About 64.4% of the world’s population uses the internet.
Having a website and an online presence is one of the most important things a business can do these days. It’s essential if you want to be able to compete with other businesses in your industry.
If you’ve built a quality website, it will help your brand, but you need to ensure you take the time to work on the SEO. This is what will help you rank higher on search engine results pages, leading to more organic traffic to your website.
In this guide, we’ll go over the different types of SEO that can help improve your website. Keep reading for more.
On-Page SEO
This is the type of SEO that people think of most often. It covers everything that you do to your website to improve its search engine ranking.
A typical example of this is providing high-quality content that’s both accurate and helpful to your visitors. Meta tags are another element of this, and they help Google bots understand what’s on your site.
Something else you can do is ensure your URL structure is clean and free of duplicate pages and broken links. Using images that have small file sizes along with descriptive file names is also beneficial.
There are a lot of elements to this technical process, but it’s very important to focus on. About 28.5% of people click the first link when performing a Google search. This drops significantly for each subsequent link, so you want your site to appear as high as possible.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO has the same goal as on-page SEO, but it involves everything you do outside of the website itself. Some common examples of this include:
- Building links from trusted sites
- Receiving positive reviews on online forums
- Social media marketing
Even though this isn’t done on your actual website, it can still have a sizable impact on your site’s ranking. Link building and obtaining backlinks is perhaps the most important element of off-page SEO. This helps show that the content on your site is valuable and will highlight your website to Google as an authority within your industry.
Social media is also one of the most significant SEO trends in today’s world. If you can build up a large following on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, it can help your SEO massively by bringing in a lot more organic traffic.
Technical SEO
This is one of the more complex types of SEO for websites. The main goal here is to make it easier for Google bots to crawl your site and interpret the information found there.
Some things you can do in this area include:
- Create a thorough XML sitemap
- Add structured data for crawlers to categorize
- Make your website mobile friendly
Good technical SEO will improve your website’s performance, functionality, and efficiency. Google tends to favor sites that are mobile responsive, for example. Poor technical SEO will hurt your ranking, so it’s not something to be ignored.
White-Hat SEO
When it comes to SEO for businesses, it’s almost all about Google. White-hat SEO refers to any optimization techniques that are based on Google’s guidelines.
This typically involves things like producing quality content and linking to high-authority sites. It’s a low-risk, high-reward type of SEO, so it should definitely be a part of your SEO strategy. It will build the authority of your brand and improve your ranking, but you need to be patient as it can take some time to see the results of white-hat SEO.
Black-Hat SEO
As the name suggests, black-hat SEO is essentially the opposite of white-hat SEO. It makes use of weaknesses and loopholes in Google’s algorithm to improve your ranking. Some typical examples of this include keyword stuffing, paid link building, and showing different content to bots.
One of the main benefits of SEO is that it will bring more organic traffic to your site, but this has a risk of doing the opposite. Ultimately, black-hat SEO can get your site blacklisted, so you should consider the risk vs reward of this method before doing it.
Grey-Hat SEO
This falls in between white-hat and black-hat SEO—the methods involved don’t go against Google’s guidelines, but they’re generally frowned upon. They can also lead to undesirable search outcomes.
Clickbait content that’s reasonable but not particularly good is a typical example of this. Another is excessive link exchange between other websites. The main purpose of grey-hat SEO is to see quick results, but it may also be something you want to avoid.
Negative SEO
While black-hat SEO is generally looked down upon, this type is even worse. It isn’t so much about improving your rankings, but centers around hurting the rankings of your competitors.
This can include hacking a competitor’s site and doing things to damage their SEO, such as adding excessive low-quality links, or posting negative reviews about them online. Such actions are very unethical and can lead to legal repercussions, so it’s not advisable under any circumstances.
Local SEO
Not all companies need this—it’s most important for local companies that rely on customers visiting their physical locations, such as restaurants and mechanics. Presenting content to search engines will make it appear when people in the area perform searches. This is why it’s called Local SEO.
Including your city or region in the content is suitable for this. Encouraging customers to leave reviews is also a good idea as other potential customers will be more likely to trust your business before visiting.
Using Different Types of SEO
You probably won’t want to use all types of SEO, but some are vital if you want your business to succeed online. It can be difficult to implement SEO properly, so hiring SEO services is often the best choice.
GHAX is a full-service digital marketing agency that can help you with SEO as well as a range of other strategies. Take a look at our SEO page to see more about what we do.
