Search Engine Optimisation 101 – a Beginners Guide

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is a field within Digital Marketing and tends to be performed in conjunction with other promotional and marketing activity. There has been some debate on whether SEO is a role or a function – you can be an SEO or do SEO – the subtlety tends to be if you are performing Optimisation, or being an Optimiser.

Search Engine Optimisation tends to focus on search engine results that aren’t advertisements – this is referred to as “Organic Search”, and due to dominance, Google tends to be the biggest consideration in SEO and we will focus on web SEO. There are, however, other search engines for more specialist content, such as Bing, YouTube, Yandex or Amazon that can be relevant in SEO and are recently receiving more focus.

So what do SEO’s do? This depends on the type of SEO being performed. Depending on who you ask, there will typically be two types of answers to the question, “What are the two types of SEO?” – As we will see, both sets of answers are totally different and totally compatible!

Some people will suggest that the two types of SEO are “Black Hat” and “White Hat”. Others will suggest that the two types are “On-Site” and “Off-Site”. The difference in perspective is really whether you are looking at the split in terms of where SEO’s work, or what guidelines they work.

White Hat/Black Hat refers to guidelines. White Hat SEO’s try to obey the rules of the Search Engine they are considering, and also, to act sustainably. Black Hats tend to be a bit more flexible in their outlook, and tend to try to deliver results regardless of method. Black Hat SEO can be very risky as the Search Engines tend not to like being “gamed”, and can issue “Penalties” – effectively demoting a result – if they expect Shenanigans.

On-site and Off-site are locations of SEO activity. Both cover a range of actions. Whilst, in detail, the boundary can get a little fuzzy, On-Site SEO tends to refer to making your own or your clients’ own site more Search Engine friendly, in the hope that this effort is rewarded by better rankings. Off-site SEO refers to work elsewhere on the internet that attempts to promote the site in question.

At this point, it’s worth noting that Search Engines tend to be quite secretive of exactly how they rank some pages above others in search results. The activities of Search Engines tend to be watched and discussed quite intently by Search Engine Optimisers who produce different models of how Search Engines decide one page is better than the other – so a lot of SEO can be the product of guesswork. Some search engines do produce guidance on SEO or even host forums or tools – such as Googles Webmaster Community, Google Search Console and the Google SEO starter guide. Sticking with the official guidelines tends to see you on the “White Hat” side of the fence.

We also need to have a quick look into how search engines work before we get too far into the nitty-gritty of white hat and black hat link building.

How Search Engines work

Search Engines work in different ways, but a general misconception is that an Internet Search Engine searches the internet – they don’t, as it would take too long to return any search results to the user. Instead, Search Engines can deliver fast results because rather than searching through all the Web Pages or Documents via a relatively slow and unpredictable internet, they search through a simplified copy of these documents, called “An Index” that they hold “in house”.

Because ( as of time of writing 😉 ) no search engine owns the internet, in order to create this local, searchable, ”index”, the search engines use software known as “crawlers” ( crawlers are also known as spiders or bots ) to explore the web and download any content that may be of interest for processing.

Whilst Majestic is quite experienced with web crawlers, a full discussion of Web crawling is way beyond the scope of this document, but for those interested, a couple of relevant starter points are:

1. An answer to the question “How Google Search Works” by Google Search Console Help.
2. A study of how web crawling works, attributed to a senior program manager at Microsoft.

How does “Crawling” and the process of creating an Index (“Indexing”) impact SEO? Well, On-site SEO is ensuring that the crawler can download the page, and, IF and when the page is downloaded, that the content is relevant and the site conducive to helping the search engine find an appropriate amount of content. Off-site SEO helps in two ways – discovery – helping search engines find documents, and also, quality, relevant links from good websites that are given freely are thought to be a significant ranking factor. 

Back to Black Hat and White Hat SEO

So let’s have a look at our 2×2 SEO matrix and break that down into four areas to see the sorts of things Black Hat and White Hat SEO’s get up to both “on” and “off” site – this list is illustrative, and isn’t aimed at any particular search engine. It should be noted that THIS LIST IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION – SOME OF THESE ACTS HAVE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.

