What is SEO and how can it affect my website?

 

In this article, we'll try to explain in detail and clearly what SEO is and what it's used for. We're sure you've heard about SEO or Google positioning many times. You might think these terms don't affect your digital business or online marketing strategy, since you already pay for Google Adwords ( now Google Ads ) and your strategy is perfect without having to go through a content study, a web audit, or heeding the recommendations of the almighty Google to get web traffic.

 

As an SEO consultancy and Google Ads specialist , we have to tell you that you're wrong, since keyword positioning is essential to avoid disappearing from search engines . Imagine for a moment that during your SEM/Adwords campaign period, you have to divert part of the money you pay to other activities within your company. If you don't have a good SEO strategy, you automatically disappear . And I'm sorry to say, if you're not on Google, you don't exist!

 

In this article, we want to give you a series of recommendations so you can stop asking that question...

 

“Okay, but how do I position my website? ”

 

Because with a basic understanding of SEO positioning, you'll have enough to start working on your digital goals.

 

Of course, the first thing we recommend is acquiring a free SEO tool and starting a real search engine strategy , as you'll be surprised to learn that there are alternatives to Google, such as Yahoo and Bing. Globally, Yandex for Russia and Baidoo for China, just to name a few, are some of the most popular search engines in the world, but they can also generate interesting traffic and potential new customers.

 

Are your ideas clear? Let's get started.

 

What is SEO?

 

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization . The main purpose of an SEO strategy is to get the largest number of keywords in the best positions in search engines so that we attract the largest possible number of visitors to our website. However, it doesn't end there, as it's pointless if a user arrives at our website and leaves immediately , thereby increasing the website's bounce rate and, therefore, penalizing Google and other search engines.

 

A bounce rate is calculated based on the number of users who enter the website, visit a single page, and then leave.

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That's why it's essential not only to implement an SEO strategy for keyword positioning , but also to create correct content that is highly focused on answering the user's questions. This is the way to ensure that the user stays on the website long enough to avoid increasing the bounce rate and gain a potential client.

 

Another key aspect is to be familiar with the terms used by SEO specialists to know exactly what they're referring to at any given time. Here are some of them:

 

What are Keywords in SEO?

 

This is the keyword we want to rank our website for . If we have a business focused on selling dog collars, our main keyword to work with is "dog collars," but Google is smart enough to recognize and semantically differentiate keywords. Therefore, if "dog collars" is our main keyword, we can also work with its variants:

 

• Dog collars
• Dog collars (Adding an s at the end makes the word different)
• Dog collars

 

Each of these words is different for Google and will have a different search volume, so it would be a matter of studying all the options and positioning those in which the KD (keyword difficulty) best adapts to our work times, strategy and budget .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What are Long Tails?

 

Long Tail, explained simply, are Keywords but long.

 

In 2020, there has been an increase in so-called " voice searches ." Tools like Siri, Alexa , and Google Assistant mean that users don't have to type what they want to search for into their smartphone or tablet, but rather have it dictated by voice . This makes it easier to search for something in more detail by not having to use their hands:

 

“Ok Google, search for golden retriever dog collars ”

 

The bold example is a long-tail search, where we see how the user not only searches for dog collars, but also adds the dog's breed.

 

 

In this regard, content should be tailored not only to those who type their search but also to those who search by voice, in order to offer the most accurate results and generate real, quality traffic to our website.

 

But long tails aren't just voice-based. During this past 2019, various studies showed that users are increasingly specific in their searches and, therefore, are using long tail keywords much more frequently .

 

What is a SERP or Search Engine Results Page?

 

The SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are the search engine results pages where we find search results in the format of Snippets, Rich Snippets, Rich Cards, news, videos, images and much more .

 

To understand SEO correctly, you need to understand what the SERP is and all its features.

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In short, it's the page you find when you search for something on Google, and it gives you a series of results . Don't worry, if you don't know what we're talking about, you'll understand a few points further down.

 

Although the best way to understand what a SERP is is to see it with this graphic example:

 

 

What are Snippets, Rich Snippets, and Knowledge Graphs?

 

Snippets

 

Snippets are the results of the search taken by Google through the Metadata and displayed in the SERPs .

 

A Snippet is the response that our website displays in a search engine to the query made by the user.

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Google takes the information from the metadata (which we will see a few sections later) and displays it in the following way.

 

 

This is how a user normally sees us, but Google goes much further when it comes to displaying results in the SERPs. What if we want to be more striking? Well, although this is advanced SEO positioning , or at least not so basic, we will explain what a Rich Snippet is .

