SEO remains a mystery to many businesses, even in 2021. If you ask most people they’ll tell you it’s something to do with keywords and Google. But there’s so much more to it than that.
Our basic guide will walk you through the different types of SEO you need to know about to help propel your online business presence to the next level.
What Is SEO?
Starting from square one – what is it? SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a marketing strategy to help increase your website’s presence within rankings on search engines.
SEO for business allows customers to find you online, search engines are the way to do it. Around 40% of all website traffic comes in through search engines. So if you’re not optimizing, you’re missing out.
How do you optimize, though? Well, that’s where the different kinds of SEO come in.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the most well-known type of SEO. As is suggested in the name, this kind of optimization is done on your website, on individual pages. Content is king for on-page SEO.
By content, we mean the things your audience sees when they land on a page on your website. Copy, images, videos, and all other kinds of good stuff. Your copy will want to be keyword-focused, high quality, and informative.
But it’s not just how it looks. On-page content is concerned with how your website behaves too. We haven’t got time for an exhaustive list but you’ll also want nice clear URLs, hierarchical heading tags, and great navigation to load to name just a few.
Technical SEO
This is where it gets a little daunting, so bear with us. Technical SEO is closely related to on-page SEO in that it’s still things done “on page”, but it’s a bit fancier than copy and images.
We could look at technical SEO as the things going on in the background of your website. Things like mobile-friendliness, page speeds, secure HTTPS connections. This is because these are all things Google’s ranking algorithm looks at to decide whether or not your website is any good.
Without technical SEO, even if your on-page SEO is great, Google will rank you lower. In some instances, like a badly executed robots.txt file, Google won’t even be able to find your pages to rank them.
Though no one except the eggheads at Google can say definitely how important technical SEO is, it’s estimated it makes up for around 10% of the overall SEO picture. While on-page SEO makes up for around 30%. So what’s the other 60% of SEO made up of?
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is all the things that don’t happen on your website. It’s a huge part of SEO.
The biggest part of off-page SEO is link building. This is simply other sites that hyperlink to URLs on your website. It’s important because these links say to Google that other people value your site and content.
It helps build domain authority, but only if you get links from non-spammy sites. As your domain authority builds, the more likely Google is to put you at the top of the rankings because you’re a trustworthy site.
It’s not just link building though. Social media is a big part of off-page SEO too. Promoting your content on social media and it being popular is another signal to Google that your content is worth ranking.
Other Types of SEO
While these are the most important 3 types of SEO, there are other kinds too. Local SEO, app store optimization, and YouTube SEO are all worth looking at for your business. You can read all about them on our blog.
