Quick Explanation of SEO:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), also referred to as SEM (Search Engine Marketing), is the practice of tweaking and changing certain on -and off page elements of a website, to make that website "more visible" in the result pages of search engines. Hereby increasing the amount of unique visitors that visit a website.

The four major players in the search arena are:
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • MSN / Live
  • Ask, followed closely by AOL
In that order, they account for the majority of referred web traffic.

Organic Rankings and PPC:

Many a makeshift SEO company will promise you top-ten search engine results within days. These placements are referred to as Pay Per Click advertising models, which the major search engines offer as a service to customers. This means, that your "SEO" did not do any work on your website. Please note, that there is a fundamental difference between SEO and PPC.

In the broader spectrum, SEO and PPC fall under the collective term, SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Both elements compliment each other, but are hardly the same thing.

Organic Rankings are achieved through constant website attention, keyword research, competitor analysis, unique content creation and ultimately trying to provide the best service to your website visitor.

The so-called hats of SEO:

Blackhat, Greyhat, and Whitehat, might be terms you have heard of before. These terms have been used the last few years to distiguish the "type of SEO" a company or individual would fall under, but have since become slightly destorted, as search engines tweak their algorithms often. Thus, what worked yesterday, could be "a problem" today.

In short, your "Blackhat SEO" would use questionable tactics to improve search engine rankings. "Questionable", probably best defined as tactics that search engines explicitly warn against or forbid. There are many of these tactics, but here are some examples:
  • Doorway Pages
  • Bogus Linking Schemes
  • Link Farms
  • Keyword Stuffing of META tags
  • White of White text
  • Sneaky Javascript or 302 redirects
These are just some of the many, many tactics that are used to manipulate search engine result pages.

How to choose your SEO:

SEO's should be transparent, honest and constantly report back to the client about ranking and algorithm shifts.

Read More:

The Google Webmaster Guidelines has been written as a guideline for webmasters to follow. To be sure that your SEO is on par with what you want, read up a bit and ask some questions.

Aditionally, you can follow our South Africa SEO category on our blog.