One of the most common terms floating around the internet for website owners is SEO, but what does that actually mean? When broken down to its most basic level, SEO stands for search engine optimization. This means taking your website and enhancing it to be able to get natural and free ranking within the first results on most common search engines. Most people desire to be the top ranked result when people search on Yahoo, Bing, or Google for their website’s specific niche. The more you can do to help your site rank within the top results from one of these search engines, the more you are SEO’d on your site.

How Do You SEO a Website?

There are many common techniques that people turn to for SEO purposes. There are techniques that you can do within your website that affect your ranking. These are known as on-site SEO techniques. There are also techniques that have an external effect on your website. These are known as off-site SEO techniques. Both of these techniques involve you getting your website noticed, but both of them take very different approaches as to how they make that happen. Which method you choose to use on your website can determine the type of ranking your website gets naturally, or without paying services that rank your website up higher.

What Are Common On Site SEO Techniques?

Some of the most common on site SEO techniques include creating title tags for your website pages, adding keywords to your website’s content, adding in different headers with the keywords you are looking to rank for, and linking your site to authoritative sites that prove you know what you are talking about. Each of these techniques allow the search engines to see that your website is focused on specific keywords and ideas. The more informative and current your website is in the eyes of the search engines, the better your natural ranking will be. However, you have to remember that you have competition most of the time, so you have to be more informative, more accurate, or more current than your competitors to rank higher than them. This is especially true if they have been around longer than you have.

What Are Common Off-Site SEO Techniques?

Off-site SEO tactics, on the other hand, involve doing things outside of your website to get more attention brought to it. Some common off-site SEO techniques include posting guest blogs that link back to your site on other high-ranking blogs, submitting your site to forums or directories, submitting press releases when you have a new product or service to offer the public, reaching out to the public through social media outlets, and commenting on other blogs with a link back to your site within the comment. These are all things you must do if your focus is off-site on a regular basis. The more current each of these techniques is, the better chances your website has at getting a good ranking out of them.

While no single SEO tactic will boost your website right up to the number one slot on a search engine overnight, when the techniques are able to work together, this is often the case for your website. It takes time, dedication, building up of trust with your visitors, and some hard work, but in the end, a highly ranking website is going to bring you visitors, business, and esteem within your field. Take the time to make your website run the way you want it to, and it will work for you right back. Enjoy the prestige and revenue that a solidly SEO’d site can offer.

SOURCES:

http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/12-basic-on-site-seo-tactics-for-optimized-results/5966/

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2107974/Successful-SEO-Tactics-Off-Site-Optimization

When it comes to SEO, or search engine optimization, there are two very distinct styles. One style is considered to be a great way to get your website ranked, while the other is punishable by the lowering of your website’s ranking. The problem is, how do new (or inexperienced) website owners know which is which? Well, the best way to do that is to learn the difference between the different styles.

Blackhat SEO

Think of this version of SEO as the cowboys in the Old West who wore the black cowboy hats. Everyone knew to stay away from them, and for good reason. The same goes for this style of SEO. It causes more harm to your website than anything else, and it could result in you losing any positive benefit that your site once offered. Some common blackhat tactics include:

• Stuffing the content on your website with the keywords you want to rank for, in an unnatural fashion

• Hiding links and text within your content that causes redirects to other locations or websites

• Spinning content and having the same basic article on multiple websites

• Buying links from somewhere else or putting a massive amount of links within any of your web content

These all used to be commonplace, but once the different search engines started running algorithms, websites started losing out for these unnatural practices. The point of a website is to inform the visitors and the readers, so for those websites that did not live up to that definition, they faced the ranking consequences.

Whitehat SEO

This would be the equivalent of the cowboys wearing the white hats. They were the people turned to for safety and security. The same goes for current websites. Those ranked up high due to the fact that they are informative and safe are the ones to trust. You can read through their information and understand that the content was written to help customers know the truth about whatever product or service the content was about. These honest tactics helped the rank of these sites naturally rise, helping them be what searchers see at the top of their results. Some of the most common whitehat tactics include:

• Proper use of keywords in a natural fashion throughout your content, including headers, title, and occasionally used within the content

• Using links within your content sparingly to prove that your information is accurate, building trust with your visitors

• Insert meta tags and meta descriptions within the backend of your website so that the web crawlers can see what your site is about

• Using your content to attract readers with unique, informative, and engaging content of varying lengths

• Link to other sites that rank highly and are about the same type of topics as yours to show that both are there for the benefit of the readers

Whitehat SEO is what people should be using for any and every website they own. Using even one of the blackhat techniques can cause irreparable damage to your website.

Unless you have the time and availability to fix your website from top to bottom, then you should not even consider using any blackhat techniques. They can cause damage that you may or may not be able to fix, and it can cause a loss of trust in the people who did visit your site, making it to where they no longer want to visit your site because they do not trust the site’s intentions. You should always check to make sure your content is totally unique and helps inform the visitors of exactly what benefits your site can offer over the sites of your competitors.

SOURCES:

http://www.wordstream.com/black-hat-seo

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/search-engine-optimization2.htm

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Black_Hat_SEO_vs_White_Hat_SEO

When you are trying to rank up your website, you want to be able to boost your website with as much natural propulsion as possible. One relatively new way of doing that is by using social media. You can help kick your website up in front of a new set of viewers on a regular basis and show the presence that can help build trust in the potential customer’s eyes. The more social media activities you are seen in, the better chances your website has when it comes to moving up the ranks.

What Social Media Options Do Businesses Have

When it comes to using social media, there are a few activities that will help more than others. The first thing you should do is create a consistent presence. If you are consistently around to respond or answer questions at a regular time, you will start seeing some familiar faces in the crowd. The more familiarity people have with you, the more trusting they will be about your business and the more your name will stick in their minds when they need a product or service they know you can provide. Another option is building links back your website that people can click on. This helps provide external links to your website, plus it increases the total viewership of your website.

The more people use social media to get their name out there, the more people will trust what their name represents. This means that social media authors can start having a following of people who can look up the author’s name and read more about what that person has to say. Plus, the social media presence of a website is now a part of the algorithm that ranks your website, so if you do not do anything with social media for one reason or another, you are missing out on the highest ranking that your website could get in more ways than one.

How to Boost Your Social Media Force

There are a few ways that you can boost the force behind your social media and SEO campaigns. Here are a few ideas on how to make them as powerful as possible:

• Understand and use the different social media sites that have followers of your website’s expertise (such as Pinterest, Reddit, or Twitter)

• Fully fill out your social media profile so that people can see for themselves why they should listen to what you have to say in social media avenues, and on your website

• Make every link you send out to your followers sharable so that they can share what you have to say with other people, potentially increasing your amount of followers

• Make each one of your social media profiles publicly viewable—if you keep them private, filling them out does you and your website no good

• Always make sure the content you share is current, informative, and accurate—any inaccuracies could cost you some trust within your followers, and that can take a long time to repair

Using social media can be a very wise way to boost the ranking of your website. However, you have to make sure you still stick to ethical ways of boosting your ranking. Take the time to inform your viewers with accurate, engaging, and up to date content so that they learn to trust what it is you have to say. This goes for anything posted on your website and anything you post through your website’s social media accounts. A little time spent on social media can bring you big returns through your website on a consistent basis.

SOURCES:

http://blog.sumall.com/journal/8-ways-social-media-affects-seo.html

http://blogs.constantcontact.com/product-blogs/social-media-marketing/social-seo-tips/

http://socialmediatoday.com/docmarkting/1637721/three-outdated-seo-tactics-could-hurt-your-rankings