SEO is the most important technique for any website to decide its ranking in search engine result pages (SERP). It is an art more than the science of combining strategy, technique, and skills to enhance the visibility of a website by increasing organic traffic.

According to Hubspot, 57% of digital marketers’ experience is that SEO is more effective than any other marketing initiatives to generate leads.

If you do it well, the quality and quantity of traffic to the website will increase significantly.

Different types of SEO

This article is about different types of SEO techniques mostly used by digital marketers to enhance the visibility of their website. You must have thorough knowledge about these different types of SEO to apply them effectively and most importantly to be aware and stay away from any unethical SEO practice which is strictly prohibited by Google Webmaster guidelines. Violating these guidelines fixed by Google for webmasters may lead to serious consequences like demoting in search results to even removal from Google search indexes. This will ruin all your hard work and the huge time you put to develop your website.

So, read this post carefully, all the nitty-gritty of different types of SEO has been compiled in one place so that you don’t have to run here and there.

Before we jump into the types of SEO and other details, let’s understand SEO first.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a key term for anyone who deals with internet/affiliate marketing. To rank an article or any content higher in the search results of search engines, SEO is indispensable. SEO increases the nonpaid or “organic traffic” to your site. The knowledge of SEO enables you to optimize the content of posts to rank higher. As the famous line goes “ SEO is both an art and science” is more than true. You have to make your content SEO optimized without compromising its readability.

SEO is like reading the mind of your readers. SEO tries to understand what people search online, what they want. Tries to find keywords that people are looking for and content that can attract people. SEO helps you to know the exact question people are searching to answer so that you can create useful content with the answer.

Different types of SEO

The main purpose of any business is to provide value to people and in turn earning money. In this way business is done honestly creates a win-win situation. But just like two sides of a coin, there are also abusers of SEO techniques, there are people who adopt unethical practices of doing business for short term gains. Such business does not last long and leads to bankruptcy. Both of these situations are primarily determined by how the technique of SEO has been applied by the website owner.

Based on the way SEO techniques are applied to boost the website’s visibility, it can be categorized as below:

1. White Hat SEO

2. Black Hat SEO

3. Grey Hat SEO and

4. Negative SEO

If SEO is done following search engine rules and ethically is called “White Hat SEO”. The primary focus of white hat SEO is to cater to helpful content to people while abiding by Google WebMaster Guidelines. Using White Hat SEO will get your site a slow but steady growth. After an initial phase of slow growth in the ranking, a snowball effect will drive huge traffic to the site leading to much faster improvement in ranking.

You can find almost all established SEO and content marketing websites like Moz, Backlinko.com, Semrush, Ahrefs, Neilpatel.com follow and suggest to adhere to White Hat SEO using best SEO tools and SEO plugins. Because success has no shortcuts, you have to go through a long and initially hard working phase to reap the sustainable benefit later. You can not just launch your site and get to the top amongst millions of other similar websites who are competing hard to provide more and more value to their readers. If your content is better than others and continues to be so, in a natural way you gradually move to the top.

Go through all these WebMaster Guidelines to check any kind of SEO practice that is not approved by Google and can even lead to the removal from the Search Index.

When SEO adopts unfair means by misusing the search engine algorithm’s weakness to fool the search engine and rank higher, is called “Black Hat SEO”. It may help you to rank your site temporarily but in the end, such unethical practice will put you in deep trouble of the site getting blacklisted and removed from search results.  Doing Blak Hat SEO is a complete violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines so not sustainable at all. 

Grey Hat SEO is something not really forbidden in Google’s webmaster guidelines that’s why it can not be called Black Hat SEO but certainly not ethical to use. Some examples of Grey Hat SEO are using paid reviews, copied content, using clickbait i.e. to make visitors click any particular link without providing any useful content. Sometimes people are so desperate to rank their sites overnight that they forget the basic principle of providing value through blogs and get trapped by these wrong SEO techniques. 

