SEO is a process of strategies and techniques required to be carried out to allow search engine spiders to find content that will in turn increase the number of visitors to a website by obtaining a high ranking placement in search results.

There are a variety of techniques used when carrying out SEO services and a search engine optimisation company will refer to this as white hat or black hat SEO methods.

Organic SEO (search engine optimisation) is the phrase that is used when describing the strategies and techniques required to be listed in the natural search engine results (SERPs). This is the unpaid advert listings which appear as a result of carrying out SEO in order to assist the search engine spiders finding the high quality website content.

White hat SEO is the type of SEO (search engine optimisation) that is carried out following search engine guidelines. This is aimed at optimisation strategies and techniques focused on a human audience and at the same time ensuring search engine spiders can find the content easily and quickly to be able to use the content within search results making the internet a useful tool.

Black hat SEO refers to aggressive SEO strategies and techniques that attempt to trick search engines and this process does not follow search engine guidelines. In this type of search engine optimisation (SEO) the black hat methods will include large quantities of back-links often poor quality, keyword stuffing, human invisible text in the colour of the website background colour, doorway pages, redirecting webpages to entirely different website domains once ranking has been achieved, etc.

These Black hat SEO techniques provide a short lifetime of success if any success at all and will result in a penalty by the search engine resulting in the domain not being used in any search results. Once this happens the domain is no longer useful to anyone and for this reason it is advised never to use this technique.

This method of SEO also plays a large part of pollution on the Internet and this makes the search engine providers job more difficult resulting in more resources required to crawl the entire Internet.

Backlinks are used in search engine optimisation (SEO) terminology to identify a link from a one web page to another.

Known in the SEO industry as an Inbound Link (IBL) and these backlinks are used as as signal by search engines to identify the popularity or importance of a web site.

Search engines use backlinks in the algorithm to help compare a website against another looking at the quantity and quality of the backlinks. As a result a website with a better backlinking structure can will be more relevant and shown in search results pages.

SEO services are provided by specialist companies that employee search engine consultants who understand the requirements to allow search engine spiders to crawl a website and ensure that the spiders can understand the content on the website pages to result in this content being including in search results.

If the best practices are used and the website’s complete online profile is clean and trusted then the website will obtain higher ranking positions in the organic search results of search engines (SERP).

SEO service providers will have a range of options for clients ranging from one off fixes to monthly subscriptions for ongoing SEO work and online support advice.

An SEO company is the specialist provider of technical knowledge and resources which are used by companies to ensure that the content on a website is easily accessible by search engine spiders. This knowledge will include how to find the keywords required to achieve the traffic that will convert into leads or sales and how to layout the content on the website in-order for the website content to be understood by spiders and liked by humans.

The SEO company services will also be to identify powerful back-links used by the competitors that are sending power to websites that make the content on the competitors websites become trusted and as a result achieving high rankings within the search results.

Spam in the SEO (search engine optimisation) industry refers to manipulation techniques used to increase search engine ranking by creating lots of content on various domains, normally duplicated content in an attempt to trick search engines to thinking that a website has lots of interest and as a result other website will be linking to the main website as part of carrying out SEO services.

This technique is against the guidelines of search engines and falls under black hat SEO methods.

High quality unique content written to help educate others about a subject, product or service. This type of content adds value to the Internet and will be found by search engine robots and then used in search results.If the content is trusted by the search engine it will rank highly within the search results and bring traffic to the website generated by visitors looking for this content which can result in leads or sales.

Duplicate content is content copied from one website and then used on another. This makes the job of search engines more difficult and plays a large part of Internet pollution.

Duplicate content is sometimes used to add content in an attempt to boost keyword density. Search engines have developed an understanding of how to deal with this copied content and filter the duplicate text or apply a penalty to a website if the majority of content is duplicated. This technique is often used in black hat SEO methods.

SEO PR refers to a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service that includes public relation (PR) communications that are aimed at a target audience directly or indirectly through online media content. SEO PR is a combination of writing press releases and other marketing material which search engine spiders find as part of optimisation to generate leads or sales by bringing targeted traffic to a web site.

SERP refers to the term used in the SEO industry for the Search Engine Results Page. This is the search engine web page that returns the results of questions asked to the search engine provider. This will include often paid listings, organic listings and map listings and all of which will be relevant to the keywords used in the search.