8 Types of SEO to Rank in Top Positions & Drive High Organic Traffic

In this article, I am going to share with you the different types of SEO in two different SEO categories that you should know and understand in order to determine which one to use for your website to increase your ranking and drive more high-quality organic traffic to your website.

So, after reading this article you will know exactly what types of SEO are important for your website, which SEO practices you should use, and which SEO practices you should avoid.

And lastly, you will know exactly what types of SEO strategies are important for your website and how and when to use them to boost your ranking and organic traffic.

4 Types of SEO Practices

The first SEO category that I want to talk about is the different types of SEO practices used by SEO marketers to achieve certain objectives.

This category represents how you can approach your SEO strategy for B2B, and rather than focusing on strategies we will be talking about the different practices that you should or should not use for your website.

Because often people tend to think of SEO as just stuffing keywords everywhere so you can start ranking for relevant search terms.

However, it is much more complicated, and only practicing a single type of SEO technique and strategy will not get you in the first place on Google, and almost certainly you will not be driving a lot of organic traffic to your website.

Also, understanding the different SEO practices will help you if you are hiring an SEO agency, so you can avoid those that are using bad SEO practices and hire those that use good SEO practices in order not to be penalized by Google.

So here are the four types of SEO practices to help you determine which types of SEO you should use and which types of SEO practices you should avoid for your website to improve your ranking and organic traffic.

1. White Hat SEO

The first SEO practice and arguably the most important is White Hat SEO.

What is White Hat SEO?

In definition, white hat SEO refers to using SEO practices that are aligned with Google-approved search engine and website optimization strategies in order to improve your search ranking on a search engine results page (SERP) while ensuring your website will not get penalized by search engines and maintain the integrity of your website.

Following white hat SEO almost guarantee to not be penalized by any search engines and you can drive a lot of organic traffic to your website.

It helps to boost your ranking and often if you follow only white hat SEO strategies then your ranking is more stable even after major search algorithm upgrades, which often can cut your organic traffic in half.

(Source)

Therefore many serious SEOs and businesses choose only to do white hat SEO strategies as in the long run it drives better results and obviously it is safer for your business.

However, if you choose only this type of SEO practice, then you should also be prepared that I will take some time to see positive results and it can take almost two years to rank a new website in Google.

Just according to Ahrefs study, the average time for a web page to get ranked #1 in Google can take 2+ years and it also depends on how well is your website established and what keyword you are targeting.

So, it can take longer to see positive results from white hat SEO strategies. However, it is safe to say that if you do it well and long enough then you can generate more SEO leads and organic traffic with SEO than with any other marketing strategies.

2. Black Hat SEO

The second type of SEO practice is Black Hat SEO.

So you might already guess what is black hat SEO, however, let me put it in definition in case you don’t.

So in definition, black hat SEO refers to using SEO practices in order to increase website ranking, organic traffic, and its PageRank to gain higher visibility on the search results as soon as possible. However, these practices are disapproved by the search engine’s terms of service and can result in the site being penalized or removed from the search.

So, one would think, why somebody would use this SEO practice if it is not allowed and your website can get banned from search engines?

Well, the thing is because people tend to search for getting rich or get results fasts and that’s what Black Hat SEO practices kind of promises, at least temporarily.

Also, doing black hat SEO is often much easier, strategies like:

• Buying links
• Content automation
• Keyword stuffing
• Guest Posting Networks
• Private Blog Networks and so on

Are very easy to do and even easier with using platforms like Fiverr or UpWork where you can just pay 5 bucks and get it all done for you.

However, because none of the black hat SEO strategies are honest and genuine and does not actually showcase any value, credibility, expertise, and trust of the website, Google and other search engines are taking the initiatives to prevent website that use these strategies to appear in the search results.

But because as I said, black hat SEO strategies can bring quick results and are easy to do, still plenty of people and website owners decide to take the leap of faith and do black hat SEO practices, which can result in growing traffic, until Google catches you.

Also, many can argue that it is no guarantee that Google or search engine will catch you if you are doing black hat SEO practices, however in my opinion eventually they will catch you soon or later and seeing your business being wiped out from search within a day is just not worthy.

3. Gray Hat SEO

The third type of SEO practice is Grey Hat SEO.

What is Gray Hat SEO practice you might ask?

