You can have the best-looking site and regularly post informative and entertaining content while still not attracting visitors to your website. Why is that? Well, the short answer is SEO. If you don’t optimize your content to match what people are searching for, it will remain undiscovered.
There is an easy way to change this and bring your content to the masses. In this post, SEO.com.ph will teach you about search engine optimization and how to create posts and marketing campaigns that reach a wider audience. We will cover the many types of SEO in digital marketing and show you how to create content that ranks on the first page of any search engine.
Technical SEO
Taking care of your site’s technical SEO is like bringing your car to the shop for a regular engine tune-up to ensure everything is running smoothly. Technical SEO focuses on what’s happening on the backend of your website, making it easy to find and navigate.
One aspect of technical SEO is ensuring that search engines can crawl, index, and rank it without issue. What does that mean exactly? Whenever you type something into any search engine and press enter, a search engine bot crawls the Internet, searching for that specific term or something similar. Once it finds what it’s looking for, the search engine stores it and shows it to you and any other person looking for the same thing.
But if your site is in disarray, you won’t rank on the search engine result page SERP and you’ll miss out on those coveted clicks. That is where technical SEO comes in and helps you whip your page back into shape. Good technical SEO can improve the user experience by taking care of several things.
Page Speed
Google’s statistics show that if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, the bounce rate increases by 32%. An experienced SEO technician will perform a detailed site audit, often using PageSpeedInsights, help you remove any broken media files and unnecessary JavaScript, and minify your coding. Every second they shave off, the page load time will turn into more visitors staying on your site for longer.
404 Pages
Nothing is worse than thinking you’ve found a webpage that holds the answers to your question, only to click on the link and be taken to a 404 error page. If the searchers aren’t redirected to what they were looking for, they’ll click off and move on to the next result.
XML Sitemap
An important part of technical SEO is creating a comprehensive XML sitemap of all your important web pages. It means storing all important data in one file, making it easier for search engines like Google to crawl the website and rank you in search results.
Duplicate Content
Another factor that affects your ranking is duplicate content. Having the same posts multiple times takes up a lot of unnecessary space and confuses search engines, leading them to mark your posts as spammy. A thorough technical site audit can remove any duplicate content and refresh your site.
Website Structure
Once again, it comes down to crawlability. If Google can’t figure out how to navigate your site, neither will your potential visitors. According to a recent report, 35.6% of site visits end in frustration and people leaving the page. If your site is easy to navigate, you’ll drastically lower the chances of people leaving disappointed.
On-Page SEO
This type of SEO is the easiest and most effective way to drive organic traffic to your sites. This approach involves SEO optimizing the visible web page elements, from the quality of your posts to the links you put in them. It represents the core of what SEO is, creating helpful content for the reader first and the search engine second. Below, you’ll find the main focus points of on-page SEO.
Keywords
If you’ve gone to the trouble of hosting a website, you’ve already decided what topic to focus on. But before you can start churning out content, you have to do some keyword research. By strategically placing relevant keywords throughout your text, you’ll match the users’ search intent and increase your content’s visibility.
Quality Content
Don’t be under the impression that any type of content can rank high on Google’s first page of results. Gone are the days when you could keyword stuff meaningless content and still appear in search results. It now crawls for rich snippets and SEO entities that match the search context. Google has made several updates focusing on ranking high-quality and helpful content that contains answers and solves problems. So, make sure your content is always fresh, original, and helpful.
Metadata
Another crucial part of any on-page SEO strategy is optimizing the metadata of your page. That means writing meta titles, also known as page titles, and meta descriptions for each piece of content you create. That is the first thing people see when the search results for their query appear on the screen, so they have to contain the keyword or phrase in question.
Internal Linking
One way to keep visitors on your site longer is to include internal links in your posts. These hyperlinks lead to other content on your site that can add value to the original article. You can have one pillar text that links to different articles and smaller posts that link back to this main text.
External Linking
These are links that lead to external sources. Always ensure you’re linking authoritative pages supporting your findings or any statistics you’ve included. That is a great way to build trust and improve your visitor’s on-page experience.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is another one of the main types of SEO in digital marketing. It focuses on everything that happens behind the scenes, from social media marketing to guest collaborations and link building. That is one of many SEO tactics you can use to drive organic traffic to your site, develop a trustworthy reputation, and, of course, jump up a few places in the SERPs.
Backlinking
We learned that you need to link your content to high-authority sites so it can become more trustworthy. Off-page SEO is the same concept in reverse, where high-authority sites link back to your posts, signaling to visitors and search engines that your content has value. However, not all backlinks are made the same. A trick that some shady websites use is to add unrelated links to their content to increase their site authority.
That goes directly against Google’s spam policies and can end up hurting your site and lowering its ranking. You should review your backlinks regularly and disavow any suspicious activity. Here is a quick comparison of reputable links versus low-quality links.
| Factor | Reputable Backlinks | Spammy Backlinks |
| Website Authority | High authority, relevant websites with good domain authority | Low authority, irrelevant websites, or private blog networks (PBNs) |
| Link Relevance | Related to the topics on your site, the context fits with your page content | Unrelated to your website, often generic anchor text or links with unnatural placements |
| Link Placement | Editorial links within high-quality content | Paid links, comment spam, link directories, widget links |
| Penalty Risk | Low risk of penalty | High risk of manual penalty or algorithmic downgrade |
| Disavow Requirement | Not necessary | You might need to disavow them to protect your site’s health |
| Building Method | Earned through quality content, research, outreach, and relationships | Bought, exchanged, or generated through automated tools |
Competitor Links
If you’re unsure of what links to include in your posts, it may be time to do a competitor link analysis. SEO experts like SEO.com.ph can help you identify your biggest competition and analyze their linking strategy. That will show you any common links frequently used by these sites, which you can later incorporate into your content.
