In today’s digital world, search engines are more important than ever. In fact, Google now accounts for more than 80% of all searches. So how can you get your brand in front of the people who want to find you? That’s where SEO comes in.

Having a firm grasp of the various types of SEO available to your company is critical as it helps you understand and get the most out of your investment when engaging in SEO services.

There are four primary main types of SEO practice in the industry and they are the following:

4 Main Types of SEO

1. White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is a type of SEO that comply with search engines’ rules. It refers to SEO that uses respectable techniques to improve a site’s ranking without resorting to deceptive tricks for different search queries. It is concerned with delivering users high-quality, relevant content rather than using spammy methods like duplicate content that is exclusively optimised for search engines.

These are the strategies Google suggests you employ in order to improve your site’s performance in the search results. In accordance with Google’s search engine guidelines, they generate positive results for your company.

These techniques include:

Businesses should only engage white hat SEO techniques vs the other 3 types of SEO mentioned below as it gives a more stable long-term improvement to their traffic and thus business.

2. Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is a type of SEO that aim to violate the rules imposed by search engines and as the name suggests is the opposite of white hat SEO. For example, black hat SEO is all about exploiting the loopholes in google’s search algorithm in order to boost a website’s search engine rankings artificially.

Being an illegal SEO tactic, black-hat SEO comes with numerous drawbacks and consequences. No matter how quickly your site rises in search engine results, black-hat SEO is not the long-term solution.

Demerits Associated with Black Hat SEO

Punishments for illegal black-hat SEO practices are in place because they are against the rules of google’s search algorithm. If a website is found employing black hat SEO tactics to artificially inflate its traffic, it risks being permanently blacklisted.

Techniques that are associated with black hat SEO include:

3. Gray Hat SEO

Gray hat SEO is a type of that SEO lies somewhere in the middle of the 2 extremes of white hat SEO and black hat SEO. The reason for that is that the approach and techniques used are not exactly specifically banned by search engines like Google as they remain ill-defined.

Gray Hat SEO is riskier than white hat SEO and it generally does not result in your site being banned from search engines but it does often in rare cases. The reason for that is SEO changes periodically; what is considered gray could become a bat hat in the following years.

Techniques that are associated with gray hat SEO include:

Using expired domains
Using exact matched domains (Eg Seoagency.com)
Using private blog networks (PBN) with well-covered tracks for links
Building links on Mico-sites and Blogs like Tumblr, Weebly, Medium & etc
Spinning content (Unethical rather than creating your own content)

4. Negative SEO

Negative SEO is a type of SEO that uses harmful black hat SEO techniques to target other websites. The goal is to cause harm to competitors in the eye of search engines like Google. As such, when it comes to negative SEO, the goal isn’t to improve the quality or rank of a particular website higher in search results but to bring it down.

Techniques that are associated with negative SEO include:

Building unnatural links to competitor’s site
Scraping the website’s content and creating duplicates of the Website (Causing duplicate content issues on the website for Competitors)
Posting fake negative reviews
Hacking websites to install malware or unsafe content

These are four of the main type of SEO that every business need to be aware of before you engage an SEO agency for it. Businesses can also run a quick SEO audit of their website to get an overview of where they stand.

4 Different Types of SEO Techniques to Drive Results for your Business

Now that you are aware of the different types of SEO in the market and what to engage in. We will look into different types of SEO techniques you need to be aware of in a successful SEO in order for your business to reap the benefits of SEO.

For a simpler explanation of SEO that is not technical, do click here to read up on our post on what is SEO and how it works.

1. On-page SEO

On-page SEO is about making changes to your website in order to improve its SEO performance.

When it comes to on-page SEO, optimizing keywords is one of the most common techniques. Keywords are used by searchers to produce a list of relevant results.

Finding out what people are searching for when looking for the products and services you offer online will be the first step in attracting new customers to your digital marketing and is especially important in eCommerce SEO so that you can properly name your product titles & descriptions based on it.

These keywords can then be incorporated into your site’s page titles, meta descriptions, and headings to get organic traffic. The optimization of URL site structure is another method of on-page SEO. If you want people to remember your page, you need to make it easy for them to do so. Make it easier for your customers to remember you by incorporating unique URLs into the URL structure. Custom content can also be created to address the keyword concerns also for digital marketing.

The main factors to take note of for On-page SEO techniques are the following:

Keywords
URL
Title tag
Meta description
Heading tags
Alt tags
Content
Internal linking
Images and their alt text

2. Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is about taking actions away from your website to improve your website’s authority and thus SEO. It’s essentially about getting more links from other websites, which is commonly known as backlinks.

Backlinks are critical for off-page SEO to rank well in search engines. This means that a site with many high-value backlinks should rank higher than an otherwise similar one without as many.

The main factors to take note of for Off-page SEO techniques are the following:

How related the linking site’s topic is to the site being linked to
The anchor text used on the linking site
The trustworthiness of the linking site
The number of other links on the linking page
Authority of the linking domain and page
The “freshness” of the link

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is about optimizing your website’s backend in order to improve its site performance, indexability, crawlability & user experience, which then can help to lead to better SEO performance.

One of the critical factors is the speed of the website. Users don’t want to sit around and wait for your page to load. You need a page that loads quickly if you want to see the best results.

With Google PageSpeed Insights, you can keep an eye on your page’s performance. Using this tool necessitates making changes to your website yourself. A digital marketing company can be hired by businesses that lack the technical know-how and use their page speed services.

Mobile friendliness is also another main technical SEO factor that should be taken into consideration. You want your visitors to have the best possible experience while they are on your website. Creating a mobile-friendly website is easy if you use a responsive design and these are part of the Google page experience, which is one of the key factors in Google’s ranking factors.

The main factors to take note of for technical SEO techniques are the following:

No major website errors like 404s, 503 and etc and free from malware
Make sure that web pages are not blocking Google bots from crawling the website
Having a Clear Site Structure to allow Google bots to easily find and index your pages
Page Experience friendly site (Https site, Mobile friendly website, No intrusive interstitial, Safe browsing experience & Core Web Vitals)

4. Local SEO

Local SEO is about optimizing your website to be more visible for local search results on Google and more specifically in the Google map 3-pack listings.

Local SEO can help your business grow if it has a physical location or serves a particular geographic area. When you search Google for important keywords related to your business and a map with 3 listings appears underneath it (also known as a map pack), local SEO can help you grow your business.

The main factors to take note of for local SEO techniques are the following:

Having a Google My Business listing
Category of the Google My Business listing
The proximity of the business address to the location of the searchers
Number of reviews of the listings
Links to the website

Conclusion

It is important to learn the different types of SEO and also the techniques of SEO so as to avoid making the wrong decisions when embarking on SEO. (Eg, black hat SEO)

SEO (search engine optimization) is a long-term digital marketing channel that does not yield results overnight as it takes some time to build it up. SEO is important to businesses and when it is done right, businesses can benefits greatly from it as 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine which means SEO. Both SEM and SEO will greatly help business benefits from it.

To get started, you can use our free SEO audit tool today to get a quick score of your current website’s SEO performance or even contact us for a free consultation on what kind of results you can expect from SEO.

4 Types of SEO: Simple & Easy Guide to Help Improve Your SEO