What is SEO? How is SEO done?

1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a very important concept because most of the access to your site is through search engines and you will probably have many competitors who want to appear on the first page of the search result.

SEO is the name given to all the efforts made to appear higher in search engines (like Google). Search engines assign a score to each website and page for relevant keywords. The goal of SEO is to increase this score.

2. How is SEO Done?

We have listed a few tips for SEO below for you:

• Make sure your site is indexed by search engines. For example, you can search Google for site:www.yourwebsite.com and see if your website appears in the results. If you don’t see your website in the search results, you can request that your website and its pages be indexed using the URL inspection tool.
• Make sure to optimize your page title and description metadata. The title should be concise and avoid unnecessary keywords. The description should be no more than one or two sentences long and clearly state your website’s purpose and target audience. The title and description will be the first thing users see about your site in search results, so make sure they’re engaging.
• Your website’s content should be noteworthy and useful. The text should be easy to read and carefully organized. The content should be unique, up-to-date, and reliable. Using keywords your target audience is likely to use in searches will benefit SEO. However, you shouldn’t overuse these words, or search engines may consider them abusive and lower your website’s ranking, negatively impacting your SEO.
• You should also promote your website for SEO. Share your website frequently in relevant places, on favorite sites, and on social media. These backlinks will organically increase your website’s visits. However, avoid unnecessary and excessive sharing; you don’t want to bore people and turn them off from your website.
• Apply SSR and SSG techniques to the technologies you use to build your website. Also, use as little JavaScript as possible. This will ensure your pages are quickly and easily indexed. This means a higher ranking score, meaning you’ll be in front of users more often.

Let’s talk a little about some common misconceptions. Some techniques that are thought to have an impact on SEO, but actually have no effect:

• keywords metadata hasn’t been used by search engines for a long time. This is because it has been widely abused in the past to trick search engine ranking algorithms. Google explains why it doesn’t look at this metadata here.
• Using keywords in domain names or URLs has no impact on search rankings, at least not for Google.
• Domain name extension (.com, .org, etc.) has no impact on ranking.

3. Black Hat vs White Hat

There are black, white, and gray areas when applying SEO techniques. The white area includes the reasonable and harmless methods mentioned above. The black area includes techniques used solely to improve rankings, which can be tedious and harmful to users, and which aim to trick search engine ranking algorithms. The gray area, on the other hand, is user-focused, but where certain techniques are overused to increase ranking scores. Those working in the black area are called black hat SEO specialists, while those working in the white area are called white hat SEO specialists.

Some black hat SEO techniques include:

• Showing different content to users and search engines. This is intended to trick search engine ranking algorithms. It may result in a block from search engines.
• Creating pages for specific queries and redirecting users to a single page through these pages. It can both frustrate users and lead to blocking by search engines.
• Buying expired domain names and using them for advertising purposes. It may result in a search engine block.
• Hiding text. It is used to trick search engine ranking algorithms. It can result in your website being removed from search engine indexes.
• Entering or extending content solely for search engines, directly copying content from other sites or AI-generated content, and stuffing content with keywords—these methods drive both users and search engines away from your website.

It’s clear that applying blacklist techniques is wrong. In the other side of the coin; it doesn’t make sense to risk alienating potential users and getting blocked by search engines just to rank a little higher.