What is SEO?

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Google’s search algorithms change frequently behind closed doors. Without understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) there is a good chance few people are actually seeing your site when they search with relevant keywords. This article explains the nuances of SEO and keywords.

What is SEO?

SEO is a term that refers to the optimization for the search engines. Considering that there are many websites that inhabit the internet it is thanks to SEO that these manage to get in the fight for good rankings in the search engines. Everyone wants to appear first on the first page of Google when someone searches using a keyword. On average, users will extend the search to the fifth page until they give up and change the search query. Therefore, it is important that the website is well positioned in the search engine so that it receives more visitors or potential customers.

In this way, the main goal of getting started with an SEO strategy is to be able to generate more organic traffic to a website. However, normally you only start to see results in the medium to long-term.

Googlebot and page rankings

Before we begin to squeeze SEO we need to start by addressing how Google ranks pages. Googlebot is a robot created by Google that runs through all the websites and their respective pages, storing them on their servers. By navigating through them, Googlebot can understand the characteristics and type of content of those websites with the help of keywords and position them according to their relevance.

Keywords

When it comes to choosing keywords, they should be related to the theme of the content and should be long tail rather than head tail. That is, instead of choosing just the word cream (head tail), a word that is widely used and widespread, and therefore there is a lot of competition associated, it is more pertinent to use the keyword body moisturizing cream (long tail), which should not have much competition.

To check if a keyword has a good search volume and little competition, one can always consult google adwords in the part of the keyword planner and there are all the information about the keyword queried.
The keywords must be present in the content but not in a repeated way, as they end up being penalized by Google Hummingbird, a new algorithm that perceives semantics and text construction. In order to avoid its repetition, it is more relevant in Google’s eyes to use secondary keywords that are related to the primary.

Advantages of SEO

– Increased organic traffic to the website;
– Improves the positioning in the search engines;
– It can be a competitive advantage, compared to the competition, in the digital world;
– Few associated costs, as it is not necessary to invest in paid advertising to get users to visit the website;
– Increased number of visitors or potential customers to the website;
– Increased income when using affiliate marketing strategy.

On-page SEO

The on-page SEO is all that can be optimized within the page:

  • Content – It is important to produce relevant content that meets the interests of users. Otherwise, if Google gets the information that people spend little time on the site and the bounce rate is high, it might penalize that website. The content should be relevant and enlightening, so it can not be too small. Full content captures the user’s attention and increases their on-page time, which increases their relevance.
  • Content Titles – In addition to having to include the keyword, content titles allow search engines to understand what the text is about. It is also through the titles that they perceive the priority of the contents, since not all have the same relevance. Thus, the main title should be H1 and the captions H2 or H3, depending on their relevance.
  • Page Title – The title of the page in the search engine should indicate the subject of the content and must also have the keyword. Must be between 55 and 70 characters.
  • Meta Description – Here should be a short description of the content as well as the same keyword that is present in the page title. The description should be no longer than 320 characters and should be appealing enough to prompt the user to click.
  • URL – The URL allows the user to understand what the content is about, as it must also have the associated keyword. In this way, Google can see if this URL is friendly, not only for having the keyword, but also for being short and objective. The words must be separated by hyphens.
  • ALT Attributes and Titles in Images – It is important to associate the keyword with the images so that the search engine perceives that they are linked to a certain theme, since they can not read pixels. In this way, the content is better positioned in the search engines and also allows blind people, users of screen readers, to identify the subject of the image, even without seeing it. ALT attributes and titles are also good for when a website loads but the images do not.

Off-page SEO

The off-page SEO are factors that although they cannot be controlled directly, they can be controlled indirectly. These are outside of the website but are associated with it.

  • External Links – One way to position ourselves well in search engines is to start by using a strategy called link building. It is relevant to insert the link of our website in other websites that already have a good positioning in the search engines, either through guest blogging or other strategies. These actions improve our position in the eyes of Google and also increase the external recognition of our website. The more external links a website has, the more recognition it will have on a certain subject.
  • Internal Links – These are the links that are inside the website and that direct the user to another page in the same website. It allows other pages to be equally visited and shows to the search engine that pages with more internal links are the most important in the website.
  • Social Networks – It is important to have a presence in social networks, because search engines also attach importance to this. Social networks must be associated with the website, and the more interactions they have, the greater their importance.

How to do link building?

