SEO
“SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving a website’s visibility on search engines like Google. It helps your site rank higher in search results to attract more organic (non-paid) traffic.”
My Explanation
While the above is an academic or scholarly kind of definition, in my own words (with at least 4 years of experience in SEO and digital marketing), I would explain it as:
How easy is it for your business, website, or social profile to be found by your online audience.
It’s not just about search engines — it applies to social media platforms too. In this article, I’ll walk you through all the SEO terms, concepts, and strategies I’ve learned throughout my career.
1. On Page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages to improve their rankings and attract relevant traffic from search engines. It includes optimizing content, meta tags, internal linking, and proper keyword placement.
SEO personnel must master on-page SEO and have a basic understanding of HTML structure, especially how to craft SEO-friendly web pages, blog posts, and articles. Other skills involve keyword and topic research, and content structuring.
Essential tools: Google Analytics (GA), Google Search Console (GSC), Google Trends, and Keyword Planner.
Popular paid tools: Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Similarweb, Sitechecker, Moz, or Backlinko.
If your website is built with WordPress, SEO personnel should also know how to use SEO plugins such as Rank Math, Yoast SEO, or AIOSEO. These tools typically provide an SEO score based on your target keywords for each page.
2. Off Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to all SEO efforts done outside of your website to improve its search rankings and authority. This includes link building, digital press releases, guest blogging, content collaborations, and promoting your pages through social media or email.
In simple terms, it’s everything you do beyond your website to boost its credibility. (How to make search engines trust you’re the expert in your niche)
Key skills: identifying relevant websites with good domain authority and executing effective email outreach.
Suggest reading: How to get backlinks & Link Building Strategy
3. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s infrastructure to help search engines crawl, index, and render it more efficiently.
It typically involves tasks like monitoring Core Web Vitals, improving site speed, setting up 301 redirects, fixing broken links, and conducting full site audits to identify technical issues.
In layman’s terms, technical SEO works like a website doctor — it diagnoses what’s wrong with a site and helps fix those issues to keep it healthy and running smoothly.
Since many SEO professionals come from marketing backgrounds, they often need to collaborate closely with developers or the dev team to implement these technical changes.
Site Audit tools: Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, or other SEO platforms with their site crawlers.
Site speed monitoring tools: Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom Website Speed Test, and more.
4. Local SEO
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your business to appear in local search results, especially for location-based queries like “French restaurant near me” or “dentist in Bangsar South.”
It’s essential for brick-and-mortar businesses or any company with a physical location. By optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP), you can appear on Google Maps, Waze, and even in the Google Knowledge Panel.
Bonus tip: Get listed on local citation sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, or local directories to boost visibility.
Tools: Google Business Profile (GBP), local directories/ citation sites
Further Reading: Local SEO Guide for brick-and-mortar businesses
5. Image SEO
Image SEO is the practice of optimizing images to load faster, increase searchability, and enhance overall page performance and visibility on Google Image Search.
A SEO-friendly image should be under 200KB, compressed, and converted from traditional formats like JPEG or PNG to modern types like WebP or AVIF.
Always rename the file and add descriptive, diverse alt text before uploading — this helps with search visibility and future library management while avoiding keyword stuffing.
In short, Image Search Engine Optimization (Image SEO) is primarily concerned with image file size, file type, and image alt text.
Tools: image compressors and file type converters
6. International SEO
International SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank in different countries and languages.
It involves correctly implementing hreflang tags using standardized country and language codes (e.g., /en-us for U.S. visitors, /en-gb for U.K. visitors, /jp for Japanese users) to ensure the right content reaches the right audience.
Sometimes, it may also include optimizing for country-specific search engines like Baidu or Sogou (China), Yandex (Russia), and Naver (Korea).
Know-how: hreflang implementation.
Further Reading: Baidu SEO Tips
How to hire a decent seo specialist: tips for hiring manager
When hiring an SEO specialist, on-page SEO is a must. A skilled SEO professional should have at least 3 out of the 6 practical SEO skills mentioned above.
