There are 2 types of SEO, the first one being offsite SEO which is more targeted to rank your website higher in Google and other search engines for specific keywords. This would include meta tags, title and H-tags. The second type of SEO is onsite SEO, which is used to increase your website’s link popularity, link juice or PR. This would include directory listings, internal and external linking.
![What are the 2 types of SEO](https://i.imgur.com/ivZIfuI.jpg)
The way each type works is pretty simple. Offsite SEO is all about increasing your relevance in the eyes of search engines. If a user types a keyword such as “motor insurance” into a Google search box and clicks on the first result page that comes up then your website will come up. If that site is a highly ranked authority then you will get traffic. On the flip side, if that same user goes onto another search engine such as Yahoo or Bing and does not find your website then he/she will not come back to Google or any of the other major search engines. That traffic will instead go to the site of the webmaster from whom the visitor came.
However, it is important to note that this is not necessarily true and some webmasters have created what are called “link farms”. Link farms are designed to look like legitimate websites when visited, however they are really just mirroring websites so that they can have a high page rank and boost their link popularity. There are literally hundreds of these link farms on the Internet and many of them are getting banned from the search engines. Google has recently introduced a new policy called penalty for duplicate content, which is specifically aimed at this type of link farms. If a website contains a large number of pages that are very similar to others then Google will consider it a spam website and will ban it from being listed in its search results.
Besides spamming, link farms cause other problems with the search engines such as decreased rankings and increased crawl rates. These decrease rankings occur because webmasters choose links pointing to their website that are not relevant. The links leading to the spam websites often have nothing to do with the content of the website. In fact, many times the links pointing to these websites were placed by webmasters who did not even know the content of the website.
Many search engines have started to implement policies which attempt to cut down on the amount of spam submissions. This is good for webmasters who cannot afford to lose their current ranking. It also makes it easier for visitors who want to see websites that are genuinely relevant. It is good to remember that search engines are not evil, they simply need to weed out the spam and give users what they want, which is great content.
There is still some way to go when it comes to SEO. However, there is less spam, which makes it easier for users to find genuine information and websites. Webmasters need to learn how to keep up with these changes, and promote their websites accordingly. It is good to get a grasp of the SEO terminology in order to promote your website in a more effective manner.