5 Types Of SEO To Focus in 2024
In today’s world where most interaction happens behind a screen, having a strong online presence is of utmost importance. Optimizing your website to make it highly visible in the search result is highly beneficial in attracting new and retaining current customers. Remember that your website represents your online branding, and a higher number of people seeing your website means a better brand visibility.
This is where Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) comes in. SEO is a digital marketing method which focuses on optimizing your website for search engines algorithm, and helps it rank higher in search engine result pages ( SERPs ) for specific search queries. It helps improve the website visibility towards targeted audience and boost your brand credibility among others.
There are a lot of other benefits of using SEO for your website, which you can read further here, but essentially, SEO is a gamechanger in this digital world.
However, SEO is constantly changing. What might have worked wonder yesterday might no longer work today. This happens because search engines, like Google, update their algorithms on a regular basis to improve what the users see on the search results pages.
To stay ahead of the curve, it’s important to understand the types of SEO that are most effective in 2024. In this article, we will explore the five types of SEO areas you should focus on to improve your website visibility and attract more traffic.
5 types of SEO
1. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the practice of implementing the optimization directly on your website. A strong on-page SEO convinces search engines that the content on your website is highly valuable and relevant to the users queries, influencing your position in the search engine.
2024 Google algorithm shows that it highly favors website with optimizes on-page SEO consisting of these key elements:
- Keyword Research & Integration
Keyword research is the foundation of any effective SEO strategy. It involves identifying the terms and phrases people use to search that relates to your website niche. By targeting the most relevant keywords, it can help you connect with the right users with the right search intent. One of the tools you can use is Google Keyword Planner.
After the best keywords are identified, it will be implemented into your website content at very specific locations based on the current algorithms. This is to ensure it will be able to provide maximum effectiveness for the optimization effort.
- Website Heading
Website heading, also known as header tags or by its numeration H1, H2 and so on, are an HTML element that helps structurize your website content. They work like titles that separate your content into sections, with H1 being the main title of your page, H2 subheading for H1, H3 the sub-content for H2 and continuing on to the last one, H6.
Proper implementation of headings helps search engines that crawl your website to better understand its structure, content and main points. Proper headings are also essential for users who relies on screen readers or other assistive technology to navigate a website.
- Content Creation
Incorporating high quality, informative and engaging content is important for on-page SEO, which fulfills Google’s ranking factor that prioritizes E-A-T : Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
You can achieve this by focusing on creating content that answers what the users are searching for, with proper content structure and high topic relevance.
2. Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to the optimization of a website’s technical aspects to improve its accessibility and usability. This is an important aspect for users to experience the site smoothly, and for search engine’s crawler to properly index the site.
Some of the technical SEO aspects that shows to improve website ranking are:
- Page Load Times
Technical SEO involves optimizing a website’s speed, which directly affects how quickly a content can load for the users. Slow loading times will frustrate the users and lead to a higher bounce rate – which is the number of people leaving the site after entering it.
- Mobile Friendliness
One of the focuses of technical SEO is improving your website’s mobile friendliness, which ensures your website is able to adapt seamlessly to different mobile screen sizes. This is called website responsiveness and is very important because a significant portion of web traffic now comes from mobile users. A website that is not mobile-friendly will push a lot of these users away. To read more about mobile responsiveness, head on over to one of our blogs on mobile responsiveness.
3. Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO involves optimizing aspects that are not on your website. This involves a few areas, and one of the main focus areas is backlink. In 2024, websites with higher numbers of backlink were shown to have triumphed over websites with less backlink.
- . Backlink
Backlinking refers to the method of adding a link on a website outside of your domain that refers to your site. This could be directory websites, review websites, guest posting websites and more. By adding this link, Google will view your website as more credible and authoritative compared to those without any backlinks.
Adding links that point to your site sounds simple in theory, but be wary of toxic backlink or blackhat SEO backlinking methods, which might cause your website to be penalized by Google. Those toxic backlink refers to spammy comment linking to your site and dummy sites created solely for backlink. Instead, you should ask for a backlink organically by requesting the site owner to include a link back to your website, pointing those links to some of your content.
Blackhat SEO backlinking is when competitors posted link to your site using spammy comment or on dummy sites. This would cause your site to be penalized or delisted even without you doing anything harmful on your end. You should avoid using this technique at all cost, because reviving a penalized and delisted website involves a lot of effort. Not to mention the damage it will cause to the brand reputation from being delisted. Always use an ethical way to outrank your competitors.
- Brand Signals
Brand signals refers to the presence and mentions of your brand online. This can happen through directory listing, social media activities, or even online reviews. These mentions are captured as brand signals, which can help to improve your brand’s authority and credibility, which in turn will help with your ranking.
You can keep track of online brand mentions through tools such as Google Alerts which alert you when new content appears for a specific search queries, or you can also use SEMrush’s brand monitoring features which monitor and notify of any mentions of your brand across the internet.
4. E-commerce SEO
E-commerce SEO is highly beneficial if you own an e-commerce website. This method is used to optimize your site using strategy catered to B2C type of business, such as well-crafted UI/UX to improve sales, and using proper schema markup to improve conversions and clicks.
An improved UI/UX helps the user journey from decision making up to the checkout point. A buggy or unsatisfactory user experience might cause them to abandon their intention and leave your site halfway through.
While UI/UX focus on improved viewing and experience on site, schema markup helps with how the search engine views your listing in the search engine result pages. An improved and attractive display would help tremendously in improving clicks and website credibility. If you would like to find out more about schema markup, you can head on over to our article covering the topic here.
5. Image SEO
Image SEO refers to optimizing images on your site for the search engine. Some of these strategies involve optimizing the sizes, and also adding alt text to the images. Image SEO does not only help with improving ranking directly, it also helps with improving website speed, which in turn has an effect on the user’s satisfaction.
Optimizing image sizes involves compressing the image while still retaining the image quality. By having a reduced image size, your website will be able to be accessed more efficiently through mobile devices with slower internet connection.
Alt text is text data describing what the image is, with the original purpose of helping people who are using accessibility tools know what an image is about. For example, an image of a car can include an alt text describing the brand, type, and also the colour of the car. This is a very important step if your website contains a large number of images, as Google website crawler cannot read or define text and objects contained in an image.
Conclusion
Optimizing your website for the search engine is an ongoing effort. Continuous studies and research need to be done to be on par with the search engine’s algorithm, and beat your competitors to it. Optimizing your website based on an outdated algorithm might not only cause your website to lose search engine ranking, it might also cause your customers to lose trust in your brand.