SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process and it is nothing more than the optimization of a web page so that it appears in the first results of search engines such as Google. They are the results known as organic, that is, they are not paid ads.
You can understand, in this case, the term optimization as a set of techniques and strategies that are carried out both inside and outside a website. A search engine is nothing more than a program or software that allows users to search for any information on the internet. In addition, it filters and offers users the best results in each search, which means that it selects the best web pages on the Internet and displays them ordered by relevance.
The objective of SEO positioning is none other than to make a website appear in the first results for certain search terms. For example, if I am the owner of a restaurant, I would like my business to appear in Internet searches such as “best restaurants”, “restaurant near me”, “restaurant in my city”, or any other similar meaning. Working on web positioning would, in this case, make my business website appear in the top positions for those search terms. Search terms are called keywords. A keyword is basically a word or group of words that express a highly significant concept. For example, "restaurant in New York" would be a keyword, that is, anything that a person can search for in a search engine like Google or others and that has a meaning or represents a concept.
Search engines are in charge of answering the questions or queries made by Internet users by providing the most appropriate results in each case. They can be understood as a library, since they collect, organize and filter the results that, later, will satisfy the need or questions of the users. Therefore, search engines will always show the most relevant results in each case. To attribute this relevance to each web page, they have an internal system called an algorithm, and each search engine has its own algorithm. To choose which web pages appear in the first or last positions, this algorithm is based on many factors, such as:
● Content of the website
● Internal titles and search engine titles
● Number of websites that link to a website
● SEO optimization of the website
● Many more technical aspects
The more optimized factors a website has, the more trust Google will give it and the more relevance it will give it in search results. To achieve the highest possible level of optimization, a professional from an SEO agency will ensure that your business's website appears in the first results using the most appropriate techniques in each case.
Although each search engine has its own requirements and processes when it comes to positioning a website, there are some prescriptive and essential ones.
TECHNICAL SEO
The technical part of SEO is very important since it is always thought that only with good content or with many incoming links will we be able to position our website. This is not quite true. There are many factors at play that will make our web page above or below the others, such as: how fast the web loads, the ease with which we allow search engines to crawl our web and the ease with which they index our pages to their indexes.
It is very important when talking about technical SEO to be aware that there are many elements that encompass this aspect in order to turn our website into a valid alternative both for search engines and users. If a web page is slow, and it takes more than 2 seconds for the user to display results or load the header images, it is very likely that they will leave. This will not only hurt the web page in question with a visitor who entered but did not even bother to navigate the page, causing the content, however valuable, to be wasted.
But it will be indicative for search engines like Google, which by the way, knows everything, that users just enter that page and flee in terror. This will mean that in this case, Google will detect that our content is not good enough to position us in high ranks since users do not show interest. A fact that will cause the penalty of lowering positions and therefore less target audience will access our content. And all this is only because the web page is not well optimized in terms of loading, either due to problems with the images or a poor server that is not capable of adjusting to our needs.
It is also very important to keep search engines up to date on our changes. Although it is true that by themselves, these systems crawl the web in search of keeping it as up-to-date as possible with the contents of all the web pages, they are not capable of carrying out this process from one moment to another, nor from one night to the next. morning. That is why the obligation of the person in charge of being the webmaster of a web page is to send, from time to time, or when a great change or introduction of content occurs, this data to tools such as the Google Search Console to let you know there has been an update to our page and track it to keep users who find us up to date.
ON-PAGE SEO
On-Page SEO is what could be understood as the visual section, the face of the web page. It is the area that optimizes both the web content and its HTML. It is a combination of SEO techniques prepared directly so that the contents of the web are positioned ahead of those of the competition. Here I would enter from the optimization of titles and descriptions to the structure of titles and content on each page of a website.
For example, in many cases, web pages are not well structured in terms of the hierarchy of the different elements that appear. As a general rule, a page usually has a single tag called h1, or what is the same, the main title. This will serve to indicate to the different search engines that the main theme of that page, the keyword for which you want to position is that. However, you can have as many h2 as you want, which would be secondary titles but are related to the main theme. If from this h2, a drop-down is selected, for example, we can give it the importance of h3, and so on.
Another fundamental aspect of on-page SEO that has to be worked on, and adhered to in the letter, is concordance with the URLs. A URL, in case you are a bit confused or clueless, refers to the web address at that moment. Therefore, if we have a website and we enter the flower sale section, our URL has to refer to that, being sale-of-flowers or sale-flowers the most correct, and not sale-sunflowers-roses-poppies-lilies... and a long etcetera. It must be short and concise.
As a fact, most search engines do not take prepositions into account when determining or filtering content, the same thing that happens with keywords.
OFF-PAGE SEO
It is the set of SEO strategies that are carried out outside the website itself. In general, they are linking strategies that try to get other web pages in the sector to talk about our website. This is useful because Google or other search engines interpret that people are talking about our brand and attribute some relevance to it.
To briefly delve into off-page SEO, note that the quality of the pages that link to us will make our website gain notoriety, and with its positions, within the different search results that compete for the same keywords as us.
For example, a page like Wikipedia or the website of a national newspaper will always have greater and better authority in the face of search engines like Google than the blog of the website of the fishmonger in our neighborhood, without detracting from its efforts. But the more people visit a page and the more well-known it is, the better Google will look at it.
To get started with your link-building journey, you can refer to 180 Days of Off Page SEO Action Plan