Introduction to SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a practice of improving a website, its visibility and search.
SEO fits into a large digital marketing strategy and it's most focused on obtaining free or organic traffic.

The most popular areas where SEO plays an important role are the following:

• Search engine marketing: bidding for paid advertisements and search engines 
• Social media marketing: encompasses both free/paid social ads and engagement practices 
• Content marketing: focuses on writing content for blogs, newsletters etc. 
• Public relations: focuses on acquiring new relationships and news related content

There are 2 types of SEO techniques that are used when trying to improve a website’s search engine ranking: black hat SEO and white hat SEO.

Black hat SEO: refers to techniques and strategies used to get higher search rankings in a short period of time, and breaking search engine rules. It focuses on only search engines and not so much a human audience. Black hat SEO is typically used by those who are looking for a quick return on their site, rather than a long-term investment on their site. Some techniques used in black hat SEO include: keyword stuffing, link farming, hidden texts and links, and blog content spamming. The problem with black hat SEO is that it can result in your site being banned from a search engine and de-indexed as a penalisation for using unethical techniques.

White hat SEO: refers to the use of techniques and strategies that target a human audience opposed to a search engine. Techniques that are typically used in white hat SEO include: using keywords, and keyword analysis, doing research, rewriting meta tags in order for them to be more relevant, backlinking, link building as well as writing content for human readers. Those who use white hat SEO expect to make a long-term investment on their website, as the results last a long time.

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine you get a list of web results that contain that query term.
The list consists of 10 organic results that are displayed in the middle plus adds along the top and the side of the search results. These are what search engine marketers focus on.

Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query.

Your goal is to get your website to show as high as possible for relevant keywords within organic results. It is important to know how results and visits to a website are dramatically affected by the position of the result. Studies have shown that about 70% of all traffic to a website is visits from the first page of results. Users are more likely to simply refine their search query rather than continue on to the second page of search results.