A question that page operators, bloggers, and content creators ask themselves every day. The magic word, in this case, is search engine optimization. According to the SEO service expert in Denver, SEO’s goal is to align its content so that it tends to be better ranked by Google, Bing, and other search engines, and thus higher up in search results. However, SEO is characterized by constant changes and technical terms that need to be looked through. In the following, we present the most important SEO terms.

White Hat-SEO has its name because of the white hats that the good cowboys in the Western stripes have mostly worn. It describes legal measures to increase the relevance of a blog. This includes, for example, the appropriate use of keywords, the correct subheadings or filling in the meta-description. An important SEO term because, according to Ryte, White Hat SEO is the safest long-term goal for the site owner.

Black Hat SEO, on the other hand, is the Darth Vader of search engine optimization and aims to use illegal methods to build up a large reach as quickly as possible. Black Hat-SEO uses techniques like keyword stuffing (very popular in the early days of SEO), link farming or cloaking. The former describes the mostly incoherent filling of a text with keywords. Link farms, on the other hand, are groups of websites that link to each other in order to get better results. And cloaking describes the practice of “camouflaging” a page. Search engines and users then receive differently displayed pages. But these methods are just as illegal as a cowboys’ black hats. A site operator who has fallen for the dark side of power can receive a penalty from Google.

Grey Hat SEO is not forbidden but is not really appreciated by search engines. According to evergreen-media, Gray Hat-SEO specifically searches for and exploits gaps in the algorithm. The grey hats include, for example, active link building, content refreshment (the new publication of an old article under a new date) or an increased (but not yet excessive) keyword density.

As soon as Google (or another search engine) notices that a website violates the rules, there may be a penalty. Either the algorithm distributes the penalty or it is distributed manually. Usually, a penalty means the loss of range and ranking. This means: The visibility of one’s own side collapses.

Website owners like backlinks, and Google too. Because a backlink is a link from the outside to your own website. These are usually set when the outside person thinks the content they are linking to is good. So it is a kind of reward. However, if the site owner actively builds or buys backlinks from one page to another, he can catch a Google Penalty. Because this practice belongs to the Grey Hats, reports tagSeoBlog.

SERP is an abbreviation for “Search Engine Result Page”. So basically the search results that Google lists as soon as the user enters a certain keyword in the search bar. The goal of an SEO strategy is to be listed as high as possible in the SERPs. In order to slide further up the ladder, content creators should ask themselves what the target group’s goals and desires are and provide corresponding content.

Organic search results are, according to the Austin SEO department of WhosTalkin SEO, all search results that can firstly be found via SERP and secondly are not financed or inflated by advertising. The paid results are usually marked with the green word “Display”. The situation is similar to social media: Organic link clicks are all those that do not come via advertised postings.

If a content creator wants to rank high on Google’s list of priorities, he must be careful to deliver unique content. Duplicate content is the opposite: a “clone” of already existing content. This can happen if, for example, a text is equipped with two URLs. In this context, however, it is also important for operators to pay attention to pirate copies. Because sometimes it can happen that pages with stolen contents suddenly rank better than the original. Webworker advises using a Duplicate Content Checker.

Onsite optimization means various measures that website operators take to improve the ranking of their site. As long as these measures relate directly to the design, structure, content or domain of the websites, onsite optimization is the term used. Offsite optimization, on the other hand, comes into play as soon as the backlinks to the incoming page are to be increased. The number and quality of backlinks play a role in Google’s ranking.

An anchor text is the marked text of a link. That is to say, a mostly colored or at least underlined word in the middle of the text on which users can click and thus be led to a new page. How Anchor texts exactly affect the Google ranking is not 100 percent clear at the moment. However, the SearchEngine Journal states that using anchor text can help Google better understand the context of a post.