Have you ever thought about the primary goal of your website? If you are selling products, it's probably to get the desired amount of sales. In order to get the desired amount of sales, however, the website needs to have a large amount of traffic.

This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. It is defined as the process of affecting or manipulating the online visibility of a website so that it gets as much unpaid traffic as possible.

SEO agencies are the main “culprits” when it comes to a well organized website which has a good ranking and gets organic results. An infographic created by the team behind SEO Tribunal shows that 70% to 80% of search engine users only focus on organic results; ignoring the paid ads. This clearly explains why marketing agencies are targeting organic results.

Page speed, quality of the content, bounce rate, backlinks, CTR, and SSL security are just some of the ranking factors, and that's why employing the right technique is of utmost importance.

SEO techniques can be divided into two categories: white hat which are welcomed by search engines, and black hat which are not approved by search engines.

The former try to produce results which are long lasting, without trying to deceive search engines. One of the characteristics of white hat is creating content for users and not for search engines. The content is created to be accessible to spiders and does not try to trick the algorithms.

On the other hand, black hat tries to improve rankings in disapproved ways by attempting to deceive search engine algorithms. Such sites usually employ a technique known as cloaking. It involves showing a different website to different users, depending on whether the user is a human or a search engine bot.

Luckily, black hat SEOs and their techniques are being increasingly intercepted and penalized by most of the search engines.

Willing to find out more about SEO? The following infographic is made up of 72 interesting facts and stats that are going to help you better understand how SEO works in 2018.