Defining gray hat SEO can be quite challenging as some say that gray hat SEO practice is something between white hat and black hat SEO practices, others say that gray hat SEO is using SEO strategies that are ill-defined by search engine guidelines, thus people can argue about those.

However, in my opinion, gray hat SEO practice is using ill-defined SEO practices and/or also using some of the black hat SEO strategies together with white hat SEO strategies in order to boost your ranking in search engine results pages to achieve your goals faster while still stay relatively safe.

And before you do anything, first you need to have a proper understanding of gray hat SEO and how it works, because even if you are using white hat SEO strategies together with black hat SEO strategies, your site still can be penalized or removed.

However, experienced SEOs and SEO agencies understand that using gray hat SEO practice could improve your site’s ranking faster than just using white hat SEO practice without negative consequences of using black hat SEO practice.

A great example of using Gray hat SEO practice is creating money pages on your website and then buying links to increase the ranking of the webpage for the targeted keyword.

Buying links that pass the link juice is prohibited by Google and your website can be penalized if you are doing this.

However, in the recent Authority Hacker podcast, both Mark and Gael have agreed that paid links are just normalized a lot more than they were before because of Google’s lack of action and you can increase your standards of a ranking if smartly done.

I recommend listening to the whole podcast or watch their video, especially the part “Money” where guys are talking in detail about the current situation of using paid links for SEO and its opportunities of it.

Either way, Gray Hat SEO practice is a lot more common nowadays as marketers can achieve better results and faster, yet still stay relatively safe from being penalized or banned.

4. Negative SEO

And the fourth and last on our list of types of SEO practices is Negative SEO.

In definition, negative SEO is a malicious practice aimed at harming competitors or other people’s websites by hacking, creating toxic and spammy links, duplicating content, and posting negative reviews in order to hurt their rankings and online reputation.

Unfortunately, this practice is a lot more common than you might think and the chance is happening to you is quite big once you start growing your website.

And while Negative SEO practice is basically a black hat SEO practice and Google does have a lot of practice dealing with those, it can still hurt your website and I recommend at least check your backlinks regularly in case you have been hit by negative SEO.

The easiest and most effective way of checking for toxic backlinks is using an SEO tool, that regularly monitors backlinks point to your website. For example, you can use SE Ranking and go into their Backlink Checker report and see referring domains for your website.

And from here you can sort the domains by DT (domain trust) or Alexa Rank and go through the referring domains.

Also, you can get additional information if you click on the domain, where you will get the exact URL of the backlinks, with anchor text, target URL, and the type of backlink.

And just like this, you can go through the domains and if you see any domain that does not seems legitimate, like for example this one:

• Without SSL Certificate
• Weird URL
• Duplicated content
• No Domain Trust or Alexa Rank

And if you also visit the website and see clearly that the website is poor quality, without any value, then you definitely don’t want to have this website referring to your website.

However, be careful as some of the more sophisticated companies that do negative SEO may create a website that seems legit, so sometimes it can be hard to track.

So, if you find any link that you don’t want to be pointed to your website, then you can use Google Disavow links to protect your website.

And this should protect your website from at least toxic backlinks used by your competitors or hackers that want to hurt your online presence.

4 Types of SEO Strategies

The second category of types of SEO is the types of SEO strategies that you can use in order to improve your ranking and organic traffic to your website.

These types of SEO strategies are more like categories that separate the different SEO tactics used to achieve certain objectives or KPIs.

And because SEO strategy has so many parts and search engines use so many different ranking factors, for example Google is using over 200+ ranking factors, then just using a single type of SEO strategy is not enough to rank high in Google.

Therefore, it is important to understand different types of SEO strategies in order for you to know what SEO strategies you need to use, how to use them and when to use them to improve the ranking of your website.

So as we go through the different types of SEO strategies I will explain what they are, why you need them, and how you can use them for your website.

So here are four types of SEO strategies that you should understand:

1. Technical SEO

The first type of SEO strategy that you must ensure you have on your website is Technical SEO.

Technical SEO strategies refer to improving your website from the technical aspect in order to ensure that your web pages can deliver the right user experience across different devices and can be accessed by search engine bots to be discovered, crawled, and indexed. Also, it helps to improve your website’s ranking on the search engine results page.

Technical SEO is very important and should be done as a first thing before you do anything else on your website. You want to priories your technical SEO first because it allows search engines like Google to crawl your website so it can find your valuable content and all pages on a website.