7. White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO refers to ethical, search-engine-approved practices that focus on long-term results and user experience.
It follows official guidelines from sources like Google Webmaster Guidelines, Bing Webmaster Guidelines, and is advocated by top industry names such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Neil Patel, Matt Diggity, Search Engine Journal, Rank Math, Yoast, and so on.
If you’re applying the six core SEO skills mentioned earlier, you’re already practicing White Hat SEO.
8. Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO refers to unethical or manipulative tactics used to trick search engines for quick rankings, often violating official guidelines.
Common practices include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and tactics like hiding keywords by matching font color to the background—an old-school trick used in the early 2000s to fool crawlers while staying invisible to human visitors.
Common Black Hat tactics:
Overloading a page with target keywords unnaturally to manipulate rankings.
Showing one version of a webpage to search engines and a different one to users.
Hiding text by using white font on a white background or placing links behind to game rankings.
Creating low-quality pages that are only designed to rank for specific keywords and redirect users elsewhere.
This tactic involves acquiring backlinks from manipulative or non-genuine sources to artificially boost a website’s domain authority and search rankings.
🔗 Link Farms:
- A link farm is a group of websites that all link to each other for the sole purpose of inflating link popularity. These links usually:
- Come from unrelated or low-quality websites.
- Have no real content or user value.
- Exist only to manipulate search engine algorithms.
Google’s algorithm (especially since the Penguin update) penalizes websites that use link farms, as it sees this behavior as an attempt to game the system. These links are unnatural, and once detected, the site may lose rankings or even be deindexed.
Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
A PBN is a collection of expired or low-traffic blogs owned by the same person or group, set up with the intent to pass backlinks to a target site.
How it works:
- The site owner buys expired domains that still have backlinks and authority.
- They republish basic content on them and insert links pointing to their money site (main website).
- This artificially inflates the “link authority” of the target site.
While PBNs might provide a short-term ranking boost, they are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Once detected, both the PBN and the target site may be penalized. Google now uses advanced signals and machine learning to detect link patterns, ownership footprints, and hosting overlaps.
Copying content from other sites without adding value or originality.
Posting spammy links in blog comments to get backlinks.
Using misleading meta titles or descriptions to attract clicks that don’t match the actual content.
Example of keyword stuffing + hidden text
Try to highlight the below:
I sell dark chocolate dark chocolate dark chocolate dark chocolate dark chocolate dark chocolate dark chocolate dark chocolate dark chocolate dark chocolate.
You can’t see, but the bot can crawl. 😏These tactics have not worked anymore since the “Panda” algorithm update.
Further reading: Google Algorithm History
Grey/Black Hat SEO Tools:
Indexification
A tool used to force search engines to index backlinks more quickly by submitting them through multiple pinging and indexing services.One Hour Indexing
A paid indexing service that claims to get backlinks indexed within an hour by pushing them through high-frequency crawlers and URL submission techniques.Money Robot Submitter
An automated SEO software that builds link pyramids and submits content to thousands of sites (wikis, blogs, web 2.0, etc.) to create backlinks — often used in aggressive link-building strategies.RankerX
Another automation tool that creates and posts content across various platforms to generate backlinks. It’s often used to simulate link growth, but falls under risky SEO territory if not handled carefully.
9. Grey Hat SEO
Grey Hat SEO refers to techniques that fall between White Hat (ethical) and Black Hat (manipulative) SEO. These methods aren’t clearly against search engine guidelines, but they carry some risk.
Grey Hat Tactics:
- Using expired domains to build authority and redirect traffic.
- Buying old websites with existing backlinks and repurposing them.
- Spinning content to create semi-original articles.
- Excessive interlinking across multiple owned sites.
- Mass guest posting with keyword-rich anchor text.
My take on the grey hat faction is that it’s kind of like KL-style wonton noodles versus Singapore-style wonton noodles — same noodles, same wonton, just cooked differently, especially the char siew. People just label it however they like.
