What is SEO? Origins and Authorities
Having a website for your brand or company is the basis of any digital presence, but the effort to create it is useless if you do not make sure that your audience finds it. Therefore, it is essential to make Google work for you. Let’s see what SEO is, why it is so important, and how search engines work.
Table of Contents
What is SEO Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is the shortening for Search Engine Optimization.
It is essential to be clear that SEO refers to organic results, that is, not paid. The complementary option (paying a cost per click to rank first for a given search) is known as SEM or Search Engine Marketing. To put a metaphor, SEO is similar to looking for good free parking next to the place where you have to go, while SEM would be the equivalent of paying for parking.
As with almost all corrections of online marketing, SEO has evolved a lot over the years. In its origins, web positioning techniques were very primitive and relied heavily on repeating some specific keywords, while now the user experience is much more critical.
The concepts and techniques that you should take into account within the world of SEO are:
SEO Consultant
The professionals are responsible for advising you, helping you, and developing your search engine positioning strategy.
Organic or Natural Positioning
It is the content strategy based on looking for the first organic positions in the search engines.
SEO Analysis
The part focused on analyzing SEO positioning data to improve and optimize content in real-time.
SEO Positioning or Web Positioning
They are other synonyms for organic or natural positioning. There are many types of techniques to achieve this goal.
Search Engine Optimization
The natural positioning in search engines. Each search is called a SERP.
Mobile-First Indexing
Google uses the information found on the mobile version of a website to compile search results.
SEO Marketing
All marketing techniques focused on improving organic search engine positioning.
SEO Strategy
We are planning techniques that will remain developed to improve web positioning.
Guest Blogging
Guest authors on a blog. It gives value and relevance if the writers are essential people in the sector.
Link Building
Strategy based on the search for inbound links to our website.
Blackhat SEO
SEO techniques penalized by search engines.
Whitehat SEO
SEO techniques endorsed by search engines are ethical and help develop a healthy and lasting SEO over time.
SEO agency
Companies specialized in search engine positioning.
SEO, and SEM
Differences between the two concepts related to appearing in search engines. Although SEO is organic positioning, and SEM is the payment strategy to appear with ads.
SEO on Google
SEO strategy focused on “liking” the most used search engine worldwide.
Local SEO
A positioning strategy focused on appearing in users’ queries locally (close to our location).
SEO Expert
Professional who has focused his career and experience on developing SEO strategies for clients.
Relevance in Web Positioning
A web page’s relevance can remain defined as its correspondence with a specific search: how well it responds to the user’s question or request. Google and other search engines’ goal is to provide the best possible service to users by offering relevant pages.
To control this factor, we use on-site SEO techniques dedicated to improving our website. Its objective is to make search engines understand your content and how it relates to user searches. For this, techniques such as keyword and URL optimization, reducing the loading time, improving user experience, etc., remain used.
Authority and SEO
Second, we have authority, which we can define as the fame of a website. The more “chooses” a website receives through links, the better it will be considered by search engines.
Off-site SEO techniques remain used, focusing on external factors to the website itself. What remains sought is to enhance the restrictions that define the popularity of a website for search engines: links to the website, presence in social networks, mentions in the media, how many users click on our website when it appears in their search results. Search, etc.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that we can also distinguish between White Hat SEO, which remains based on the practices recommended by the search engines themselves, and Black Hat SEO, which seeks to take advantage of the “gaps” to manipulate the results quickly. Although it can sometimes achieve short-term results, the Black Hat is never worth it in the long term.
What are the Origins of SEO?
Although it seems essential today, the truth is that Google did not appear until the year 96, and even today, there are countries in the world where it is not especially popular. The heritages of these types of tools, called search engines, dating back to the early 90s when the rise of web pages began.
Nearly all web pages have the same goal in common: attract quality traffic. Search engines are effective record ways to bring visitors potentially interested in the web subject in question. Webmasters realized this and began to compete with each other to rank higher in search engines. SEO was born.
Understanding SEO: Search Engines
To fully understand how SEO works, we have to see what happens when Google’s “spiders” roam the web. Its operation can remain summarized in two steps: crawling and indexing.
