A recent study has shown that, on all the data present on the internet since its creation, 90% have been created in the last two years! Faced with this striking observation, one can imagine the difficulty that new players face in making a place on the net.

To stand out in this plethora of content, all techniques have been exploited to their maximum. Thus, positioning on short keywords and backlinking, which had worked well for a time, are now ineffective. Search engines have put up penalties against excessive backlinking and competition is such on the basic keywords that they are no longer of any effectiveness.

With that in mind, you should properly educate yourself on SEO, it’s importance and how to do it.

Definition

The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is optimizing a web project and its environment in order to appear in search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo…). More commonly known as natural referencing, its aim is to increase the quality, understanding, but above all the visibility of a website within the results of search engines.

In general, the SEO is only the sum of optimizations on the site (on-site) and off-site. Second, only the engines decide whether we are eligible to be properly visible or not within their results. Of course, there are SEO optimization to do such as audits, tracking, planning, etc.

SEO is therefore a science in the sense that its use only induces the engines (or rather their algorithms) to position us, index and/or evaluate properly.

Importance

Generally, a SEO strategy works on natural traffic, i.e. traffic from natural and unselected search engine results.

Generally, it is the first three places of these natural results that take most of the traffic. Some studies even report nearly 90% of traffic generated on the first page, of which more than 60% exclusively on the first three results. Simply put, if you’re at the bottom of the first page or a few pages later one of your activity’s queries, you only get a tiny portion of natural traffic. That’s why SEO is important.

Natural referencing SEO allows you to properly position your pages on several keywords or key phrases that carry targeted traffic, that is, in relation to your activity and what you offer. Users can access your site through targeted queries that direct them to the content they want. This then increases (by their satisfaction) your visits, sales, etc.

Moreover, you should note that today ranking rules are not the only important criterion to observe in SEO. In fact, an SEO strategy improves a site’s environment, which means that your popularity component will also be optimized. You will benefit from direct traffic from search engines, but also indirect traffic from networks/social media or links that point to your site (backlinks).

Risk

In the early 2000s, SEO was much simpler than it is today. All we had to do was have a good domain name, content full of keywords, links (among others) and we got mass visits no matter what we did. This was a relatively permissive time as there were few checks or penalties from search engines.

However, today, the web has evolved well. With the arrival of filters and penalties punishing bad practices (Google Panda, Google Penguin or other), optimizing a website and its environment has become much more difficult and time consuming. In fact, many companies have been penalized by search engines because of the use of techniques that do not comply with the rules of the engines.

Thus, SEO has now become much more framed to avoid SPAM, poor quality content, theft, etc. Prioritizing long-term strategies is therefore a must-have in order to be able to do a professional job without any pitfalls.

In other words, the SEO now requires much more effort, time and willpower, but it is only risky if one wants to take risks with techniques at the limit (or more) of the rules of the engines. In any event, a few SEO issues remain unresolved and that only experience can help.

How it works?

As we have seen before, natural referencing is based on a principle of optimization. However, there are many rules to follow and we must therefore avoid getting into exaggerated over-optimizations or risky practices causing sanctions, misunderstandings or more.

To avoid bad choices and accidents, the best way is to prepare while doing regular follow-up. This requires a complete overview of the website and then a flexible strategy according to the objectives, budgets and means of the company.

Most of the referencing agency work on SEO points/criteria organized around three main axes:

• The Technique
• Content
• Popularity

These optimizations allow you to start on a good working basis to be able to present the added value of a site. In other words, you’re preparing the ground.

The second axis is Content. This can be text, images, video, product page, etc. The goal here is to create added value. By analogy, each content could be compared with a product from a street store. This part is therefore essential to be able to improve its visibility in the long term (no products/choices – no store).

Finally, Popularity is based outside the site. It allows you to show/highlight added value as well as expertise. All this in order to acquire and retain the maximum user on the project. This axis is very important because it allows you not to drown in the mass.

In summary, the referencing SEO is relatively simple… We look at the resources available, we study the site and identify its problems, we create a strategy, we carefully and strategically correct the criteria having the impact, and then we question ourselves before continuing the cycle.

Black hat and the white hat SEO

There are two different approaches that referencing agency use to optimize their websites for search engines when it comes to referencing SEO which is the black hat and white SEO hat.

What SEO black hat implies is that most organizations don’t care about human visitors looking for content on their website, these organizations don’t follow the rules that involve ways to improve their website rankings because they want to make money quickly. In short, this Black hat SEO approach creates pages that are hard to read and often look a lot like spam. Overall, note that this type of approach to SEO’s rapid enrichment can ruin a business chance to create a sustainable website.

The use of effective tactics that can boost the website on search engines and help build a sustainable online business is known as the white hat SEO. The white hat SEO approach focus primarily on the human audience that clicks and read the content of the site. The main objective of this type of SEO is to create high quality content on a website and by following the rules of search engine optimization.

Note; Aside from the fact that Black Hat SEO tactics can help increase your ranking on search engines, the downside is that your site could be blocked by Google and it mainly depends on the level of violation your site has committed. If you surely want to build a sustainable online commercial presence that will generate real and organic traffic over time, the best advice is to go for white hat SEO tactics because it is very convenient and also it can help create effective content that your visitors value and would like to stick to your website for authentic content.