I’d be hard-pressed to name anyone recommending Black Hat On-site SEO on a client’s site. The reasons are pretty obvious – you are breaking the Search Engine Rules and it’s pretty clear who the guilty party is as the rules have been broken on your site!

A lot of “White Hat” SEO may seem familiar – indeed – since search engines became popular, SEO has become a well-known term, and touches many fields. Website designers are now expected to be reasonably “SEO Savvy” by their clients, and modern PR professionals are also expected to “know digital“.

SEO and Content Marketing, Keywords and Links

By way of expanding on the overlapping nature of White Hat Search Engine Optimisation, we can look at some SEO in action. One way that SEO’s can conduct offsite campaigns is to try to encourage owners of quality, well-ranked material to include links to their site – there are a few approaches to this – including a technique credited to Brian Dean of BackLinko, called the “Skyscraper Technique” – which entails producing best-in-class content and encouraging others to link to it instead of other copy.

This approach of getting quality links from quality publications doesn’t just help search engine results – indeed – any boost in search engine rankings could be thought of as symptomatic of the quality organic referrals such references have.

Commissioning and maintaining high quality, indexable content that is relevant to the audience and accessible by search engines can be a difficult exercise – even for experts – as documented by Olga Mykhoparkina in a report on Search Engine Journal about how they tried to use the “Sky Scraper” technique to build links.

An aspect of the post that is relevant is the use of classic SEO tools to provide digital marketing insights and data.

Difficulties with Organic Search

It’s probably fair to say that most Search Engines are operated as commercial entities, hoping to make a return off of the huge investment it takes to build and maintain a credible web-scale search.

An obvious route to achieving a profit on the loss-leader that is search, is advertisements, and in search, not all search terms are created equal. Some will be far, far more profitable than others, which might cause one to question if a provider of a search engine would seek to balance occasional, complimentary ads in helpful results in interesting niches, with more profitable content where monetisation is easier. 

It’s probably fair to say that there is a little bit of a “love-hate” relationship between SEOs and Search Engine providers, and the monetization of search engine results has been somewhat of a hot topic for some time within SEO.

To illustrate where some of the concern lies, try searching for a popular search term – such as “Car Insurance” or “Hotel In London” – our results suggest only two organic searches are returned for “car insurance”, with only google maps results and adverts above the fold for “hotels in London”.

So does this undermine SEO? Not at all – the art of digital marketing has been built on a swamp of fast-moving technology, and change has always been constant.

In the short term, search phrases like “BrightonSEO accommodation” still (at time of writing) yield a high number of organic results – and it is this sort of “Long Tail” results which have been SEO bread and butter for some time – based on more obscure search terms consisting of multiple words, typically having lower volume of search, but often with a higher purchasing intent on the part of the searcher.

Other changes Google have made is the introduction of penalties for link manipulation. These developments have encouraged a White Hat approach to SEO link prospecting which blurs the lines between SEO and Digital PR.

And finally, to finish off with a conclusion…

The more astute reader may notice a range of variations in how some of the terms are represented (“White-Hat” “WhiteHat” “White Hat”). For many years, Search Engine Optimisers would focus on ensuring pages contained many variants of keywords. Whilst Search Engines have got smarter, and the need to vary such wording on pages now tends to be far more succinct, we deliberately chose to leave these terms in by way of rounding out this guide explanation of a common SEO Copywriter Joke – “An SEO Copywriter walks into a Bar… ”.

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Steve Pitchford

Steve has a been in tech since the late 90's, learning the ropes with a UK e-retailer through much of the first dotcom boom after developing a passion for the web during his BSc in Computer Science.

Steve has been engaged with the Birmingham tech scene for years, co-organising the grassroots open-source conference YAPC:: Europe 2008, and founding the West Midlands Java User Group in 2014.

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