Good search engine optimization practices are vital if you want your website to rank on your specific keywords and get your potential customers to convert. But there are different types of SEO, and all of them can help you achieve different goals.
In this post, we’re looking at the various types of SEO, all of which you might have to use at one point or the other. Just to make things clear, there isn’t a type that’s better than the other, so you will have to do your best to use all of them to your advantage.
Technical SEO largely refers to on-page SEO, meaning the modifications that you need to make on your website in order to see better rankings. We’ve already created a post about a technical SEO checklist, but for you to get an idea of what it is, here are some important guidelines:
Using Schema markup has also become popular these days as it can tell Google and other search engines exactly what your posts and pages are about. Fortunately, instead of having to do all of this manually, you can now use specific tools and plugins for the purpose.
Check out our WordLift review here, one of the best Schema plugins for WordPress we’ve tried.
As challenging as technical SEO might seem to you, if you take all of its aspects one by one and fix any issues you come across, you’ll improve your users’ experience and your rankings, too.
On-page SEO mostly involves your content, but the truth is that it also refers to your meta titles, meta descriptions, the presence of your specific keyword in the page or post title and URL, as well as in the first paragraph and at least one of your headings.
As you can expect, when people start creating content for their blogs or websites, they rarely consider how important on-page SEO can be and how much of a difference it can make. Optimizing your older pages can take a lot of time and effort, so we’d advise you to create a checklist and stick to it each time you want to create a new article.
Your internal linking process can also refer to on-page SEO, so you should make sure that your links point out to the same category your article is in so that Google’s crawlers don’t get confused.
Off-page SEO mostly refers to whatever you can do outside your website or blog, and that can help you rank better. This usually involves getting backlinks from authoritative websites and others in your specific niche.
Social media marketing can be another technique that you can use to your advantage when improving your off-page SEO, especially since social signals are so important nowadays.
You’ll also have to build long-lasting relationships with influencers, bloggers, or journalists, leave comments on other sites, do some guest blogging, and pretty much anything that can create the image of an expert in your field.
Even though Mobile SEO isn’t exactly separate from the rest, it is an important subset in this day and age. More than half of all Internet users now use their mobile devices to perform searches on Google and other search engines, so you will have to optimize your site for mobile as best as possible.
If your site runs well on mobile, if it’s easy to use, and if it’s mobile-friendly, the user experience will be better, too.
As you know, the click-through-rate matters a lot, and it can be manipulated, but your bounce rate also matters, and if your potential customers are leaving your site too quickly because of poor user experience, you aren’t going to convert them.
Although many businesses now ship worldwide or in the same country, but they don’t depend on a physical location, there are still physical businesses that exist and that need to have customers going through their door in order for them to make sales.
The first step to making sure that you have your local SEO in check is to claim your Google My Business page, which will ensure that you have complete control over your business name, address, opening hours, telephone number, and the user reviews you’ve received.
If local SEO is very important for you, you’ll have to use specific local-based keywords in your homepage, post and page titles, and create articles around them, too. Off-page local SEO is a thing, too, with people these days buying links and asking for specific local-based anchor text.
These aren’t exactly types of SEO per se as they merely refer to the techniques that you can use to see better rankings in Google and other search engines. In theory, White Hat SEO involves only clean practices, meaning that you would never have to ask for or buy types of links in SEO, for example.
Black Hat SEO, on the other hand, doesn’t have any ‘scruples,’ so if you decide to use this technique, you will artificially create links, manipulate your CTR, and generally improve your rankings by using methods that effectively go against most search engines’ policies.
Grey Hat SEO is a mix of both of these, and some people argue that it’s the best since you can always limit the number of potentially bad links you buy or you can get rid of them completely once you’ve improved your rankings (which is what you most SEOs do with PBN links, for instance, as they merely keep them for a limited amount of time and then fully remove them).
Since social media content also gets indexed, using social media SEO the right way can make a huge difference in your content marketing. Relying only on social media for links isn’t the best idea as most of them are no-follow anyway. You do need some, at least for building a decent following.
Besides, some social media networks have their own SEO, which means using your keywords in specific places (such as YouTube, for example) and generally optimizing your social profile for the best user experience.
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