What Is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing a website’s webpages to appear higher in search results for a given search query.

How does Google rank webpages?

When you read a textbook with factual information in it, it will have citations that refer to studies and other forms of “proof” that give credibility to the information you are reading about. This same concept applies to websites. You can think of “backlinks,” which are links from one site on the internet to another, as the “citations.” When a website with high domain authority links to another site, it passes some of that domain authority (via “linkjuice” – ugh I hate that term) on to the site that it is linking to. For example – if Wikipedia links to my website, it will pass a high level of domain authority to my site. When Google crawls Wikipedia and comes across the link from Wikipedia to my website, it will follow the link and say, “hey, Wikipedia linked to this site? Nice. This site must be legit if Wikipedia references it!” And thus, my site will then rank higher in search results than my competitor who doesnt have a backlink from Wikipedia. This is a very simple example but hopefully it gets the idea across.

What is White Hat/Black Hat SEO?

To understand the difference between these two areas of SEO, you need to understand how Google ranks webpages. This is important – BLACK HAT SEO will ruin your websites reputation and likely get your site dropped from Google and other search engines. This is where a lot of businesses get conned by bad SEO agencies (more on that below). White Hat SEO refers to the use of SEO methods and practices that lead to long term, legitimate organic growth and rankings. If you are a business looking to hire an SEO expert or agency, you need White Hat SEO.

Surely you’ve gotten an email promising top rankings on Google for little money. Getting your website to show up at the top of Google is actually not a hard task if you employ black hat techniques. With black hat SEO, you can artificially increase the “authority” of a website in the eyes of Google.  The problem is that this kind of SEO is detectable by search engines. Google and other search engines go to great lengths to detect websites that use black hat techniques as they are often full of misinformation.

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is an aspect of SEO that involves optimizing the technical elements of a website for search engine spiders to better crawl and index your website.

How To Do SEO?

There are unlimited resources on the internet that describe how to do SEO. These resources give you the basics but don’t come close to providing the level of knowledge and expertise that a professional SEO does. The “it depends” phenomenon applies here – there almost always a “best practice” solution, but it doesn’t mean it is the correct solution for that particular application. Knowing when and how to apply these SEO principals can only be learned through years of experience. 

Web 2.0 – What is it, or what are they?

Web 2.0s are sites that allow users to publish content (e.g., Tumblr, Weebly, WordPress.com, etc). People use these sites to post articles before linking back to their main websites.

DA, PA, TF, CF, Etc – What are these?

These “third party metrics”  are a way of measuring a domain’s or a webpages “value”.

You can learn more about these metrics here:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority
https://majestic.com/support/glossary

Are Meta Tags Still Used?

Absolutely. The meta description, no-follow, and no-index tags are still used, among many others. The “keywords” meta tag, however, is largely ignored by search engines these days.

For more information on meta tags – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

What Is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing the elements of your website as well as its content. At its most basic level, this includes targeting a keyword, adding outbound links, using H tags, creating an internal link structure, etc.

What Is Local SEO?

This is a sub-category of SEO that pertains to brick-and-mortar storefronts and businesses, and not so much online or ecommerce businesses. The most notable difference between SEO and local SEO is the use of local citations, ie. name, address, and phone number listings. Defining these citations properly using micro data help local business rank higher in the search results locally.

When Should I Start Doing SEO?

Yesterday.