What is SEO is a frequently asked question and there is a very short answer for it: SEO = search engine optimization. However, if you really want to know what is SEO and learn how to practice it than I’d suggest that you read further.

SEO is practiced by bloggers and professionals to bring traffic to their websites or their customers websites for free from search engines, and when I say search engines I mean Google, because that’s where the big traffic comes from. If you want to practice SEO you must first understand what is SEO, and how destructive can SEO be if you use it unwisely.

There are 2 types of SEO that you can practice, white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEO is all about getting your site viral and getting organic backlinks from bloggers and other sites, which is extremely hard and time consuming while black hat SEO is about using blasting software and automated link building tools to spam blogs, forums and web 2-0 sites with spun content and “that’s nice” comments. Black hat SEO is wrong, and won’t get you anywhere in the long term and white hat SEO is extremely hard to execute and you need to make your site viral before you can receive those high quality contextual organic backlinks.

So which type of SEO should you practice? Well I’m not here to tell you which one to choose, I’m here to make you understand what is SEO and to present all your options so you can choose which one suits you best. An optimum option would be to combine white hat SEO and black hat SEO and get faster results for longer term duration. This is called gray hat SEO, and it is used by most of the professionals that have learned that automation and spun content will never trick Google but in order to gain organic links you have to give your site a starting bump up the SERPs.

What is gray hat SEO? Well, it is way better than black hat SEO and less luck-based than white hat SEO. Basically, after you finish your on-page SEO and content writing you should start building backlinks that look as natural as possible. How should you build those backlinks? Well, there are various methods depending on your budget or time to spend and I’m going to list them below along with their advantages and disadvantages.

Blog Commenting and Forum Posting

Blog commenting and forum posting might get you valuable high quality links but it’s very time consuming and with a low success rate. Of course you can outsource this to a VA on odesk and save you time but it will add extra expenses to your SEO campaign.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking can bring extra link juice but it is not enough to rank medium competition keywords. If you choose to use social bookmarking you must either target low competition keywords or use an extra backlinking method to help. There are certain tools that can help you automate the bookmarking process, but don’t automate it too much because you risk falling into the dark side.

Private Blog Networks

Private blog networks can help you achieve good rankings for almost any keyword, depending on your niche and budget. There are a couple of popular private blog networks, and they’re all good. If you decide on using blog networks than I’d suggest that you pick at least 2 for diversifying your inbound links a little, as some of them offer homepage links and other inner page links.

So what is SEO after all? Well, it’s 90% link building and 10% planning and on-page optimization. Subscribe to my blog and you’ll be the first to know about new link building tools and fresh SEO tips as soon as they hit the online world.