 

Rich Snippet

 

This is a rich snippet in the search results . Although, as always, a picture is worth a thousand words:

 

 

In this case, we see rich text snippets in Google results in a simple yet user-friendly way. In the same box, we have a small illustrative image, in this case a recipe, and a review of it, which can refer to the quality of the food, or even the quality of the item in question.

 

In any case, it is a reference so that the user performing the search clicks on these featured snippets before the non-featured organic snippets.

 

There are also variations for products, services, articles, jobs, books, and more.

 

However, what is currently working best in Google is the one known as Knowledge-graph , and in short, it is a Rich Snippet but with greater visual and content quality and which in SEO is known as position 0.

 

Knowledge-graph or Position 0

 

As in the previous points, a graphical example will better determine what a Knowledge-graph is :

 

 

As we see in this case, the snippet consists of a larger image and the recipe's ingredients, which helps the user know for sure if it's the recipe they're looking for so they can click on the link and see the preparation process. And like this, there are many types of Knowledge Graphs; here are more examples:

 

 

 

In this pair of examples, you can see that there is a variety in this type of snippets , which, without giving all the information, offer enough to make the user click interesting.

 

However, this is a somewhat negative section for certain types of businesses , since in many cases this featured Snippet offers enough information to prevent the user from clicking on any search results, resulting in the loss of visits to the website.

 

On the other hand, and as we mentioned a few paragraphs ago, this type of snippet often occupies Google Rank 0, which means it is above position 1 of the search engine .

 

On some occasions, we have detected that we position a word, for example gazpacho recipes, and our keyword is in position 8 of the search engine. However, by having correctly programmed the systems that launch this type of enriched text , Google also shows it in this zero position, which is at the very top, and also your search result in position 8.

 

Google doesn't do this to compensate us for a job well done—I wish!—but rather to offer a better response to its users . The bot detects our content, evaluates it, and decides it should rank eighth, but during its reading, it finds our rich code, and in the other results, it either doesn't like it or can't find it, and therefore decides that the user should see that code snippet in addition to our result.

 

What is a Bot?

 

Just as you've wondered , "What is SEO?" You've probably wondered , "How does Google work?"

 

Without getting into complex technicalities, we can say that Google uses a series of bots with enough intelligence and capacity to read our content, organize it, and position it.

 

A bot is a computer program that performs automated, often complex, tasks . Google has several bots that work differently and coordinate with each other to perform search engine optimization. These bots learn and improve over time.

 

Although they always need the human aspect that, among other things, works to improve these bots and avoid SEO malpractice or what is known as Black Hat SEO.

 

HTML and CSS, important for SEO positioning

 

In short, these are the basic languages used to display a website to the user via their browser.

 

HTML and CSS, contrary to what many sites indicate, are not programming languages , but rather tag languages in which each tag wraps the content to be displayed and gives it a style with CSS code, which is a cascading language for providing the design you want for your website.

 

It's important to have a basic understanding of HTML to be able to implement tracking codes, tags, and other elements necessary for SEO. On the other hand, knowing CSS helps give your website a touch of design and usability, which is also increasingly important.

 

I recommend this article from the Mozilla Foundation detailing this type of language, and our CSS Course to learn the basics of the style language.

 

What are Meta Keywords?

 

Meta Keywords were a fundamental part of SEO , and I say that well, they were, since they've become obsolete for some time now. These tags are inserted inside your website's <head> tags, and in them you tell the search engine the target words for which you intended to rank that page, article, or product.

 

They eventually lost their value as Google and other search engines were able to interpret the target words without meta keyword optimization. Furthermore, the goal of search engines is to satisfy users with their results. Therefore, they are increasingly improving their capabilities when it comes to crawling web content and positioning it, ignoring some of the so-called Meta Tags.

 

• Meta Title and Meta Description (Metadata)

 

Remember the previous point about SERPs? Have you ever wondered where Google gets those results and text from? Well, the answer is Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions . Depending on the year you're looking at, this section may have become obsolete, and we'll explain why.

 

Our goal as an SEO positioning company is to understand and study the changes in the different algorithms that primarily comprise Google. We'll discuss this in an upcoming Technical SEO article and another on Advanced SEO. During these analyses of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, we found that the trend is shifting from the character limits currently recommended in meta tags to pixels... Boom, your head has exploded and you don't understand a thing! Don't worry, we'll explain how Google displays the SERPs in its search results.

 

We'll keep it as simple as possible and without getting into technicalities; we'll get to that later.

 

Google launches its spiders (bots, crawlers, etc.) to study the content and assign it a value (formerly Page Rank). Once this process is complete, it reads the entire HTML code of the website in a matter of milliseconds, and within it are these meta tags that tell the search engine how we want to be displayed in the search results. It will take the Meta Title and place it in the blue section with a link in the SERP, and the Meta Description and place it in the white and gray sections of the SERP.