Apart from being discoverable by search engines, technical SEO helps also deliver the right user experience, which is becoming more and more important.

Because Google does track user engagement metrics like average engagement time, revenue generated, sessions, user activity, scroll and so much more, which allows them to learn whether your website satisfies the user’s needs or not.

So, whether you are starting a new website or have already one and want to make sure your technical SEO is up to date, then here are 7 most important technical SEO strategies you should focus on:

• Having SSL certification on your website
• Responsive website for mobile, desktop, and tablet
• Having XML sitemap on your website
• Having Robot.txt file on your website
• Following Core Web Vitals performance recommendation
• Apply the right schema markups
• Avoid duplicated content on your website

Of course, there are more things you can do about technical SEO, but I recommend you to do these first as these will hurt your ranking the most.

And luckily you don’t need to be an expert or website developer to have your technical SEO correctly done. Most of the things are handled by CMS systems like WordPress or HubSpot CMS and by the theme developers.

That’s why it is so important to invest a little bit of money into high-quality themes if you are using WordPress or other free CMS systems. I recommend using Elementor, Avada, or Divi.

Also, to check your technical SEO I recommend you to use SEO tools like SE Ranking that helps you to do technical SEO audit regularly. It monitors your site health and then shows you exactly where you are having issues and how to fix them.

Like this, you can keep abreast with your technical SEO so you don’t lose out on your organic traffic and ranking and you don’t have to manually check every single page every week.

SE Ranking will do it for you automatically every week. It shows you exactly what technical SEO issues you have on every single of your web page and then helps you to fix them.

2. On-Page SEO

The next on our list of important types of SEO strategies is on-page SEO.

On-Page, SEO strategy refers to improving your HTML and content of your individual web pages by applying some of the best practices that follow search engine guidelines in order to improve your ranking and earn more relevant traffic in search engines.

Like every type of SEO strategy, even on-page SEO is important for your website to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs). it helps search engines like Google to analyze your website and the content you have there, so it can categorize it and then serve that content to the relevant search query.

It is essential that you follow the latest on-page SEO strategies and practices so you can make your website visible to your users when they are searching for your information.

And the seven most important on-page SEO strategies that you should ensure you have on your web pages are:

• Include targeted keywords within your page
• Optimize page titles and meta description
• Provide valuable high-quality content
• URL optimization
• Include Internal and external links
• Image optimization like size, alt text, and the picture name
• Create headings and content formatting

(Source)

However, as search engines algorithm are evolving it is important to stay ahead with the on-page SEO strategies. SE Ranking website audit helps you to apply the latest on-page SEO recommendation on your website.

Apart from tracking your Technical SEO, SE Ranking will also show you on-page SEO issues such as:

• Title
• Description
• Textual Content
• Internal Links
• Images

Also, SE Ranking comes with a very useful feature called the On-Page SEO Checker. It was developed to reveal errors that prevent certain pages from ranking high in SERPs. It evaluates a page to see how well it is optimized for a certain query. And then give you get a complete list of errors, regardless of whether they are small or critical.

Having an SEO tool that checks your websites’ wealth is essential to keep your website health optimize and to prevent losing traffic.

Definitely, you should consider SEO tools for your website to help you with all of that. It will save you a ton of time, headaches and help you keep growing.

My recommendation is SE Ranking, so if you want to give it try for 14 days.

Read my guide on On-Page SEO to learn more.

3. Content Creation

The next type of SEO strategy that actually will bring you organic traffic is content creation.

Content creation refers to processes of finding topics, which is also called keyword research, that your target audience is searching for, creating written or visual content based on the topics, and then publishing the content on your website for search engines to discover it, crawl it, index it, and serve it to yours when they are searching for it.

Often people tend to think that creating a website with a few pages should be enough to start generating organic traffic to your website. However, nothing could be further from true.

SEO Content creation is the essential strategy that will be driving you traffic and leads for your business and without it, you cannot rank and bring organic traffic.

Because if you want to bring organic traffic to your website, you must create content on your website that people are searching for in order to bring them to your website. The same as when you are searching for anything on the internet.

However, you must remember that organic traffic doesn’t pay the bills and ultimately you do not want to drive any organic traffic, but targeted and relevant to your business, that can convert as leads and customers.

So, to drive relevant organic traffic to your website you must find out what is your target audience typing in the search engines to discover information about your products or services.

