What is SEO and why do I need?
Where the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) arise?
The first search engines emerged in the early 90's and until Google appeared in 1996 many, including Yahoo were created; that's when he started the boom of web pages and people realized you could really make money with them, it was then obvious way they concluded that they needed to attract traffic and what was the best method to drive traffic ? indeed the search engines. Just then the owners of the sites began to think how they could reach the top positions ... SEO was born!
SEO focuses on organic search results, ie, which they are not paid:
But hey, let's go to what matters and why (I think) you are reading this chapter:
What is SEO?
According to Wikipedia, SEO is:
Search engine optimization or search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website in the organic results of different search engines. It is also common to name it by its English title, SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
SEO is one of the "discipline" that has changed in recent years, we have only to look at the large number of updates that have been Penguin and Panda, and how they have taken a 180-degree turn to what is by SEO he understood until recently. Now with the SEO it pursues what Matt Cutts himself calls "Search Experience Optimization" or what is the same, all for the user.
Although there are many factors that a search engine is based to position a page or another might say that there are two basic factors: the authority and relevance
· The Authority is basically the popularity of a website, the more popular a page or a web is valuable information it contains. This factor is what a search engine takes more account since it is based on the experience of the user, the more a content is that more users have found it helpful to share them.
· Relevance is the relationship you have a page in front of a given search, this is not simply a page containing a lot of times the search term (in the beginning it was so) if a search engine is based on hundreds of factors on-site to determine this.
In turn, the SEO can be divided into two groups: the SEO on-site and off-site SEO.
/On-site : The on-site SEO is concerned with relevance, ensuring that the website is optimized for search engines understand the main thing, which is the content of it.Within the on-site SEO optimization we would include keywords, charging time, user experience, code optimization and format of URLs.
· Off-site : off-site SEO is the part of SEO work it focuses on the external website we work factors. The most important factors in SEO off-site are the number and quality of links, social media presence, mentions in local media authority of the brand and performance in search results, ie, CTR having our results in a search engine. You're probably thinking that this is all very well and that is very interesting but you are here because you need to learn SEO on your website and you will benefit if you integrate your online strategy.
SEO can make a difference in whether or not to follow the "recommendations" of the search engine: SEO Black Hat or White Hat SEO
· Black Hat SEO : Black Hat is called to attempt to improve search engine rankings of a website through unethical or that contradict the guidelines of the search engine techniques. Examples of Black Hat SEO are the Cloaking, Spinning, SPAM in forums and blog comments, or Keyword Stuffing. The black hat can provide benefits in the short term, but is usually a risky strategy, without continuity in the long term and it does not add value.
· White Hat SEO : It consists of all those ethically correct actions that meet the guidelines of search engines to position a web page and search results. Since search engines give more importance to pages that best respond to a user's search, comprising the White Hat techniques that seek to make a page more relevant to search engines by providing value to its users.
2. Why is SEO important?
The most important reason that SEO is necessary is that makes your website more useful for both users and search engines because, although the latter are more sophisticated every day still can not see a Web page as you do a human, SEO is needed to help search engines understand what it is about each page and whether it is useful to users.
Now let an example to see things clearer:
We have an e-commerce dedicated to the sale of children's books, well, for the term "coloring" there are 673,000 monthly searches, if we have that 22% of visits for that term leads the first position, which would be around 148,000 visits per month.
But how much are these 148,000 visits? Well, if that term average spending per click is 0,20 € we are talking about more than 29,000 € per month. This just in Spain, if we have a business-oriented several countries, hourly 1.4 billion searches are performed in the world, of those searches, 70% of clicks are on the organic results and 75% of users They do not reach the second page; if we consider all this many clicks per month for the first result.
SEO is the best way for your users find you in searches in which your site is relevant, these users are looking for what you offer them and the best way to reach all those users through a search engine.
3. How search engines work?
The operation of a search engine can be summarized in two steps: crawling and indexing .
Tracking
A search engine runs the web tracking with what are called bots These bots roam all pages through links (hence the importance of a good link structure) just as you would any user to navigate the content Web, moving from one link to another and collect data on these web pages provide their servers. The tracking process begins with a list of web addresses and sitemaps previous scans provided by other websites. Once access these web bots seek links to other pages to visit them. The bots are particularly attracted by the new sites and changes in existing web.
Are the bots themselves decide which pages to visit, how often and how long will track the web, so it is important to have an
optimal load time and updated content.
optimal load time and updated content.
It is very common in a web page you need to restrict crawling certain pages or content to prevent these appear in search results. For this you can tell the bots of search engines do not crawl certain pages through the file "robots.txt".
Indexing
Once a bot has tracked a website and has collected the necessary information, you pages are included in an index where they are sorted according to their content, their authority and relevance ; so when we make a query to the search engine it will be much easier to show results that are more related to our inquiry.
At first search engines they were based on the number of times a word is repeated on a page to do a search in its index tracked those terms to find pages they had them in their texts better positioning which was repeated more times what . From that point the search engines become more sophisticated and base their rates on hundreds of different aspects such as the date of publication, if they contain photos and videos, etc; because surely if you are looking for the word "house" you want not see a page with the word "home" thousands of times.
Once the pages are crawled and indexed the time comes serving the search engine algorithm: the formulas and computer algorithms are processes that convert answers questions, such algorithm in the index seek the answers that best suit the question we have made, this is done based on hundreds of signs as the terms of websites, content today, our region or PageRank.