If you are writing anything out of passion, have skills in the field and want to share your knowledge with the world, you don’t have to read any guidelines. Your content will be loved by your readers which Google will also come to know and improve its ranking.

As the name suggests, the Negative SEO technique is adopting unfair means to cause harm to competitor websites to rank higher without improving its own content quality. Sometimes people get over competitive and start writing negative reviews about their competitors, steal their content and even try to hack their sites. 

These SEO strategies are basically categorized depending on Good and Bad SEO techniques. Except these, SEO techniques are further subdivided into a few more categories which are no way different from each other, rather these breakdown is basically to come up with smaller processes which can be handled better.

These SEO categories are as below:

• On-Page SEO

• Off-Page SEO

• Technical SEO

• Content SEO

• Local SEO

• Mobile SEO

• eCommerce SEO

On-Page SEO 

It refers to those SEO strategies which are solely limited to website or page content, like keyword optimization, image optimization, creating SEO friendly title, URL and meta description. This SEO ultimately makes the task easy for Google to identify if the content in your site is meaningful, helpful to your readers. Doing on-page SEO is comparatively easier and less time consuming compare to off-page SEO.

Off-Page SEO 

This type of SEO refers to techniques that are beyond the content of your website i.e how your website is recognized by your reader community, other popular websites in your niche and social media response. If a website of your niche and with good domain authority refers to your post in its content then its a very important signal to Google that your website has something worth citing in such a popular website. This is called backlinking and is important for ranking. High-quality backlinks indicate the reputation and authority of your website. Use guest posts is an effective way to achieve high-quality backlinks.

Technical SEO

This SEO strategy is concerned with some factors which are not related to the content of the website but are also determining factor for any website’s ranking. Background factors of any website like as mentioned below come under this type of SEO technique.

• Mobile-friendliness or responsiveness

• Creating an XML sitemap and optimizing robots.txt file 

• Page loading speed

• Security certificate

• Site structure

• Ease of navigation

• Crawlability

You can find elaborate discussion on these factors here.

Content SEO

This is a part of On-Page SEO only. This is all about writing great content providing some real value to the audience. It also suggests thorough keyword research before you start writing your content. If you are a beginner in blog writing, better to find a low competition long tail keyword for fast ranking.

Local SEO

It refers to optimization strategies applied to any local business i.e. if you have a local store then local SEO will be applied to the website for that store.  As your target audience are the customers of your area, so you should use your locality name in your business or website name, contact details, and address. The SEO strategies mentioned above, all will be applicable for local SEO.

Mobile SEO

In today’s world where almost 60% of internet users are accessing the internet through their mobile, it becomes of utmost importance to make your website mobile-friendly in all possible ways. Like your site structure or theme should be mobile responsive i.e. the website will be automatically adjusted according to the mobile screen size, page load speed in mobile handsets must be quick, ideally readers should not have to scroll much in their mobile to get to your page content i.e. you should start your page content just below the page title to make it easy for reading in mobile.

eCommerce SEO

An eCommerce site highly depends on its SEO and it is also far more complex On-Page SEO process than any other website or blog. An eCommerce site consists of a large number of pages and also heavily loaded with product images and details. So, all these components need to be optimized with lots of patience. Especially the Homa Page and Category page are very crucial to attract customers and lure them to make a purchase.

Off-Page SEO for eCommerce sites is also very critical. The promotion of such sites in social media platforms determines the volume of organic traffic to a large extent.

Conclusion

This article covers almost all types of SEO techniques you need to know and apply to enhance the visibility of your site. And, also all those unethical SEO practices you have to carefully avoid to keep your website in the good book of Google and ultimately get loved by your readers. 

Here several types of SEO processes are discussed which are purposefully broke down into small processes so that you can adopt them with ease.

Create a great website to cater to really useful information to your audience and then apply the SEO strategies as discussed here, success is bound to come over time.  You have to keep patience and go on adding and updating your content and blogs. Google will surely come to know that there is a blog which is providing value and automatically promote it to the top search position.

Wish you happy blogging 🙂