Types of SEO – A Detailed Guide

The benefits of SEO for any business are practically endless. With SEO, you can improve your brand’s success in the marketplace.

There are hundreds of rules to satisfy the various search engine ranking factors. To keep it easy, the SEO industry has come up with different types of SEO. And, each SEO type is responsible for respective SEO rules.

In this blog post, you will learn about the following SEO types : 

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

Before diving into this, let’s get to know about SEO and its benefits first. 

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization means improving a website to increase its visibility on the search engine when people search for related products or services. SEO is all about the site’s rankings in an organic way. 

According to the survey, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine and 61% of B2B marketers stated that SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than any other marketing initiative.

Implementing an SEO strategy on your website helps you to generate more traffic and also, keeps that website traffic consistent. Also, it helps to improve the user experience.

Benefits of SEO

Search engine optimization drives long-term success. You can improve local marketing efforts and makes your digital marketing strategy stronger using SEO. Also, SEO helps to decrease advertising costs.

Below we have listed the top benefits of SEO : 

• Boosts your credibility
• Generates more leads, sales, and market share
• Targets every stage of the buying funnel
• Increases brand awareness
• Drives high-quality traffic to your website
• Reaches every member of your target audience
• Measures your success with real numbers

Ironpaper is a digital marketing agency that helps its B2B clients grow. They worked with one of their clients, Goddard, to achieve significant success using HubSpot’s SEO tools. Jonathan Franchell, CEO and Founder of Ironpaper company, says Ironpaper began making critical SEO updates with HubSpot tools on Goddard’s site. 

Over an eight-month campaign, Ironpaper helped Goddard gain 2,361 Google positions across various keywords relevant to their offerings. The company also now ranks in the top 100 for 50 strategically targeted terms and can use HubSpot’s insights reports and dashboards to monitor their progress to ensure that its future marketing efforts are hyper-targeted for the audience they’ve worked hard to develop.

SEO strategies followed by Ironpaper are: Developed pillar pages around highly relevant terms with good search volume, Redesigned homepage menu for a better user experience, Drove Goddard’s content strategy through keyword-focused blogs and web pages, Executed internal linking and optimization strategy, and fix technical SEO issues such as broken links, missing meta tags, and more. 

Types of SEO : 

Here are the most common types of SEO techniques:

On-page SEO

On-page SEO, also known as on-site SEO,  is vital to search engine optimization (SEO). You can optimize the elements on web pages using on-page SEO. 

On-page SEO helps search engines to understand each piece of content on your website. Then, search engines decide if your page is relevant to the search result or not. 

The advantages of On-page SEO are : 

• Rank higher in the SERPs
• Boost organic traffic
• Increases conversion rate
• Enhanced click-through rate
• Faster website speed

Do you know, The first 5 organic results in the SERPs account for 67.6% of all clicks

Tips on SEO best practices for on-page optimization are : 

• Title Tags : Follow this format for title tag “Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name”. Always make sure to avoid duplicate title tags. Keep title tags at 55 characters or less in length, including spaces.
• Meta Descriptions : Do not use quotes or any non-alpha characters. Keep meta descriptions limited from 150 to 160 characters. Always make sure to avoid duplication
• Targeted Keyword Phrases : Your website content should be extremely relevant for that keyword phrase. Don’t try to abuse it, add keywords where required. 
• Header Tags : Use your keyword phrase once in your H1 tag where you want to drive unique traffic. You can add keyword phrases in your H2 tag as well. Don’t try to abuse it, add keywords where required. 
• Internal Page Linking : While linking to another page on the same site, always select good anchor text (keywords) to use in the actual link and do this often.
• Image ALT Tags : Name all of your website images that describe them best. Do not use non-alpha characters. Make sure to use dashes between the words, rather than underscores. 
• Content : Paragraphs should be roughly three sentences long. Use bullet points and bolding to break up large blocks of content but don’t overuse it. 

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO, also known as off-site SEO, in this types of SEO refers to actions taken outside the website. It helps to improve your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). It doesn’t involve updating or publishing content to your website. 

Off-page SEO is one of the essential parts of a successful SEO strategy. It involves Backlinks – attracting links from other websites and shares on social media.

The advantages of Off-page SEO are : 

• Higher search engine rankings
• Improves keyword ranking
• Multiple domain referrals
• Enhanced website exposure
• Improves online branding

According to the survey, Top-ranking pages tend to get new ‘do follow’ backlinks at a pace of +5%-14.5% per month. All things equal, more backlinks to a page results in higher search rankings and more organic traffic. 

Tips on SEO best practices for off-page optimization are : 

• Link Building : Build and chase quality links. Website visitors give natural links themselves. In addition to this, you can gain direct link-building efforts by asking customers.
• Social Media : Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram are the buzzwords of the day. Here, shares and likes are social media magic tricks. Don’t forget, Brand mentions are a precious asset to your business. 
• Guest Posting : To advertise your business or product, guest posting is one of the best options. While writing the guest post, always be fair, and make it full of actionable, fresh, and relevant information.  
• Forums : Forums are a great place to promote your website. It’s good to mention your brand, but avoid doing it bluntly. Always make it relevant and transparent.
• Podcasts : Podcasts are insanely popular right now. It is a great way to gain a competitive advantage. You can reach new audiences, share your expertise, and gain visibility on search engines
• Reviews : Reviews are underrated off-page SEO. Great reviews help to increase conversions and trust on your website. Always add a reviews section to your website. 
• Content Syndication : Get your content published by a third-party website. It helps to amplify your content. You can increase your reach and readership with this. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the tactics involved in creating and optimizing a website. It helps search engine spiders to crawl and index your site more effectively. 

Technical SEO doesn’t include analytics, keyword research, backlink profile development, or social media strategies. A search engine does three things: it crawls pages, indexes them, and ranks them. Good technical SEO ensures that all three steps are done accurately. 

The advantages of Technical SEO are : 

• Increase reach across all channels
• Increase search engine ranking
• Rich snippets in search results
• Identify technical content weaknesses
• Reduce costs of SEO

Do you know, 12.29% of search queries have featured snippets in their search results? The top three Google search results get 54.4% of all clicks and Google accounts for around 83% of the global search market.

Tips on SEO best practices for Technical SEO optimization are : 

• SSL : SSL creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. It helps to ensure your site is secured.
• Mobile-friendly : Responsive website can be navigated and read easily on any device. Google considers a responsive site a significant ranking signal by its algorithms. Your website should display in the best format possible for mobile, tablet or desktop users
• Speed Optimization : Search engines prefer sites that load quickly. Keep your website speed optimized. Page speed is considered an important ranking signal.
• XML Sitemap : XML sitemap file helps search engines to understand your website is crawling. It contains useful information about each page. 
• Enable AMP : AMP is a web component framework to easily create user-first experiences for the web. AMP versions of pages are far more likely to be read and shared by your users.
• Structured Data Markup : It is a machine-readable representation of your product data directly on your site. Structured Data markup helps search engines to understand the content on your website. 
• Duplicate Content Issues : Content duplication issues manipulate search rankings and stop your website to win more traffic. You can use the canonical link element to let search engines know where the ‘main’ version of your content resides.

Conclusion

Wrapping up, search engine optimization improves your website’s visibility in Google’s search results. It is a major part of Digital Marketing. 

If you have just started the optimization of your website, then you can get away with just doing on-page SEO, but for a while. To boost your search rankings, you need to implement Off-page SEO and Technical SEO techniques as well.

Ready to optimize your website using these techniques and types of SEO to produce the results you want and conquer the SERPs? 

Feel free to comment below if the above-mentioned techniques improve your site’s visibility in search engines.