Top 15 Types of SEO: White-Hat, Technical, Mobile, & More

According to a recent study, SEO drives 1000% more traffic than organic social media. It highlights the increasing importance of SEO for businesses who wish to enhance their brand awareness. But what is SEO? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique that enhances the visibility of a site using specific keywords and phrases. 

Businesses utilize different SEO types to optimize their website for better search engine rankings. This blog explores the different types of SEO and how they help in website optimization.

Types Of SEO

The following are the top 15 types of SEO. To comprehensively learn about SEO and its important tools, you can opt for an online digital marketing course.

1. White-Hat SEO

White-Hat SEO are SEO practices that are in line with the major search engines and improve the search engine results page (SERP) ranking. It regulates the website’s integrity with the search engine’s terms of service. It also makes the websites more user-friendly. Below are a few properties that white-hat SEO works on:

• The keywords and meta descriptions should be used strictly. 
• The quality of content should be top-notch.
• It makes the website easier to navigate.

The following are the benefits of white-hat SEO:

• It leads to long-term results and is, therefore, sustainable. 
• It provides a positive user experience.
• It improves the website rankings without getting penalized by Google. 
• It helps increase the website’s traffic and enhance the brand’s credibility.

2. Black-Hat SEO

Black-Hat SEO is just the opposite of White-Hat SEO. It exploits weaknesses in the Google Search algorithm. Methods like keyword stuffing, spamming, paid link strategies, and cloaking are used to rank the website higher and get ahead in search engine results. 

This method can provide instant results but is not great in the long run. It impacts the website negatively if, by any chance, it gets detected by Google. There are plenty of risks that arise because of black hat SEO. 

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3. Gray-Hat SEO

Gray-hat SEO falls in between white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO. It is slightly riskier than white-hat SEO but less harmful than black-hat SEO. It manipulates the search engines to get a higher ranking, leading to negative consequences. The content published under gray-hat SEO is ill-defined but the awareness of the consequences motivates you to adopt fair practices. 

Commonly used gray-hat SEO techniques include the following:

• Creating content that is low in quality.
• Buying expired domains to save money.
• Redirecting other domains to your site.

4. On-Page SEO

The process of optimizing on-page elements, like title tags, internal links, and HTML code, to improve rankings is known as on-page SEO. Below are a few functions of On-page search engine optimization:

• It is informative and relevant for the website.
• It utilizes HTML tags to emphasize the important sections.
• It reduces the size of the photos.
• It helps check and duplicate the content. 
• It helps structure the URL for numerous pages and ensures clarity.

Some essential components of on-page SEO or on-site SEO are:

• Quality Content: High-quality content made according to the needs of your target audience is an essential SEO practice. It includes integrating relevant keywords and backlinks to enhance the search engine results page ranking. 
• Keyword Research: Before adding any keywords, thorough research is required to identify which keywords the target audience is searching for. They are incorporated into the content organically to enhance the relevance of your website. 
• Metadata Optimization: Metadata SEO includes HTML elements like header tags, title tags, and meta descriptions. They increase the visibility of your website by describing what the web page is about to the search engines and the users. 
• Internal Linking: Linking the content in the website with relevant internal pages is necessary to build an easy-to-understand website structure for search engines. It also makes the user experience seamless. 
• Image Optimization: This includes adding descriptive file names, captions, and alt tags, to improve the website’s visibility and users’ experience.

5. Off-Page SEO

There are various types of SEO in digital marketing; one of them is off-page SEO. Off-page SEO consists of everything that happens outside the web page to rank it higher in the search results. It includes social media advertising, building good client relations for reviews and forums, and generating links from credible websites.

The different off-page SEO components include:

• Competitor Research: It involves analyzing competitor’s content, keywords, backlinks, and more to get insights and optimize one’s strategy. 
• Guest Blogging: It is writing a blog for another website and adding a backlink to your website in it. Guest blogging is a great way to strengthen your website’s authority. 
• Press Distribution: There are two ways to attract media attention and increase brand recognition. You can either share press releases with media outlets or respond to journalists’ queries on Help a Reporter Out, an online platform where journalists look for information or feedback from the public. You can get relevant backlinks through both of these sources. 
• Brand Signals: Social media engagement, online reviews, and online directory listings are brand signals or indicators of the online presence of a brand. They help establish the credibility of your brand’s website.