As already mentioned above, link building helps a website improve its search engine rankings and its authority over a particular subject. Imagine that you are an actor and that your acting skills are

recommended by a Hollywood actress. This person has greater authority on the subject and therefore her recommendation would be more important than one by a friend of yours. The same is true with link building.
The factors to take into account to carry out the link building are the following:

  • Quantity – The quantity refers to the number and diversity of domains linking to us. If a site has multiple external links from only one website, it will not be so relevant if you have multiple links coming from multiple sites.
  • Quality – The websites that link to us should have a good position in Google search engine, so that it positions us equally well. They should also have other quality links that are not just spam.
  • Number of Links in a Page – When a page’s already linking to a lot of other pages, less value will be assigned to us if we choose to link building with it.
  • Domain – Each domain has a value and older domains have more value, so you have to invest in sites with such domains.
  • URL – Links must have a URL that is accessible to search engines.
  • Type of Links – Text links have more value than image links because search engines can not read the image, only the ALT attributes.
  • Anchor Text – It is through the anchor text that search engines can identify what kind of subject the link is about, it is a good way to include the keyword there.

Page Load Time

If a page takes too long to load, it can annoy the user and cause the user to leave the page. This will motivate the search engine to give your website less importance, and penalize it in its ranking.
A page should not take more than 4 seconds to load, more than that

and it loses priority over other websites that load their contents faster. One way to help speed up a website is to compress the images, making them lighter.

Optimization for Mobile Devices

From 2015 until now, Google has made an effort to promote the use of responsive websites by assigning advantages in search rankings to those websites. In our blog, we talked about the importance of a good mobile performance strategy, however, we return to its importance, since more than half of the world’s population accesses Internet browsers from mobile devices.

One of the most important features of website optimization for mobile devices is the use of Structured Data on the web page.
Few people properly make this association, since it is seen only as a beneficiary for desktop-optimized websites, however, in this information age, where the user wants and can access information instantly, the supply of information quickly can be seen as a competitive advantage.

In short, what Structured Data does is tell google what is the content present on your website (content type, etc.) so that when Google receives a Search query, it will show that information in the area of the meta-description or even in search results, in a frame carefully selected by Google.

Websites like Wikipedia have been using this technology for some time, increasing the speed with which users access the information they want.

Google Search Console

This is perhaps the most undervalued tool there is, since much of the time is forgotten by users at the expense of its best known “siblings”: google analytics and google adwords, however it is as or more fundamental than these two tools.

It offers the possibility of knowing the research terms that led to the most visits to our website (useful to use when studying keywords to bet on our website); the possibility of monitoring and adding a sitemap (and here we can divide a general sitemap into image sitemaps and even video sitemaps) and a robot.txt file to the website and perform its maintenance.

Let’s say we’ve just created a page on google, however, it usually takes google around 2 weeks to properly index that page in your search engine. With search console, this time can be shortened to within a few hours, as it also has a feature to speed up the indexing process of newly created

pages. If we want to know what kind of errors exist in the indexation of the pages of our website we can also do it using this tool.

Google recently announced a new version of the platform that will allow us to access a larger set of data and information.

In conclusion, if you still do not give importance to this tool maybe it’s time to change the mindset, or hire an agency that knows how to extract all the data that this tool provides and optimize your company’s presence in search engines.

A / B Testing

Another of the tools that Google provides us is Google Optimize. Its features include the possibility of allowing the user to perform A / B tests on their website, in order to extract data from users who visit the website. This type of information is very important to understand what kind of content on our website we should optimize and take advantage of, to increase our conversion rates.

A / B tests are small changes that we make in the layout / content of our website and then we test with the end user to see which of these changes works best for a future implementation. Let’s say that we want to measure the conversion % of users who click in a certain call-to-action on our website, currently with a green background we will test what happens if we install a yellow background. What the software does is show users different versions of the website and collect the conversion data according to the purpose we have defined. This allows us to gather more insights from customers and make use of the information for the benefit of our online presence.

The best of this software from Google is that it allows you to make these changes to a website without having to have any programming knowledge, an excellent tool for digital marketing professionals with a lack in the areas of web development.

Local SEO

Another area that we should bet on is Local SEO, that is, the optimization of our local SEO, so that we are relevant to customers looking for services like what we offer in a given location. The fact that we have a fully updated and optimized Business Listing in our Google My Business account can already bring huge returns in terms of recognition and traffic to our website, since there are still few companies that give the due importance to this topic.

When a customer searches for a particular type of service in a given location, Google tends to show not only results that are more optimized but also those with better reviews, so the next time a customer is satisfied with your service ask him to leave a review in this platform, and you will see that you will begin to give more importance to this topic as soon as results start to appear.

In addition, there is now the possibility of creating publications through the “Business Listing”, making your business achieving greater relevance in Google’s search engine, almost functioning as a kind of social network in which companies battle each other for the attention of the public (all this on Google Maps). Well played Google!