What is Seo and How it works

The first search engines emerged in the early 90s. Until Google appeared in 1996 many were created, including Yahoo. The Web boom began. People realized that you could really make money with them. So they came to the conclusion that they needed to attract traffic. What was the best method of attracting traffic? The search engines. At that time the owners of the webs began to think how they could reach the first positions.

SEO focuses on organic search results, that is, what is not paid:

Anyway, let’s go to what matters and the reason why (I think) you are reading this chapter:

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website in the organic results of the different search engines. SEO is one of the “disciplines” that has changed the most in recent years. We just have to look at the large number of updates that have been Penguin and Panda, and how they have turned around 180 degrees to what was understood by SEO until recently.

Although there are thousands of factors in which a search engine is based to position a page or another one could say that there are two basic factors: authority and relevance

· The authority is basically the popularity of a website. The more popular the information, the more valuable it is. This factor is what a search engine takes more into account since it is based on the user’s own experience. The more content is shared, the more users have found it useful.

Relevance is the relationship a page has with a given search. This is not simply that a page contains a lot of times the term sought (in the beginning it was like that) but a search engine is based on hundreds of on-site factors to determine this.

SEO can be divided into two major groups:

On-site: SEO on-site worries about relevance. It ensures that the web is optimized so that the search engine understands the main thing, which is the content of it. Within SEO On-site we would include keyword optimization, load time, user experience, code optimization and format of URLs.

Off-site: SEO off-site is the part of SEO work that focuses on factors external to the web page in which we work. The most important factors in off-site SEO are the number and quality of the links, presence in social networks, mentions in local media, brand authority and performance in search results, that is, the CTR our customers have. results in a search engine. Sure you are thinking that all this is very well and that it is very interesting but that you are here to know why you need SEO on your website and what benefits you will get if you integrate it into your online strategy.

Once we know what SEO is, we must differentiate whether or not we follow the “recommendations” of the search engine.

Black Hat SEO or White Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO: Black hat is the attempt to improve the search engine positioning of a web page through unethical techniques or that contradict the guidelines of the search engine. Some examples of Black Hat SEO are Cloaking, Spinning, SPAM in forums and blog comments, or Keyword Stuffing. Black hat can provide benefits in the short term, but it is generally a risky strategy, without continuity in the long term and that does not add value.

White Hat SEO: Consists of all those ethically correct actions that meet the guidelines of the search engines to position a web page and the search results. Since search engines give greater importance to the pages that best respond to a user’s search, White Hat understands the techniques that seek to make a search engine page more relevant by providing value to its users.

Why is SEO important?

The most important reason why SEO is necessary is because it makes your website more useful for both users and search engines. Although these cannot yet see a web page as a human does. SEO is necessary to help search engines understand what each page is about and whether or not it is useful for users.

Now let’s give an example to see the clearest things:

We have an electronic commerce dedicated to the sale of children’s books. Well, for the term “coloring pictures” there are about 673,000 searches per month. Assuming that the first result that appears after doing a Google search gets 22% clicks ( CTR = 22%), we would get about 148,000 visits per month.

Now, how much are those 148,000 visits worth? Well, if for that term the average cost per click is USD 0.20, we are talking about more than 29,000 / month. This only in USA, if we have a business oriented to several countries, every hour 1.4 billion searches are made in the world. Of those searches, 70% of clicks are on organic results and 75% of users do not reach the second page. If we consider all this, we see that there are many clicks per month for the first result.

SEO is the best way for your users to find you through searches in which your website is relevant. These users look for what you offer them. The best way to reach them is through a search engine.

How do search engines work?

The operation of a search engine can be summarized in two steps: tracking and indexing.

Tracking

A search engine crawls the web tracking what are called bots. These scroll through all the pages through the links. Hence the importance of a good link structure. As would any user when browsing the content of the Web, they pass from one link to another and collect data about those web pages that they provide to their servers.

The crawling process begins with a list of web addresses of previous crawls and sitemaps provided by other web pages. Once they access these webs, the bots look for links to other pages to visit them. The bots are especially attracted to new sites and to changes in existing webs.

It is the bots themselves that decide which pages to visit, how often and how long they will crawl that web, that’s why it’s important to have an optimal loading time and updated content.

It is very common that in a web page you need to restrict the tracking of some pages or certain content to avoid that they appear in the search results. For this you can tell search engine bots not to crawl certain pages through the ” robots.txt ” file .

Indexing

Once a bot has crawled a website and collected the necessary information, these pages are included in an index. There they are ordered according to their content, their authority and their relevance. In this way, when we make a query to the search engine it will be much easier to show us the results that are more related to our query.