To understand how tracking works, think about the transportation system of a big city. Every web page or document (like a PDF or an image) is a stop. The search engine needs to crawl the entire city and do. It uses the best available path: links.
The link structure of the web connects the pages, so they are so crucial in optimization. Search engine bots use addresses from previous sitemaps and crawl to begin their search, and they navigate from link to link. In this way, they reach the documents stored on the web.
Not all websites are crawled in the same depth or for the same time. Spiders are especially attracted to new content, either because a site has remained built from scratch or because an existing one has remained updated. The loading time is also decisive.
The second step is indexing. Once these documents remain found, they take care of cracking their code and saving some “pieces” of it to retrieve when a user searches. As you can imagine, these “pieces” together represent an immense volume of information. For this reason, companies like Google have massive data centers where they store this information so that it is easily retrievable.
The criteria have evolved and are increasingly complex; In addition to keywords, factors such as publication date, whether they contain multimedia elements, the quality of the content, and many others remain taken into account.
And with these two steps, everything is ready for the user to do their search. It is not magic, and it is SEO.
Keys to SEO Positioning
Many factors influence the organic positioning, which has also evolved over time and with search engines’ advances. Let’s see ten big keys to the [SEO] on-page and off-page SEO
SEO-on Page: Work the Keyword Strategy
Any natural positioning strategy should start from a good keyword analysis, which considers aspects such as the volume of searches, competition level, seasonality, and the term’s relevance for the brand.
SEO-on Page: Optimize URLs
The URL should be short, easy to read, and indexed by search engines. Try to keep them as humble as thinkable and contain the main keyword of the page they refer . This last point is an essential part of web positioning. If the keyword remains not included, Google will not index the content correctly.
SEO on-page: Structure the Pages with Headings
The header tags (H1, H2, H3 …) are essential to organize the information within each text, both for search engines and users.
On-page SEO: Watch your Loading Times
Google penalizes pages with prolonged loading times, generating a high bounce rate and worsening the user experience. Therefore, a full technical audit should remain carried out to optimize all factors that influence loading speed. To facilitate this SEO positioning work, one of the most used tools to evaluate the loading speed of a page is PageSpeed Insights.
SEO off-Page: get Quality Inbound Links
The link building is a crucial factor in SEO positioning, but not everything goes. Always bet on natural techniques to generate quality links.
Off-Page SEO: do Video Marketing
The quality videos generate many links to your site, and if you hang them on YouTube, they will also remain displayed in Google search results.
Off-Page SEO: Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a beneficial technique for positioning yourself as an industry expert in [SEO] to generate inbound links to your website.
SEO off-Page: Create Infographics and other Graphic Elements
The richer your content, the easier it will be to generate inbound links organically. The infographics are one of the most popular formats, mainly if based on their studies.
SEO off-Page: Bet on Networking
In the end, what works best to improve the reputation of your website is to connect with other people in your sector and look for opportunities to collaborate. Everyone will win!
Main SEO Strategies
As positioning evolves, so do the SEO strategies that are applied. These are the main trends in [SEO] strategies that you should take into account for your website:
The voice searches. It remains estimated that in 2020 50% of searches will be made through voice, with technologies such as smart speakers or the Google assistant. It implies an essential change in how the positioning remains approached since voice searches tend to be longer, longer tail, and expressed more naturally.
The intentionality. Artificial intelligence is increasingly playing a more prominent role in positioning. Therefore, instead of blindly searching for keywords, search engines can detect a user’s intentionality even if they express their search in different ways. Thus, the focus should always be on the usefulness of the user and quality content.
Google’s zero position. Increasingly, Google searches incorporate a result in “position zero,” that is, that shows part of a page’s content as a direct answer to the user’s question. It is essential to include rich data on your website.
Mobile prioritization. For years, Google has decided the web-based ranking on its version for mobile phones, not computers. Therefore, there is no excuse for not having a perfectly optimized mobile website, either through a responsive design or AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
Brand awareness as an [SEO] factor. As Google’s algorithms get smarter, it seems factors like unlinking brand mentions could start to play a role. In the end, brand awareness and positioning are two mutually beneficial elements, so you have to work both well.
