How Do Search Engines Work?

Exactly as its name suggests, SEO implies all strategies used for optimizing a website, so it is more visible to web surfers in search engine’s results queue. Most important search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic ranking. Once a crawler accesses one of your website’s pages, the page in question will be automatically indexed, thus it will become visible to other web surfers in search engine’s results queue. The typical turnaround time of the indexing process can take longer than one month, especially for websites that have been recently started. By using various search engine optimization strategies, you can accelerate the rate at which search engines index your website, which means that all pages will become visible and will be accessed by web surfers faster.

On-Page and Off-Page SEO

SEO strategies are usually divided into two primary categories: on- and off-page strategies. On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website within its own “borders” so to speak. In other words, all strategies are applied directly to the website you are attempting to make more visible, including keyword optimization, content marketing, design, and so on. On the other hand, off-page SEO is related to optimizing a website outside of its pages – for example, through social media marketing and efficient backlinking.

To properly optimize a website, you will need both on-page and off-page SEO strategies, particularly because you need to create a network outside of your website, so you can attract visitors and convert them into paying customers.

White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO

Moreover, SEO strategies are also separated into white hat and black hat. By white hat SEO strategies, we refer only to those strategies that are approved and encouraged by search engines, which include mostly content marketing, social media marketing, design, and many similar others. However, black hat SEO strategies are considered illicit and using them can easily result in ranking penalizations or even website ban. Some of the commonest black hat SEO strategies are keyword stuffing (too many keywords in the same article/post/page), paid links (paying other websites to publish one or more links to your website on their pages), content spinning (using a software that can replace the words in an article/post, completely or partially, with synonyms to create a new article that basically conveys the same idea), and many others.
Even though it might seem tempting for many business and company owners, using black hat SEO can have many undesired outcomes that can negatively affect the visibility of your website, which is better to focus only on white hat SEO strategies.