10. Semantic SEO
Semantic SEO is the practice of optimizing content around the meaning and intent behind search queries, rather than just exact keywords. It focuses on context, relationships between topics, and delivering deeper, more relevant information.
Common Semantic SEO Methods:
- Using topic clusters and content hubs.
- Targeting search intent (informational, transactional, navigational, commercial).
- Adding related keywords, synonyms, and entities (like people, places, and brands).
- Structuring content with schema markup for better understanding by search engines.
- Answering People Also Ask questions and building FAQ sections.
This AI hype category emerged recently (in 2024), following the rise of tools like ChatGPT-4o, Google Gemini, Google AI Overview, Perplexity AI, and Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE).
Some refer to this trend as ChatGPT SEO, LLM SEO (Large Language Model Optimization), GEO, or simply AI SEO. They have the same meaning.
Influential SEO figures like Matt Diggity, Brian Dean, and Neil Patel commonly use the term “GEO” (Generative Engine Optimization), so I’ll stick with GEO.
11. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), also known as LLM SEO or AI SEO, follows the same core principles as traditional Google SEO—but applied to AI-powered search results.
It focuses on increasing visibility across multiple AI channels and optimizing your site or brand for platforms like Google’s AI Overview, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Grok
The goal is to ensure your expertise is directly cited in AI-generated answers, thereby improving your visibility in large language models (LLMs).
What is SGE (Search Generative Experience)
SGE (Search Generative Experience) is Google’s AI-powered search feature that uses generative AI to provide quick, conversational answers at the top of search results. It helps users get a summarized response without needing to click through multiple links.
12. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
This SEO faction focuses on creating content that directly addresses the questions users type into various search engines, especially for voice searches and digital assistants.
The goal is to provide fast, accurate answers in a clear format. To succeed with AEO, it’s important to consider that your website’s user experience, well-structured, easy-to-navigate content is more likely to be featured as a top answer by search engines.
Some popular examples of answer engines include:
Google AI Overview
Google’s search engine is one of the most popular search engines in the world. It uses natural language processing and machine learning to provide direct answers to user queries on the results page.
Bing
Bing is another popular search engine that uses artificial intelligence to provide direct answers. It also provides rich results, including images, videos, and maps.
Siri
Siri is a voice-activated answer engine that is available on Apple devices.
Alexa
Alexa is a voice-activated answer engine that is available on Amazon devices.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an open-source answer engine that uses natural language processing to provide user queries. It is designed to be easy to use and customizable.
13. YouTube SEO
YouTube SEO is the process of optimizing your videos and channel to rank higher in YouTube search results and recommended feeds.
Common YouTube SEO Tactics:
- Using target keywords in titles, descriptions, and tags.
- Creating engaging thumbnails and high-retention content.
- Adding closed captions and transcripts.
- Using timestamps and proper video structuring.
- Encouraging likes, comments, shares, and subscriptions.
- Optimizing your channel layout and playlists for discoverability.
14. Social Media SEO
Social Media SEO refers to optimizing your content and presence on social platforms to increase visibility, engagement, and traffic to your website or brand.
Unlike search engines, social media platforms have fewer algorithmic ranking factors and rely heavily on user signals — also known as social signals — to determine visibility. These signals include:
Likes
Comments
Shares
Saves
Number of followers or subscribers
Karma on Reddit
Additionally, frequent brand mentions through user-generated content (UGC) by KOLs and influencers can significantly boost your brand’s visibility and credibility across platforms.
Well-strategized use of hashtags (#) also contributes a bit to visibility. Tools: Hashtag Tracker
15. E-commerce SEO
E-commerce SEO is the process of optimizing an online store to increase its visibility in search results, attract more organic traffic, and drive sales.
Common E-commerce SEO Tactics:
- Optimizing product titles, descriptions, and images with relevant keywords.
- Creating SEO-friendly category pages.