Know the difference between on page and off page SEO to understand them better.

6. Technical SEO

Technical SEO assists Google bots in interpreting, accessing, crawling, and indexing the website’s pages. It is known as technical SEO because it has nothing to do with the content directly. Its primary function is to optimize the infrastructure of the website. Various SEO tools are used for tech audit followed by working on the improvement practices on XML sitemap, website speed, and mobile friendliness.

Let us understand these technical SEO practices in detail here: 

• XML Sitemap Optimization: This means improving the organization of the site structure for better content comprehension by users and search engines. 
• Website Speed: It involves optimizing the site load time to increase the speed and performance of the website. 
• Mobile Friendliness: Technical SEO also involves designing the website in a way that is easily viewed on mobile devices. A website navigable and responsive to different screen sizes enhances the user experience. 
• Removing Duplicate Content: Duplicate content can negatively impact your website rankings as it interrupts a smooth user experience. Removing this duplicate content is, therefore, essential among the many SEO practices. 
• Crawl Error Identification: This involves identifying and resolving errors like missing pages or broken links that prevent search engines from crawling on the website’s content.

7. International SEO

International SEO brings natural traffic to the website from different languages and areas. The target market’s cultural context is set accurately. It also allows users to make transactions in their currency and languages. The overall structure of international SEO increases reliability and is best known for creating a good online presence for targeted audiences. It is mostly beneficial for multinational corporations, travel and tourism businesses, e-commerce companies, and content creators.

Popular international SEO strategies include:

• Website translation to ensure the users get to engage with the content in their language. 
• Ensure crawling and indexing in different languages and regions.
• Link building from credible sources across the globe.
• Content localization to ensure content is relevant to the user accessing it. 
• Keyword research for an international audience. 

8. Local SEO

It is useful for local businesses as it helps increase their website’s visibility and create awareness. It also helps businesses reach their local audiences and rank themselves higher in the search results. 

Local SEO includes the following practices: 

• Creating a Google Business Profile.
• Optimizing the website’s content to target local searches.
• Managing and maintaining online citations.
• Utilizing local connections to establish partnerships and build backlinks.
• Researching and incorporating local keywords.

9. E-commerce SEO

E-commerce SEO helps online stores rank higher in the search results whenever a user searches for a relevant product or service. It is the best method for a paid SEO, as the costs are much less compared to the profit the stores receive. 

Some common e-commerce SEO techniques include:

• Keyword research to optimize the category and product pages. 
• Optimize the home page to ensure it is appealing as well as navigable across diverse categories of people. 
• Start a blog to promote products by providing necessary information and solutions to common problems associated with the products. 
• Optimize visual elements, such as videos and images on your e-commerce website for better user experience.

10. Content SEO

It is the most important type of all. The creation of unique content involving writing, graphics, and videos helps the website maintain its structure and stay on top of the search results. Three things are crucial while working with content SEO: copywriting, site structure, and keyword strategy. 

Some content SEO practices you can employ for better rankings are:

• Ensure you balance the basic research, content quality, and technical SEO.
• Proofread content before publishing.
• Regularly track and analyze your content’s performance.
• Make necessary changes and optimize content according to the latest guidelines and trends.
• Employ the best strategies to increase the traffic to your website. 

11. Mobile SEO

It includes the optimization of the site while ensuring that it can simultaneously work on devices other than the laptop, i.e., mobile and tablets. The style of the site, page speed, and structure are the main factors that should be addressed in Mobile SEO. It is important because if a user has a bad experience with a website on their mobile phone, there is a possibility that they might never visit the site again.

Here are some things you should ensure while working on mobile SEO:

• Format both the website and the content for easy viewing on mobile devices. 
• Add attractive but easy-to-use features to your website optimized for mobile phones.
• Optimize the speed of the main website as well as interlinked web pages for a better navigation experience. 
• Ensure the user experience is not disrupted by unnecessary pop-ups or other aggressive advertising methods.