And there are numerous ways how to find out, but the easiest and most effective way is to do keyword research based on your niche. And to do keyword research you need to use a keyword research tool. If you have not subscribed to any, then I recommend you use SE Ranking.

So, to find topics that my target audience is searching for I start with some generic keywords that describe my products or services. Let’s say I am working for a SaaS company selling a customer relationship management (CRM) system and I want to find topics for my product.

So, I take the generic keyword that describes my product which is CRM and plug it in into the SE Ranking keyword research tool. And like this, you can get easily thousands of keyword ideas that your target audience is searching for along with additional helpful information.

And from here, you can select the ones that most resonate with your business. But please be aware this is not a complete guide on keyword research.

Alright, once you have the topics that your target audience is searching for, then you can start creating content on your website to start ranking for those keywords.

However, to rank in the top positions in Google, you must optimize your content and your pages with the on-page and technical SEO strategies and do one more thing, which we are going to talk about right now!

4. Off-Page SEO

The next very important and often skipped type of SEO strategies to rank in top positions in Google is Off-Page SEO.

Off-Page SEO refers to tactics or strategies that take place outside of your website in order to increase the ranking and authority of your website. Unlike on-page SEO where you focus on optimizing your pages and you have full control over it, off-page SEO often comes with collaborating with other websites or participating on social platforms, forums, and alike websites.

Off-Page SEO is very important for you if you want to rank in top positions in Google’s results pages, as Google is using a part of off-page SEO as a very strong ranking factor.

This ranking factor is based on backlinks, which are links from one website to a page on another website and Google is using this to understand the quality of a website and its content.

And then there are more off-page SEO techniques such as:

• Backlinks: we have just talked about
• Social shares,
• Brand Searches

And all these are tracked by Google and considered when assessing your site for ranking. However, the most important are the backlinks which according to 65% of digital marketers stated getting backlinks is the hardest part of SEO.

But one of the best ways to find potential link-building opportunities is to check backlinks of your direct competitors or established website within your niche.

To do that, you can just take your competitor URL and put it in the SE Ranking Backlink Checker and you will get quickly a bunch of useful information about your competitor backlinks profile such as the number of backlinks, referring domains, domain trust, how many EDU backlinks and GOV backlinks are linking to the website and much more.

And from here you can assess your competitor’s most linked outdated content, created even better and up-to-date resources, and then reach out to the referring websites offering them your resource as more relevant and valuable to their users.

And this is just one example of how to do link building for your website and there is much more. Here you can find list of off-page seo activities.

My Recommendation for Types of SEO

So these are the types of SEO that you should know in order to increase your website ranking and drive more organic traffic to your website.

And if you are new to the SEO world, then I recommend properly understand White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO practices in order to maximize your potential and avoid being penalized by Google or other search engines.

Also, once you are having a website before you do anything else, make sure your website has all the right technical SEO strategies in place that I have mentioned above.

Once this is done, then you can start creating content on your website. Remember, that whenever you are creating content, it must be relevant to your target audience and provide more value than those already published on the given topic.

And then, when you are doing your content, always make sure that every single of your web page is always optimized with on-page SEO strategies to help Google crawl it and index it properly.

And lastly, once you are having great content on your website, optimized with on-page SEO then you can start planning and executing your off-page SEO strategies.

At least start with promoting your content on social media and relevant forums and subreddit and once you are comfortable with that, then you can move to the actual link-building strategies.

I hope this article helps you to boost your ranking and drive more organic traffic!

Related Articles:

• Podcast Link Building: The Easiest & Best Strategy
• 8 Best B2B SEO Tools in 2023: Boost Your Digital Marketing Results
• 7 Powerful B2B SEO Tips: SEO for Beginners to Rank #1 on Google in 2023
• B2B SEO Strategy: 8 Steps to Effectively Generate Leads and Organic Traffic
• 6 Most Important Google Ranking Factors You Should Know to Improve Your Ranking
• How To Check Website Position in Google
• What are Niche-Relevant Backlinks & Best Practices

Also, check out our SEO hub page to find all our SEO resources.

Disclaimer

Some pictures are coming from Freepik and some of my links are affiliate links, which means if you purchase something, I might get some small commission as a reward for reference. Of course, I am actively using all these services and products, and I only affiliate products or services I have full trust in their quality!