 

These texts, to use the analogy of a supermarket, are the packaging that must enclose the product. That's why it's so important to treat and maintain them well. If we don't add these meta tags manually or do so incorrectly, Google will search the content for the first thing it finds within the HTML tags that it considers visible text and index it. Don't know what we're talking about?

 

Here is an example:

 

 

In this example, we see two very unusual search results . This is because the WordPress installation uses a plugin called Visual Composer to create web pages. This element creates a series of shortcodes that allow users to create their website without any programming or computer language knowledge.

 

The problem we encounter here is that by not defining Meta tags, Google has located the plugin code as the first text for the description and has indexed it as is. Now tell us, would you enter this website to see its product or would you not trust it?

 

Well, although I can't name the website for privacy reasons, it's a movie site, with no risk, that's losing traffic due to its lack of metadata protection.

 

The way to implement these, I assume that if you are learning Basic SEO, it is almost certain that you are working in a CMS, Content Management System, type WordPress or Prestashop, so I have to tell you that you are in luck, with a simple Wordpress plugin you can implement these and in Prestashop they come by default, Yoast Plugins, Wordpress SEO and similar help you to place the meta tags correctly.

 

Regarding what we discussed at the beginning of this section, metadata has a limit of approximately 50-70 characters for the title and 110-140 for the description . By including this limitation in the meta tag, we end up with shortened titles and shortened descriptions, which gives a negative impression, or it doesn't fully convey the message you want to convey to the user searching for you.

 

Google now limits the size of the metadata by pixels, which gives us the ability to " play " with it more, adding elements like emojis and others that weren't possible before. The point, ultimately, is to make our product more attractive, like in a supermarket.

 

The importance of links and link building in SEO

 

Links are, to a large extent, one of the ranking factors that our SEO agency values most, and various studies have shown us that Google values most, along with content.

 

One of the most difficult aspects of ranking is creating quality content that truly interests the user who visits our website. But even more difficult is getting that user to link to us from their own website, adding value to our content. That's why Google highly values links when evaluating our content.

 

Unfortunately, where there's a law, there's a loophole. Link building is nothing more than attracting links by taking some action that also benefits the other party, whether financially, by exchanging links, or by paying for our business's materials.

 

This is why we strive to offer free SEO positioning , meaning that the monthly management fee includes strategies that are sufficiently interesting for the user to voluntarily create the link, or, failing that, the benefit is equal for both parties through a link exchange.

 

In any case, we'll go into more depth on this topic in the more advanced SEO section we're preparing.

 

Responsive and SEO

 

Have you ever run an email marketing campaign and your users tell you that the product price isn't visible or that they can't find what they're looking for? That's because the user accessed the site using a tablet or mobile phone, and your website content isn't properly adapted.

 

He thinks that if the user doesn't see it well, neither does Google, and it will rate it negatively.

 

In 2018, Google actually began evaluating the content of a website's mobile version, using the so-called Mobile First Index, before its PC counterpart, which obviously values it, but increasingly less so than the adapted version. So, that tells you everything.

 

Fortunately, these days, you don't have to have a domain for the PC version and a subdomain for the mobile version, as you used to. Nowadays, with a little knowledge of HTML and CSS , and a little Boostrap, you can have a website fully adapted to both PC and mobile.

 

But we have even better news if you don't have that knowledge of markup or programming: CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, Prestashop, and others do most of the work for you. In any case, we always recommend having that basic knowledge to be able to work on at least basic SEO.

 

We'll go into more detail on this aspect in the more advanced SEO article, but you should know that having a properly mobile-friendly version is very important.

 

Is SEO Free?

 

Yes, of course, SEO is free. The time you invest in research, finding the right niche, the right keywords, content, tools, and all the work involved, whether you do it yourself or hire a specialist SEO agency , comes at a cost that you must assume.

 

One of the main problems we encounter as SEO companies is that ROI (Return on Investment) is difficult to quantify in this field since there is no way to immediately measure the results. Also, unlike Google Ads, keyword ranking takes a long time to be reflected, since we depend entirely on Google updates and changes in the SERPs, Google results pages. Sometimes the optimization that an SEO company can perform can take months to be reflected in the search engine. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you fully understand what SEO is before hiring an agency or specialist.

 

Conclusions on What is SEO?

 

We know this is a long article, but we want to take your mind off what SEO is and give you a basic understanding of SEO, its meaning, and how positioning can benefit your business or online pages. In upcoming articles, we'll share SEO tools and more advanced steps so you can understand how Google works and what you can do to get to know it better.