At first the search engines were based on the number of times a word was repeated. When doing a search they traced those terms in their index to find which pages they had in their texts, positioning better the one that more times had it repeated. Currently, they are more sophisticated and base their indexes on hundreds of different aspects. The date of publication, if they contain images, videos or animations, microformats, etc. They are some of those aspects. Now they give more priority to the quality of the content.

Once the pages are tracked and indexed, the time comes in which the algorithm acts :algorithms are the computer processes that decide which pages appear before or after the search results. Once the search is done, the algorithms check the indexes. This way they will know which are the most relevant pages taking into account the hundreds of positioning factors. And all this happens in a matter of milliseconds.

Characteristics of doing a good SEO

Do a correct job of SEO on your website, is the way to get users to find the products or services you offer through specific searches by keywords . This will also help search engines understand what each page and article of your website is about while determining its relevance.

The keywords or keywords help to generate reputation and position yourself as an expert in a specific topic before the search engines. However, when writing about SEO optimization, it is common to make mistakes such as writing repeating the keywords without any coherence as if we were writing for robots.

Keep in mind that the search engines have advanced and there is no need to repeat the keyword a thousand times to achieve positioning . Use synonyms, be sure to make a readable and interesting text and they will more easily perceive that yours is a quality article that deserves to occupy the top positions.

Of course, do not neglect the contextual research on the subject on which you are going to write. I recommend you make an arduous market research that allows you to find the ideal keywords for your company and its level of influence.

How to recognize a good keyword? Because it is widely sought after but not saturated. In those intermediate spaces between the popularity of a keyword and the saturation of the market, is where you will find the opportunity of positioning.

For this, you must take into account the following SEO positioning actions:

Constant Analysis: keyword search, search trends, traffic evaluation and links to content related to your brand, product or service.

Teamwork with all involved: at this point it is important to bring together all the members of the project, especially those of web development, since they will be in charge of setting up the site in an easy way so that search engines track them quickly.

Know the objectives of the Marketing strategy: make sure you want to achieve with the proposed strategy and how they can be aligned with your positioning strategy.

Learn about web analytics: analyze the different web indicators to reinforce the conversion rates and share the information with the Sales and Marketing team to reinforce those low points.

Constant improvement: not everything remains in the web launch, after that there are many more things to do, always improve the user experience as this will help people who interact on the web to find information faster. In addition, a good interface will help search engines integrate better information such as titles, texts, videos or images and, therefore, achieve a faster product positioning.

Provides valuable content: both users and search engines prioritize unique and relevant content, since the way the engines index your information is through robots that do detect duplicate content; They usually omit it from their listings and penalize the website. In this sense, the Pillar Pages, or Pillar Pages can help you. In addition, you can always offer premium content in them to capture leads.

Typical problems of SEO in a web launch

Getting positioned in the first places in the search engines, when a person searches for a keyword, is the challenge. To gain better positions in a short time, you should avoid these typical SEO problems:

Duplicate pages: This happens when content management systems (CMS) are used that often copy the pages and are not correctly configured. This generates the opposite effect to the desired one, since the search engines will take it as an error and will penalize you for it by decreasing your positioning.

A structure of poor links: Build a relevant content but, at the same time, have a good structure of internal and external links, which allows the user to learn more. This will also help you build reputation and increase the diffusion of your own content.

Code lock The programming team must correctly configure all the pages that the search engines are going to track. That is why the configuration of the robots.txt document is very important.

That the content is not relevant or unique: This is a serious error because the more exclusive the content, the easier it will be to share. Search engines demand unique content today . In addition, users are increasingly informed. Sure you will remember if the content has seen it somewhere else.

Unusual terms I recommend developing the content with friendly words and not using many technicalities. You must put yourself in the user’s place: analyze what words he will use to find what he needs. The better you adapt to the language of your prospects, it will be much easier for you to be found thanks to your positioning.

Taking into account these recommendations of how to make a good SEO , it is also important to know what are those elements that an optimized page needs.

• Generate unique content
• Provide an incredible UX
• Target by keyword
• Build content designed to be shared on social networks
• Think of multi-device content
• Accessible information for robots
• Optimize web assets (author, goals, schemas, site map

However, to see the results requires time and patience, since it will depend a lot on how you are executing the actions that will complement it (analysis of keywords, analysis of your audience, develop a good user experience, among others). And you, what actions are you executing to have a good positioning of the contents of your website?

The main reasons why SEO is important for your company are the following:

• Multiply your visibility
• Improve the appearance and usefulness of your web content
• It is a long-term investment
• Significantly monetize the web
• Increase the impact on social networks
• Provide confidence and credibility to your business

In addition, the results of your SEO campaign can be measured and optimized , so it will be possible to evaluate the results of all the techniques and factors involved in your SEO, to see which are giving the best results and correct the course in case of need.

With all this, if you have not used SEO to optimize your website and make your business take off, do not expect much more; millions of potential customers are ready to visit your website.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)