Also Read: Types of Digital Marketing

12. Negative SEO

It is an unethical SEO practice, extensively used to lower the rank of competitors. No one wants their competitors to win, no matter how open and free-minded they are. Hence, this technique is used to overtake and gain an advantage over other competitor websites. 

Negative SEO can be practiced by spreading negative reviews or words about the competitor’s website. It can also happen by breaking into their website and adding large amounts of low-quality links. It is not advisable to follow negative SEO as it can lead to various legal issues. 

The following practices are used to implement negative SEO:

• Hacking and Malware: A hacking attack is used to damage the website’s ranking by replacing links, injecting low-quality or duplicate content, and editing the robots.txt file to hamper the crawling. 
• Fake Reviews: Some businesses put up fake negative reviews to manipulate the local engine rankings and malign the reputation of their competitors.
• Link Farms: A link farm is a group of interconnected websites linked to each other to increase the popularity of each site’s pages. Anyone can purchase links from these websites to increase their site’s page rank. 
• Heavy Crawling: It is a technique with which server load is increased by forcefully crawling the website. It either slows down or crashes the website. 
• Scrapers: It involves falsifying duplicate content by scraping your website’s content and copying it to other websites. 

13. YouTube SEO

This SEO type enables YouTube to boost its exposure and ranking on the platform’s search results pages by increasing the YouTube channel’s views, engagement, and subscribers. This search engine optimization technique increases the accessibility and discoverability of videos, through the video title, description, tags, video length, view duration, engagement (likes, comments, shares), etc.

Some of the popular YouTube SEO practices are:

• Writing SEO-friendly Video Descriptions: The description with brief information about what the video contains, time stamps, and links to related content helps in improving the visibility of the video. 
• Creating Attractive Thumbnails: Creative and appealing thumbnails help attract more traffic. 
• Optimizing YouTube Channels: The channels that are more organized and easy to navigate ensure users stay on the channel longer. 
• Enhancing Metadata of the Video: Relevant titles, meta tags, hashtags, alt text, and more help in boosting the visibility of the video.

14. Voice Search SEO

Voice search SEO allows users to access the internet using spoken commands rather than prompts. Voice assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant engage natural language processing (NLP) to understand the intent of the user’s inquiry and provide the best relevant response. 

It is essential to focus on long-tail keywords, question-based searches, and conversational content that mirrors how people talk to optimize content for voice search. Furthermore, as many voice searches are based on location, optimizing for local SEO is critical for voice searches.

Here are some tips to optimize content for voice search SEO:

• Research voice search keywords related to your topic.
• Embed keywords in your content as answers to the commonly asked questions.
• Keep your answers to 30 words or less.
• In your long-form content, include as many answers as you can organically. 
• Optimize featured snippets for your content to rank better in voice searches.
• Use structured markup in your content.
• Improve your domain authority. 
• Rank videos in search results as videos feature commonly in voice search queries. 

15. App Store Optimization SEO

This is the process of optimizing mobile apps to rank higher in app store search results. The aim is to increase the app’s exposure and downloads. 

It includes analyzing user behavior and making data-driven decisions to improve the app’s performance through app titles, app descriptions, app icons, screenshots, ratings, reviews, and user engagement. 

Some best practices employed for app store optimization are as follows: 

• Make descriptive and appealing app titles and icons.
• Add keywords your target audience is likely to search for in the description of your application. 
• Include keywords in meta tags as well.
• Build more links to your app for it to rank better in app store rank results.

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Conclusion

The process of optimizing online content is known as search engine optimization. It helps increase the traffic of a website. We have covered various types of SEO used for different purposes to improve the appearance of web pages. These range from content SEO to technical SEO and cover a vast scope of optimization one can employ for their website. Businesses benefit greatly as they get a higher return on investment, enhancing their online presence and solidifying their brand reputation. 
Which one of these strategies do you think is the most effective? Share your opinion with us in the comments section below. Also, refer to these top SEO interview questions to further brush up on your SEO-related knowledge.

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