- Implementing structured data (schema markup) for products, prices, and reviews.
- Adding user-generated reviews for trust and fresh content.
- Avoid duplicate content, especially from product variations or tag/filter-based URLs, by implementing canonical tags.
- Ensure proper use of breadcrumbs for better site structure & navigation.
16. Mobile SEO
Mobile SEO is the process of optimizing your website to provide a smooth and user-friendly experience on mobile devices, ensuring it performs well on both mobile search results and usability standards.
Common Mobile SEO Tactics:
- Use a responsive design that adapts to all screen sizes.
- Improve page speed and reduce mobile load times.
- Ensure tap targets (buttons/links) are large and spaced correctly.
- Avoid intrusive pop-ups that disrupt mobile browsing.
- Use mobile-friendly fonts and layout for readability.
- Test performance with Mobile-Friendly Test tool and monitor via Google Search Console’s mobile usability report.
- Implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to deliver lightning-fast loading, especially for blogs or news content.
17. App Store Optimization (ASO)
ASO (App Store Optimization) is the process of improving an app’s visibility and ranking in app stores like the Apple App Store and Google Play to increase downloads and user engagement.
Common ASO Tactics:
- Use relevant keywords in your app title and description.
- Design an eye-catching app icon and compelling screenshots.
- Write a clear and engaging app description that highlights key features and benefits.
- Encourage positive user reviews and ratings.
- Use localized content for different regions/languages.
- Regularly update your app to stay relevant and improve performance.
- Monitor performance using tools like App Annie, Sensor Tower, or Google Play Console.
18. Voice Search Optimization (VSO)
Common VSO Tactics:
- Focus on natural, conversational language in your content.
- Optimize for long-tail and question-based keywords (e.g., “What is the best coffee shop near me?”).
- Create FAQ sections to directly answer common voice queries.
- Improve mobile-friendliness, since most voice searches happen on mobile.
- Aim to rank in featured snippets, which are often used in voice responses.
19. Negative SEO
Negative SEO refers to unethical practices aimed at harming a competitor’s search engine rankings, rather than improving your own.
Negative SEO Tactics:
- Creating toxic backlinks pointing to a competitor’s site.
- Hacking or injecting malware into their website.
- Generating fake negative reviews to hurt their reputation.
- Crawling a competitor’s site aggressively to overload their server or slow it down (also called forceful crawling or server stress).
Warning Signs of a Negative SEO Attack
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Sudden spike in spammy backlinks from irrelevant or low-quality domains.
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Unexpected drop in search rankings or organic traffic.
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Duplicate versions of your content showing up across other domains.
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Google Search Console reports manual penalties or security issues.*
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Unusual page load times or server performance issues.
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An increase in fake negative reviews on Google, Yelp, or Trustpilot.
How to Protect Your Site from Negative SEO
Regularly monitor your backlink profile using tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google Search Console.
Set up email alerts in Google Search Console for sudden issues.
Use disavow files to tell Google to ignore toxic backlinks.
Keep your site secure with SSL, strong passwords, and firewall protection.
Use tools like Copyscape to check for plagiarized content.
Monitor your brand mentions and reviews to detect fake reviews early.
20. Parasite SEO
Parasite SEO is a tactic where you publish content on high-authority third-party websites to quickly rank in search results and drive traffic, often bypassing the need to rank your site.
Parasite SEO Tactics:
- Posting keyword-rich articles on high-authority platforms like Medium, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, or Google Sites.
- Embedding affiliate links, CTAs, or backlinks to your main site within the content.
- Targeting low-competition keywords to rank quickly using the host site’s domain authority.
- Publishing review-style or comparison content with commercial intent.
- Leveraging platforms that allow DoFollow links or indexable pages.
I spent a few days putting this article together, with input from SEO experts to make sure it’s accurate and practical. You can treat it like an SEO encyclopedia or dictionary — the easiest way to use it is to just hit Ctrl + F and search for the term you want to learn more about.