2. Digital Marketing - Part 2 - Search Engine-Paid Search-Organic Search-SEO-White Hat-Black Hat

Note: All the topics are explained in detail with extra content which may be not in the syllabus/textbook. Use the ppts for extra  knowledge/reference. 

For studying use the Textbook

Part 2 - PPT

What is Search Engine?

A web search engine or Internet search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web search, which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. 

Search engines are answer machines. 

They exist to discover, understand, and organize the internet's content in order to offer the most relevant results to the questions searchers are asking.

The search results are presented in a line of results often referred to as Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

The results are a mix of links to web pages, images, videos, info-graphics, articles, research papers, and other types of files.

Displaying of Websites in SERP

In order to show up in search results, your website content needs to first be visible to search engines. 

It's arguably the most important piece of the SEO puzzle: If your site can't be found, there's no way you'll ever show up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

How Search Engine works?

Search engines have three primary functions:

Crawl: Discover the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find.

Crawling is the discovery process in which search engines send out a team of programs (known as crawlers or spiders or bots) to find new and updated content.  

They scan a website and collect details about each page : titles, images, keywords, other linked pages, etc.

Content can vary — it could be a webpage, an image, a video, a PDF, etc. — but regardless of the format, content is discovered by links.

Googlebot starts out by fetching a few web pages, and then follows the links on those webpages to find new URLs. By hopping along this path of links, the crawler is able to find new content and add it to their index 

Index: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.

Search engines processes and stores information of websites they find;  in an index, a huge database of all the content they’ve discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers.

When someone performs a search, search engines look into their index for highly relevant content and then orders that content in the hopes of solving the searcher's query.  

Ranking: Provide the pieces of content that will best answer a searcher's query, which means that results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant. This ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking. 

Ways to Rank Website

There are two ways to Rank a website

One can pay and rank the website in top list (paid search results)

Without paying can rank the website using SEO process (appears in organic search results)

Organic Search Results

Organic search results are the listing on a search engine results page (SERP) that appear because of factors such as relevance to the search term and valid search engine optimization efforts rather than because of search engine marketing or trickery.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the process of boosting content and technical 

set-up of the website so that it appear at the top of a search engine result for specific keywords.

SEO Techniques

Techniques and strategies used to get higher search rankings for websites can be classified into two:

• White Hat SEO
• Black Hat SEO

White Hat SEO

White hat SEO involves looking for ways to improve user experience ethically and genuinely.

It ensures that web page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines.

White hat SEO is the use of tactics and strategies that follows all search engine guidelines and policies.

White hat SEO is the complete opposite of Black Hat SEO. 

Any practice that aims to improve a website’s search rankings while still keeping its integrity and is in-line with search engine guidelines is considered to be an example of white hat SEO.

Some specific white hat strategies are:

• Content that’s written for the users
• Fast site speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• Easy site navigation
• Proper and natural use of keywords inside the content and meta tags

White hat SEO focuses mainly on content – basically on how user-friendly, informative, and useful your content is. 

When your content is good, people will talk about it in different social media channels and that will lead to a massive increase in traffic. 

It will also help your rankings since content that satisfies the three factors is ranked higher in the search engines. 

Black Hat SEO

‘Black Hat’ SEO deals with a bunch of unethical exercises that are performed to elevate website’s ranking on any search engine by violating the search engine guidelines.

It is also referred as unethical SEO as it includes immoral black shady tricks and techniques to gain rankings and traffic.

(Not in Syllabus - For Knowledge)

i. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword repetition is a very common technique used in ‘black hat SEO’ where the same word is used multiple times to increase its SEO. It will end up in corrupting that website and creating a very bad experience for the user.

ii. Cloaking

It means to provide one content to the user and different contents to search engine for the same search.

For example, writing making a website for selling of suspense novels and putting inside some irrelevant data of suspense movies as Meta description.

iii. Irrelevant URL’s as backlinks

Using irrelevant URL’s as backlinks is another popular technique. In this technique, some URL’s are used in order to redirect the user to some other irrelevant websites. These techniques are mostly used in websites with high domain authority. 

For example– Quota, car vale etc

iv. Spam Comment

Commenting on a blog with some links to get a follow backlink is also a type of ‘black hat ‘technique to improve domain authority. It creates spam for the new user.

Getting spammy comments links to your site. When creating backlinks from another website to your website. in a short period. this trick may give you a temporary boost in SEO, But in along run, it’s not going to work. However, you can drive traffic to your website in 2019, by using this simple black hat method.

Redirects are normally used only when you’re moving domains, or your website is down for some reason. They’re a welcome practice with user engagement.

However, Black Hat SEO uses false links to redirect users to a different website. Think of every time you clicked a link to a page, only to have another tab pop open, taking you to a gambling website. 

That is called shady redirecting. 

Private Blog Networks

A PBN is what it says: a network of blogs run by a single person, preferably on different domains. Their sole purpose is to create a huge amount of links for the “parent” site and help boost its rankings. The sites don’t need to be updated frequently, nor feature enticing content. All they need are 3rd party links. 

Conclusion – Black Hat vs White hat

“Thoroughly, Truly, the one and only result of Black Hat SEO is either drop down of your business or a complete destruction of your business.”

Now take it down, if you are thinking of re-building a brand or uplifting your business, Black Hat SEO is never at all a solution! 

In contrast, it can only affect your brand via the negative way. 

It disrupts user experience, swaps information reputation, damage your presence in search and most importantly can get you removed completely from search engines with punishments such as penalty and many others. 

Thereby always keep in mind that Black hat SEO is never at all the way to go. It may seem to work in short term but it’s a sure assurance to bring consequences in future.

Also search engines have got sophisticated a lot presently. They have become better at spotting SEO tactics. If you want your dividends to be doubled and have a sleep never seeing a dip in your brand due to nasty approaches, never ever do Black Hat SEO.

Focus on your brand, create quality content and stop playing with search engines, internet will focus you. It’s a way far better, helping you exist in long term, bunging your website from bringing about a penalty than can remove your visibility from search engines.