Let us start from simple terms without any tangling.
Search engine optimization, abbreviated as SEO, is defined as the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of traffic to your website via search engine results.
Diving deep
What SEO means? According to the above statement, three parts – quality of traffic, quantity of traffic, and search engines results – form the term SEO.
SEO helps in attracting the customers from all around the world. Attracting visitors who are genuinely interested in your products and services is your goal and SEO focuses into this to deliver quality traffic on to your website.
When the right people are there on your website, then having more traffic is a plus from those search engines result pages, hereafter SERPs.
A significant portion of SERPs is advertising or ads. Organic results means organic traffic, i.e. your site has traffic without paying for it. It is the unpaid traffic coming from SERPs.
Timeline of SEO
In the mid-1990s, content providers and webmasters began optimizing for search engines. Initially, all the webmasters were required to submit the page address only or URL. This was submitted to the various engines which would then send a spider to crawl over the page and extract the links. Then the information was returned on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider crawling to download a page and storing in its own server. Indexer – another program – then extracts the information like the word it contains, weightage for specific words, and their location. All of this information for crawling at a later stage or date is placed into a scheduler.
In 1997, the industry analyst, Danny Sullivan, gave the term SEO and credits Bruce Clay for popularizing it. By then, webmasters recognized the value of visibility and high ranking in search engine results.
Early versions of search engines were ALIWEB, Altavista, and Infoseek. The first engine relied on the information provided by the webmaster; and because of this feature many web content providers used to manipulate the information to rank high, which resulted in inaccurate, inconsistent, and incomplete data. While in case of the other two search engines, webmasters found it difficult to manipulate because the algorithms in them were adjusted so.
To rate the prominence of web pages, in 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed a search engine Backrub – based on the mathematical algorithm PageRank. They both founded Google in 1998. It attracted a loyal following and a growing number of internet users because of its simple design. To avoid the manipulation, both the on-page and off-page factors were considered in Google search engine.
By 2004, a wide range of undisclosed factors were incorporated in the algorithms of the search engines in order to avoid the manipulation.
From then till now — Google Caffeine, Google Instant, Google’s Panda update, Google penguin, and Google Hummingbird – Google has offered no manipulation, no duplicate content, penalizing websites for not having unique content, and Conversational Search, where every word in the query is payed attention to in order to generate better results for its user.
Black vs. white hat strategies
You must want to deliver the best content possible and make it accessible along with playing round the rules of search engines.
Then just have a look to the below comparison we have created among these strategies.
| Black hat strategy | White hat strategy |
| Duplicate content | Unique and quality content |
| Redirects the user to another page | Standards compliant HTML |
| Links from pages having irrelevant content | Relevant and unique page titles |
| Stuffed keywords, hidden text, and blog spamming | Involves keyword analysis, rewriting tags, and doing research |
| Do not target human audience and focus on search engines only | Focuses on the use of search engines targeting the audience |
Know more
SEO is changing now and then and the rules are ill-defines often.
To sneak in, gray hat SEO is in now – as the name implies, a little white and a little black. Hence, gray hat SEO is not as innocent as white hat and not as manipulative as black. Rather you are on a way to get a distinctive advantage.
It is all about the tactics scalable tactics.
The chances of the user to link to your website or page are from slim to none. But the chances are to be made and many times this is the only way to get through.
Higher domain authority, more links to your page, and better on-page markup are the three important factors of SEO Lugano.
What else?
Personal factors like the country you are in affect a lot and form an important part of off-page SEO. All searches one makes are relevant to their country. It is worth to go multilingual. This will increase your website’s traffic and ranking by exposing your information to more people.
Multilingual content is one of the easiest quick wins. So it would be a pull to your website’s SEO.
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