Bestowing the outdated title of “king” upon SEO might seem like an irregularity. Search Engine Optimization heavily depends on what users want. People searching the Internet are the ones that have given birth to the most popular form of non-paid advertising in history. So far, the majority shapes things. However, as legendary kings did, SEO governs with justice and takes care of Internet users in the best possible way. For that reason, as long as the era of instant information and the Internet is dominant, SEO will never vanish. It might “die” a couple of times, only to rise from its ashes like a digital phoenix, to bring… order in the vast and complex world of the Internet.

Developed in the mid-1990s, Search Engine Optimization is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of one’s website traffic. It achieves that by increasing the visibility of a website or web page to users of a web search engine. The mid-1990s, you ask? Webmasters and content providers have been optimizing their websites for search engine visibility since the early days of the Internet.

Simply put, SEO is how someone tweaks their website so that Google suggests it as one of the best places for a user to find what they are looking for. Whether it is information, services, a product, and everything in between, SEO is the answer. Understanding the fundamentals of SEO might seem hectic, however, in the following presentation, we are going to break-down the bits and bytes of the “king” of the Internet.

SEO can be roughly split into two categories: On-Page and Off-Page.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is anything that happens within the website itself. In essence, it represents all of the practices a website has in its arsenal to achieve high visibility within search engines. Also, On-Page SEO includes the tactics and practices that not only bring visitors but also make them stay within a website, decreasing the bounce rate.

The aspects of On-Page SEO that need to be of the highest quality possible for an excellent user experience to be achieved, are the following -in a nutshell:

• HTML – HTML is the language that Google “spiders” speak, and therefore, the only way for search engines to understand what a webpage of a website is all about
• Tags – Tags are equally important to HTML since Google “spiders” can also read Tags
• Website Speed & Mobile Access – This is self-explanatory, the faster a user enters a website, the happier their overall experience will eventually be. Adding easy mobile access counts towards that
• Content – The reason users click on a link and enter a website
• System – This aspect has to with URLs, the importance of their first 3 to 5 words to SEO, and it also has to do with S.E. Indexing, which helps minimize the time of search completion by creating an index with categories

Make sure to check our focused article on On-Page SEO, to better understand how it works, and how the aforementioned aspects can be tailored in a way that a website will be considered as having excellent On-Page SEO.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO, on the other hand, is the practice that tells Google what others think about a website. It includes activities that are done away from a website or a webpage. Off-Page SEO includes links within webpages of a website which lead to other webpages of the same website, or links within another website that lead to a different one.

It also includes the following:

• Trust – The trustworthiness of a website’s links is of vital importance
• TLS – Also known as Transport Layer Security, it is a cryptographic protocol that provides communications security
• Social Media – One of the most -if not THE most- popular types of Off-Page SEO, proven to increase SEO results by over 20%
• Blocking – SEO-dampening effect which is a result of a website either being blocked or being blacklisted

You can take a look at our focused article on Off-Page SEO, which will help you understand in-depth what it is, how it works, and why it is equally important to On-Site SEO, despite having to do with aspects outside of a website.

Summary

As we are walking through the vast world of SEO, we make several realizations concerning digital marketing. How we search, buy, and communicate is changing every day. The speed, the quality, the access to variety, and our needs are all evolving by the minute, and industries follow. This has always been and will continue to be a two-way, continuous transaction. The market offers what humans are asking for. The more humans ask for something, others follow and ask for it as well.

Between the serious environmental alerts, the financial problems arising day by day around the globe, and the staggering speed of things, we are also making progress, creating new and improved methods of providing services and goods. SEO fits right in on this equation and the reason is simple:

SEO is -so far- the truest form of Democracy ever applied by mankind on itself. Users search what they want, search engines rank websites according to those needs, and websites fight for higher rankings. Users of the Internet, just like humans that visit brick-and-mortar stores, are the ones sculpting the market. Therefore, to everyone out there trying to perfect their SEO tactics and strategies, keep in mind that the fundamental truth of SEO is one:

Users determine everything. Good luck with your SEO strategies and stay tuned for more guides on how to adapt and stay ahead of the curve!

Tags: Content SEO, HTML SEO, Off-Page SEO, On-Page SEO, SEO, Social Media SEO, Tags SEO