Guest Posting
Networking is a proven way to get your name out there in the real world, and it also works the same way online. Try to interact and establish working relationships with other prominent figures in your niche. That way, you can learn from each other, collaborate on mutual content such as guest posts, and take full advantage of the benefits of SEO. This will allow you to include relevant links that lead to other reputable sources and have backlinks that organically bring more eyes to your site.
Social Media
There is more to social media than sharing Facebook posts and watching funny cat videos on YouTube. It’s a powerful digital marketing tool to help you reach a wider audience and drive organic traffic to your site. Ensure that every image, video, or marketing campaign you share on any social media platform is optimized according to the different types of SEO in digital marketing and that it leads back directly to your website.
Types of SEO Techniques
Creating online content may seem straightforward, but it is good to know more about white and black hat SEO techniques. While the term is borrowed from the hacking world, it doesn’t come with high stakes but affects your website and reputation.
White hat SEO means everything you do with your content is above broad and follows SEO best practices. Black hat SEO attempts to artificially cheat the system and achieve a higher ranking. Using such underhanded tactics can get a website penalized or even blocked.
SEO Content
You’ve probably noticed the word content being used frequently throughout this post. But what exactly qualifies as SEO content, and what types of SEO content are there? Simply put, any online content that is optimized around a specific keyword or phrase is considered SEO content. It doesn’t matter if it’s a blog, an image, a video, a graph, or even a marketing campaign. If it ranks on the first page of Google, it’s SEO content.
And why Google specifically? Well, because a staggering 90% of all website traffic originates from Google Search, Google Images, or Google Maps, which gives you a good idea of which content needs to be optimized.
Local SEO
You know how sometimes you’re not in the mood to cook, so you just google “Pizza delivery near me,” and a bunch of red pins appear on the map? Well, that is part of what local SEO is. If you’re a business owner with a physical store, your business must appear in local Internet searches. To achieve this, include your address, phone number, and hours of operation on your official website.
You can also open a free business profile on Google and include the following info:
- Business name
- Exact location
- Work hours
- Contact number
- Social media profiles
- Photos
- Customer reviews
All of the above will help you with local ranking, ensuring your business is amongst the top choices that pop up whenever someone searches for a “business near me.”
Mobile SEO
In the past, we used mobile phones to make calls or send the occasional SMS. Now, they are our connection to the world, our TV, library, and shopping mall all in one. Whenever we have a free moment, we use our phones to watch a video, read a fun article, shop, or even just mindlessly scroll for a bit. That’s why 58.33% of all online traffic comes from smartphones and other mobile devices.
So, if you haven’t optimized your site for mobile viewing yet, you better get on it or miss out on a lot of mobile visitors. That process goes back to technical SEO and ensuring your site is easy to navigate and look at on a smaller screen. People also search differently when on their phones, so doing mobile keyword research will also benefit you in the long run.
E-commerce SEO
Shopping malls step aside, as online shopping is here to take your place. Recent reports show that up to 95% of Gen-Z prefer to shop online. So, if you own an online business, e-commerce SEO is one of the types of SEO in digital marketing that will help your store get on the first page of any search engine.
That means you have to optimize the title and description of all your products. No more long and nonsensical titles like you might find on a certain Chinese wholesale site. You must incorporate relevant keywords in your product names and descriptions to make them easier to find.
Another SEO tactic you can use is to incorporate a blog into your website. Say you sell clothes and apparel. Start creating content that covers the latest trends in fashion or what to expect in the upcoming summer season, where you can link back to your products. The e-commerce space is very saturated and competitive, so you must create high-quality, SEO-optimized content to stand out.
Image SEO
Say you’re running a blog about baking, and you’ve just made the best cherry pie ever. You take a picture, add it to your content, and press post. Suddenly, your blog is receiving an unexpected amount of visitors who are all after your amazing-looking cherry pie. Adding the right image to your blog post or article will make it easier for the reader to visualize the message you’re trying to get across.
Additions like graphs, charts, photos, and other visual aids can spice up your content and, you guessed it, make it rank higher in SERPs. But try to avoid generic royalty-free images – everyone has access to those. If you can, create custom flow charts or take high-resolution images. Also, don’t forget to optimize the image HTML tags to help crawlers understand and index the image.
Types of SEO in Digital Marketing: Final Thoughts
Websites don’t run themselves, and you have to put in time and effort to make them not only successful but also trusted resources for information. Getting ranked on the first page of Google is no easy feat, and your content has to be intentional, informative, and helpful for your intended audience. That’s where SEO comes in. It transforms good content into great content and ensures it’s the first click for anyone who comes across it.
Considering the many different types of SEO in digital marketing, it can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning. Experts like SEO.com.ph are here to make the process easier. So stop hanging around the bottom and let SEO take you to the top of any search results.
FAQs
Gray hat SEO combines the principles of white hat and black hat SEO and uses them at the same time. Someone who uses gray hat SEO methods may create their own high-quality content but decide to buy backlinks or overstuff it with keywords.
Yes, videos can be SEO optimized in the same way that images are. Include relevant keywords and phrases in the video title and description, and they should match the context of the video. Avoid click-bait titles, as those can make viewers click away faster.
