Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process to get your website to show up as a top result in the search results for the right term. It is a pretty complicated method that search engines use, but includes factors that include what is on your site, and factors such as what other sites link to yours. This is like a website recommedning your website. If your site is recommended by a lot of good sites, Google might trust yours a bit mroe.
SEO consists of three main things. Technical SEO, On-Site or On-Page SEO, and Off-Site or Off-Page SEO.
- Technical SEO
- On-Site SEO
- Off-Site SEO
Technical SEO
Technical SEO, as the name suggests, is anything related to the technical aspects of the site. This includes anything such as creating your pages and url structures in a way that Google can crawl and making sure the site speed it fast enough.
On-Site SEO
On-Site SEO is anything you do with your actual content. In a nutshell, you have to set it up so that when Google crawls your site, it knows what it is about. This includes obvious stuff like putting in the actual keyword into your site. For instance if you think your customers would search for “Dog Grooming”, you wouldn’t want your site to only talk about grooming and expect to show up in the search results.
Off-Site SEO
Off-Site SEO is everything else you do to try to help your site rank such as trying to get other sites to link for yours. This one can be tricky, because certain things if you do wrong, Google will actually penalize you. If you read further into the topic you’ll likely see the terms “white hat” and “black hat”. White hat being anything done right up to standards, like reaching out to another site about your content and asking them to link to it if they think it is good and can benefit their readers. Black hat would be paying someone to link to your site regardless of if they like your content.
Google wants only content that is truly beneficial to show up, so if it thinks your site is not getting real links to it, you could get in trouble.
In the real world there is a lot of in between, sometimes known as “Gray Hat”.