SEO is short for search engine optimization.
Creating high quality websites, blogs and improving user experience is the main goal of SEO.
By creating a better web we make it easier for every user to find it’s online experience a pleasurable one. SEO helps every website and blog to improve quality, get more visitors and increase revenue.
History of SEO
Everything started in the mid 1990’s, with the first search engines, back then it was really easy to do SEO. You only had to submit website url to search engine and spider would crawl the page in order to categorize the website.
Based on your content and links, spiders would crawl and index your site for later crawling, every url was stored on the search engine servers.
Similar techniques work till this day but much more efficiency is at play, and there is a lot more to do in order to position your site.
We have machine learning, artificial intelligence in play, crawlers got much smarter and we have hundreds of factors needed to rank the website.
The terms SEO was created somewhere in the 1990’s, some of the main SEO experts believe that the term was created around 1997.
How SEO Works
It all started with Larry and Sergey creating a PageRank, most of the websites are ranked based on so many factors (Google supposedly have over 200 rankings factors) and quality of the page, it’s authority and responsiveness.
As you can see here while reading this article, content is one of the most important factors, after all, every search engine today is still keyword based tool.
You cannot be found if your website is empty, has no any technical quality, speed and if you are not giving any value.
SEO works like this, it all starts with you, creating something useful and then notifying search engines about your work. Every search engine has it’s own “spiders”, crawling the web and “jumping” or “following” links found on the page.
After spider visits your page, he crawls every link, text, image, social links, comments and everything your have visible on your page, he collects that info and sends it back to the search engine servers.
Based on the ranking factors, your website gets something like a “PageRank”, the term was created by Google in order to rank sites based on number of links pointing to you.
Today we don’t know exactly if the links are still the main ranking factor but we can follow the guidelines provided by Google and other search engines in order to improve the quality of the page.
The more you “optimize” your website or a blog, the better chance you have to outrank your competitors.
At the end, every search engine tends to serve quality pages to their end users in order to improve it’s quality and of course increase overall revenue numbers.
What you give in, is what you will get back in return, remember that when doing search engine optimization.
How to do SEO
Depending on the platforms, programmings language your website is created on, it covers all kinds of different activites. Usually to do SEO you will need to cover two main factors: ON Site SEO and OFF Site SEO.
Onsite SEO factors are:
Technical/ onsite optimization – Improving your internal link structure, navigation, writing relevant content, optimization of the titles, descriptions, images and of course last but not least technical improvements.
Keyword research – There are many other on site factors in order to properly do SEO, one of them is keyword research, without it you would only create a site that touches no one with it’s content. Every keyword has a certain search volume and each search volume means more traffic to your page.
Offsite SEO factors are:
Backlinks – One of the most important off site SEO factor are backlinks, in my years of experience working with SEO clients there is always a big task to finish it the backlinks area.
Content – Content marketing is the second main factor when it comes to doing proper SEO. Essentially this is the process of finding similar quality sites from your niche and writing a guest post with the link in return to your own page or your clients page.
Social – building your brand on social media, connecting with your users and getting social signals like shares, tweets and mentions are one of the main and fastest boost toward better positions on search engines.
But remember this, growing organically is always the best way to go, building links is not something any search engine would appreciate.
When you force the growth, you will fall in the blackhat seo category and the penalty is inevitable. Grow slow and grow organically.
Types of SEO
Ow, I really like this part, and I bet you will enjoy it as much as I’m going to enjoy explaining and spilling the secrets of a successful SEO “experts” doing everything by the book.
You see, there are three types of SEO:
White hat SEO – type of SEO where everything is dones by the “book”and by following the rules of the SEO community and big search engines.
Black hat SEO – optimization activities involving shady tricks in order to gain competitive advantage over your rankings competitors. Everything learned in white hat seo has it’s own black hat version of things. (MOST DANGEROUS APPROACH TO SEO)
Grey hat SEO – experimental SEO activites involving a mixture of white hat and black hat SEO in order to cut the ranking curve.
In the upcoming articles I’m going to write about every possible type of SEO and what many people did and case studies where some got caught and penalized and of course of the hard working white hat SEO techniques still working today.
Best SEO Resources
In order to stay at the top of my game, I need to read and experiment daily when it comes to search engine optimization and improving the positions of my clients.
Here is the sort list of SEO resources that I visit daily in order to see what’s going on in the SEO industry:
Google wemaster central blog – google blog where you can read anything and everything related to this biggest search giant and all of their changes related to SEO and quality of search.
MOZ – I remember starting with SEO, moz was one of the main and only quality SEO resource blog, the great Rand Fishkin and his Whiteboard friday videos helped me a lot. Moz is actually a marketing company with it’s own SEO tools built to help you learn and grow.
Other SEO resources blogs:
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Roundtable
Blackhatworld – the name says it all, if you want to learn unusual ways of SEO, then this forum is for you 😉
I hope you liked this article as much I enjoyed writing it for you, if you decide to enter the world of SEO and doing this for a living, be prepared for a quite interesting career choice.
As much as it can be lucrative, interesting and challenging to do, at the same time it can be frustrating by not knowing what cause some sites to drop and others to grow.
But as with anything in life, if you strive to be better and learn a lot, everything can be much more rewarding.
Thank you for reading.
Dalibor
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