve a problem.
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