Before diving into the field of SEO, you should be aware of White Hat and Black Hat SEO. Here is how these may be described…

Black vs White Hat SEO

If you want to work SEO like a get-rich-quick scheme, you’ll probably end up doing what’s called black hat SEO. This type of SEO focuses on optimizing your content only for the search engine, not considering humans at all.

Since there are lots of ways to bend and break the rules to get your sites to rank high, these are a welcome way for black hat SEOs to make a few thousand dollars fast.

Ultimately this approach results in spammy, junky pages, which often get banned very fast, often leading to severe punishment for the marketer, ruining their chance of building something sustainable in the future. You might make some quick cash this way, but will continuously have to be on the lookout for search engine updates and come up with new ways to dodge the rules.

White hat SEO, on the other hand, is the way to build a sustainable online business. If you do SEO this way, you’ll focus on your human audience, trying to give them the best content possible and making it easily accessible to them, by playing according to the search engine’s rules. Needless to say, you should always go for white hat SEO.

Before moving on further, below are the major divisions of SEO:

• Keyword Research
• On Page SEO
• Off Page SEO  

1 Keyword Research

Almost all of the beginner’s guides to SEO on the internet are ignoring this factor. But it is the most important one. SEO is a game of Keywords.

You must be aware of the keywords related to your topic or niche if you want to be successful in SEO. Different keywords have different value depending on their search volume and some other factors.

Different keywords have different value depending on their search volume and some other factors. Keyword Research is all about finding the intentions of the users to use search engines. What exactly the users are searching for your topic, are your keywords.

Using the right keywords while doing SEO of your website, is the career deciding thing for your site. It gives you an opportunity to know your targeted audience in a better way. It will increase your site’s relevancy to your topic, and that is a great thing for SEO and search engines.

You need to do proper research to find valuable keywords related to your topic before starting your website. Even if you already have a website and content on it, you can optimize it by using correct keywords.

2 On Page SEO

On Page means everything displayed on the web page and its back end programming. In On Page SEO, you need to optimize your website’s page and posts, etc. for search engines.

In Short “Optimizing Content for Search Engine!”

It covers a lot of things, so let’s break this into larger branches.

1. Content

Content is the biggest division of On Page SEO. You might have heard that famous quote about content that: “Content is the King,” an there is no place for doubt about that.

Content is the King

Google’s first priority is to provide its users with top quality content, and with best relevant information available on the web. These days Google also loves the right length of content. So, try to write long content that’s informative.

Content on your website isn’t only about the written article. It also includes videos, pictures, animated slides, and infographics, etc.

Pay more attention to these items for better content:

• Titles – Create eye-catching titles that raise the reader’s interest. You only have one chance to make a great first impression.
• Keywords – Pick keywords that will help bring people to your site and are relevant.
• Links – Link to quality sites that compliment what your website is about. It’ll encourage sites in your niche to link to you as well.
• Quality – Try to publish unique and quality content. This prompts users to come to your site because they cannot easily find the content elsewhere.
• Freshness – If you are publishing content that does not age or becomes outdated, that’s great, but you also need to add new content on a regular basis. If you don’t have the time to add content to your website, consider adding a question and answer section or a blog to your site.

While writing your content, don’t ever forget to embed your keyword research in the best possible and natural looking way.

2. Website Layout

After optimizing your content, Website Layout is the next thing you need to take care of while doing On Page SEO. An example of the worst website layout is when someone has totally irrelevant categories as compared to their topic.

Just imagine visiting a website with a bad layout, there’s more than 80% chance that you won’t like to visit that site again. So, why would anyone else?

Why not make it user-friendly? And sure, Google loves that as well.

3. Website Speed

Yes! Website Loading Speed matters a lot! When a user searches for something and your website appears on search engine result page (SERP), and that user opens your site, they expect fast response. Dwell time is the duration for how long that user stays on your site after clicking on it. And that Dwell time is indeed an important search engine ranking factor.

In short, a user needs good speed, and Google also has an update for website speed. So, try to improve your site to increase its Dwell time and hence improving its ranking in SERPs.

4. Website Design

Website design is another critical thing to have good user experience… Your theme needs to be Responsive and should have an Eye Catching Design.

There are lots of sites which have excellent content but actually a bad design. Just ask yourself, how long would you keep visiting these type of sites, which are even worse when you are using your Smartphone. You’ll surely get tired and at the end, will stop visiting that site. Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Hence, always use Responsive and Eye Catching Design.

2 Off Page SEO

Just like you have done your On-Page SEO, you also need to do Off-Page SEO to make your domain an authority in the eyes of search engines. In other words, we need to make our website trustworthy for search engines. And it will happen when other famous sites tell the search engine that our site has the best content about our topic. Now, how would that happen?

You need to get your website referred from other famous resources on the web also in your niche. In technical terms, it is called link building.

Naturally, it’s an automatic thing. We will post very high-quality content on our website and share it with topically interested people and internet marketing resources. Eventually, whoever would like our resource will link to it.

The best link building strategy is to create something awesome and let everyone know about it. But Remember: In today’s competitive environment, we need to learn about proper link building strategies. Then plan and execute pre-defined and practical ways adopted by some quality sites. And your hard work in that activity will surely pay you with better ranking in SERPs. 
 
Just so you’ll know, here are the things which should be done:

• Use social network to promote your content
• Do some blogging and guest posting
• Refer your suggested solutions in discussion forums
• Photo and video sharing
• Relevant business and local listing

Conclusion: While doing all these things, keep on learning and improving. Exploring each subheading, you will find some new website’s authority and ranking parameters defined by SEO experts.

Like domain authority, page authority, trust flow, citation flow, do-follow backlinks, and spam score, etc. These parameters are actually useful and do change your ranking with increase or decrease in their values.