Did you know that about 64% of organic traffic comes from search? Only about 10% come from social media. To successfully build a digital marketing strategy, you need to master a search engine.
This beginner SEO guide introduces you to search engine optimization concepts and explains how to optimize your website to increase traffic. To understand what SEO is, you need to know how search engines like Google and Bing work.
The example is like Google because you want to find information about a particular topic, such as “The Best Tool for Digital Marketing.” Just type or type “digital marketing tool”. You will receive a list of results immediately.
Which would you like to click?
Have you ever viewed the second or third page of results? Probably not, and if so, less often.
This example shows why SEO is so important. Optimizing your pages for search engines contributes to your overall search ranking.
Your goal is to be on the first page of your customer’s search (and even better, within the first few entries) so that you can see more traffic to your website.
What are the types of SEO?
Ranking your page is a multifaceted effort. There are four common types of SEO that you may encounter in the industry. Each type requires different skills, but it doesn’t work on its own.
- These four common types of SEO are:
- On page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Local page SEO
1. On Page SEO
On page SEO is about the content of your web page, such as text, keywords, and images. You need to focus on optimizing your content for the keywords people are looking for.
On-page SEO (also known as “on-site SEO”) is a way to optimize website content for search engines and users. Typical on-page SEO practices include title tag, content, internal links, and URL optimization.
This is different from off-page SEO, which is optimized for signals that occur outside the website (such as backlinks).
2. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that your website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improving your organic ranking. Key elements of technical SEO are crawl, indexing, rendering, and website architecture. It refers to website and server optimizations that help search engine spiders crawl and index websites more effective (to improve organic rankings).
3. Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO, includes all SEO tactics that take place outside your own website. Link building is often thought of as everything, but in reality there are far more off-page SEO tactics you need to use if you want to gain a competitive advantage. Tactics such as brand building, citation building, content marketing and social media play a key role in a comprehensive SEO strategy.
However, as a brief description of off-page SEO, this includes tactics to use without modifying your website or posting content to your website.
4. Local page SEO
There is no official definition for local SEO, but some brands and agencies are trying to explain marketing tactics. Moz defines local SEO as “the process of increasing the visibility of searches for companies that serve the community directly.” These may be physical store businesses with physical locations or service companies operating in a particular area. RevLocal sees local search engine optimization as an “integrated marketing approach for local businesses,” and eConsultancy is “relevant to searchers based on their current location.
Those types are useful for beginners to learn basic knowledge about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).