What is SEO?

Last modified: May 25, 2021

Search Engine Optimization, shortened to SEO, is a term that is used by website owners, developers and marketers to describe the process of making a site rank higher in search results. There are lots of elements to SEO and there are many articles to explain how to better improve your SEO.

The better you get your site’s SEO, the more visible you will be on search engines like Google, Bing and others.

As with many aspects of marketing, there are two types of SEO; black hat and white hat.

Black hat SEO is when unethical and cheating methods are used to get a site to rank higher. This might have a short term positive impact, but the long term effectiveness is often really bad. Sites can suffer from a Google penalty where their rank is lowered manually by the search engine. Or worse, their site can be struck off the search results altogether.

There are ways to reverse both penalties, but it can take lots of time and effort.

White hat SEO is using methods that are approved by search engines. The guidelines for getting your site to rank on each search engine is broadly the same. However, there might be small differences in what each search engine considers more important.

Generally speaking, the algorithms that are used to calculate your ranking are kept top secret. Plus many search engines say that they regularly change algorithms. Though the daily changes are often minor and won’t have a massive impact on your site’s rank.

However, there is often a major update at least once or twice a year. These times can have devastating impacts on your site’s ranking.

To help website owners with their SEO, there are numerous WordPress SEO plugins available. For instance there are plugins for speed and navigational help. There are also plugins that can help with meta tags, image optimization and linking.

It is important that you spend a considerable amount of time on your SEO. It can contribute to almost two-thirds of your website’s traffic. And it is a highly converting source of traffic that can help your business’ revenue grow.