Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a complex process that has several different types. All types of SEO have the same goal: to optimize a website for higher visibility in search engines. In this post you will learn the different types of SEO and which SEO techniques are applicable for each type.
SEO Types
Let’s start with a quick definition of what SEO is. SEO is the process of making a website easier for search engines to understand and more user friendly. The general objective of SEO is to increase organic traffic from search engines by improving the positions that the website appears in the SERPS for various search terms. At first (think early 2000’s), SEO was simple, but over the years the entire SEO process has become complex. When optimizing a website for search engines, you have to consider hundreds of rules to satisfy various search engine ranking factors while keeping your users happy. To make it easier to deal with, the SEO industry has come up with different types of SEO. Each type is responsible for a series of SEO rules. What is important to understand is that these subsets of SEO are not a different process, it is just a way of breaking a complicated process into several smaller processes that are easier to manage. Therefore, the various types of SEO are: The most important are technical, on-page and off-page SEO, as shown in the diagram below. Most Important Types of SEO Recommended Reading: Our SEO Checklist covers all types of SEO. For each type, you get a checklist of the most important factors to know about.
technical SEO
Technical SEO is exactly what its name implies, that is, the technical parameters that affect the visibility of a website in search engines. The main goal of technical SEO is to ensure that search engine crawlers can crawl and index a website without any problem. The most important technical SEO guidelines are:
On-Page SEO
On Page SEO is all about the page itself and how to make it more friendly to search engines and users. It should be noted that while search engines look at a website as a whole, ranking is done at the page level. That is why it is important to pay attention to the optimization of each and every page of your website. The most important on-page SEO guidelines are: Optimize your page titles. This is a critical SEO factor. Page titles are displayed in search results and should be interesting for users to click on. A page title should also give search engine bots enough clues about the content of the page. Optimize your H1 tag. While the page title is displayed in the SERPS, the H1 tag is what is displayed as the top header of a page. An optimized page has only one H1 tag and usually has the same values as the page title. Optimize your headers. In addition to the H1 tag, a page should have subheadings (H2, H3) for the different sections. For long-form content, subheadings make the page easier for users to read and crawlers to scan. SEO for Images. Any image used on a page must be properly optimized, otherwise search engines cannot understand what they represent. Things like optimizing the file name, file size, and ALT text are critical to image SEO. Page format. Publishing a page with text and images without spending time embellishing the content is not good SEO practice. Although Google can’t “see” a page like a human, it does have ways of understanding what a page looks like or if it’s full of ads and popups and this is taken into account during the ranking process.
content SEO
Content SEO is a subset of on-page SEO. Content SEO is all about the quality of content and how to improve it. Because this is a very important SEO success factor, it is considered by many to be one of the types of SEO. However, in many cases, you can find on-page SEO content guidelines, which is also a correct approach. Publishing great content that users love and search engines can understand is the winning combination. To achieve this, you can follow these guidelines: Begin your content creation process with keyword research. Find the SEO keywords that are important to your website and incorporate them into your content. Go a step further and search for long-tail keywords and semantically related (or LSI) keywords, and add them to your titles, headlines, and main content. Publish content that is comprehensive and long enough that users can get what they want and search engines have enough clues to understand the context of your content. Link to other high-quality websites (if it makes sense) and to other pages on your website to help users learn more about a topic. Use schemas and structured data to flag important parts of your content to search engines.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is all about promotion. While the previous types of SEO focused more on the infrastructure and content of the website, off-page SEO is all about the techniques you can use to promote your website on the internet. Websites that are popular are more likely to rank higher on Google than less popular websites. The most important off-page SEO methods are: Link building. Link building is the process of getting SEO backlinks from other websites. These backlinks act as “votes of confidence” and increase the authority of the destination website (as long as they don’t have the nofollow attribute attached to the link). Brand promotion. Google likes to rank well-known brands at the top of search results because people trust them. In addition to promoting your website to get backlinks, you should also work on promoting your brand and encouraging conversations about it on the various social networks and forums. Google can pick up these signals and reward websites that people talk about.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a type of SEO suitable for local businesses only. In other words, if you have a website and your goal is to get customers to visit your local store, then you need to optimize your website for local SEO. All of the above is true for local SEO, with the addition of the following guidelines: Make sure you have your business name, address, and contact details on every page of your website.
Recommend reading: Our local SEO checklist covers in detail everything you need to know about local SEO optimization.
mobile SEO
Again, mobile SEO is not a different type by itself, but rather a subset of mobile-specific SEO. It is a fact that more than 60% of Google searches are now done on mobile devices. This is a huge number and a good indication that the Internet is moving away from the traditional desktop and towards mobile devices. This is also the reason why Google decided to create a mobile first index and start indexing the mobile-friendly version of a website instead of the desktop version. When working on mobile SEO, you need to make sure that:
eCommerce SEO
E-commerce is a huge industry. When it comes to search engine optimization, optimizing an ecommerce website is more complex than working on a blog or corporate website. You have a lot more pages to optimize and it’s a lot harder to promote an ecommerce website. The most important ecommerce SEO factors are:
Recommended reading: Check out our ecommerce SEO checklist to find out how to fully optimize your ecommerce website.
White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO
Is black hat SEO a type of SEO? Some people consider ‘black hat SEO’ to be a type of SEO and this creates confusion for beginners. Black hat SEO is just a term used to describe any action taken to fool search engine algorithms. From time to time, many people come up with ideas on how to artificially build links to improve a website’s ranking on Google. These methods are against Google guidelines and should be avoided. The only result of following black hat techniques is to lose your Google ranking and trust, to be penalized by Google, and to decrease your chances of achieving Google ranking ever again. All of the methods outlined in the article are ‘White Hat SEO’ techniques and if you follow them correctly, you will eventually be able to rank high in search engines and get a piece of search engine traffic.
Key learnings
SEO is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for any type of website. An SEO optimized website enjoys high visibility in search engines and improves the user experience. To make it easier to manage, the SEO process is divided into a number of sub-processes or types. The most important types are technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.