What is SEO?

The only guide you will need to understand Search Engine Optimisation

Consider you are in a line at an airport entrance. Now, they will authorize you inside the airport only if you have a valid identity card and a ticket and if you ask nicely, they will even guide you towards your destination inside the airport. This is exactly what search engine does but to the web pages. Search engines crawl through the web pages and index them in its system which it uses to rank our content based on what user wants to see. You can understand a search engine to be an intermediary who wants to show us the most relevant content based on our search, and hence, it indexes all the web pages to get an idea of what that page is about.

Now, this is where optimization of web pages comes in. Search Engine Optimization refers to the practices that one follows to increase their relevance while getting indexed by the search engine.

Crawling and Indexing

Wondering what is with these fancy words?

Search Engine stores all the relevant details about a web page in its system called Index. This data consists of a description of the content and address of that page. Looking for new web pages to index them is called Crawling. So whenever someone adds new content on the web, the search engine goes through that content, identifies relevant details, and then indexes it.

Different Hats of SEO

If you are a cybersecurity enthusiast, then we might have your attention here. And yes, these hats are also of the same kind. SEO also has a white hat, black hat, and grey hat. Their relevance? In the case of SEO’s all websites must follow certain guidelines regarding what they can do with their SEO keywords, if they follow these guidelines, they are white hat and if they don’t and try some illegal method like hacking, they will get blacklisted from the search engine and are referred to as black hat. Grey hat is when they follow most of the guidelines but make some minor tweaks against the guidelines to improve their ranking. However, grey hat SEO is considered to be dangerous waters.

Types of SEO

SEO techniques are broadly categorized into 2: i.e. On-page SEO and Off-page SEO, contributing towards a higher ranking of web pages.

On-page SEO: It refers to optimizing the website with the use of certain relevant keywords in content, less plagiarism. Another part is optimizing your source code with meta tags, Header tags, and alt tags and improving the relevance of the content that appears as a search result.

Off-page SEO: As the name suggests, it refers to techniques we follow outside of our page. It helps in improving websites’ popularity, relevance, and trustworthiness. Different techniques are involved to do the same, some of them being generating backlinks and social media marketing. It’s basically to show your website’s popularity and people wanting to visit it.

Conclusion

And as we claimed at the start, this is the only guide that you will need to understand SEO. If you are still with us, you will now be curious about how you can implement SEO in your webpage or business. And our next article is all about it. So stay tuned!