What is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
SEO means “search engine optimization”. In plain language, this is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when individuals search for products or services related to your company on Google, Bing and other search engines. The more visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to attract attention and attract potential and existing clients to your business.
How does SEO work?
Search engines like Google and Bing use bots to navigate pages on the web going from one site to another, gathering information about these pages and put them into an index. Look at the index like a giant library where a librarian can pull out a book (or a web page) to help you figure out exactly what you’re looking for right now.In the library analogy, the librarian has read each of the books in the library and can tell you exactly which of them will have the answers to your questions.
Unlike paid search ads, you cannot pay search engines to get more organic search rankings, which means that SEO experts must put into work. Search algorithms are designed to surface relevant, authoritative pages and give users an effective search experience.
Why is SEO important for marketing?
SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches every year, often with the commercial intention of finding information about products and services. Search is often the first source of digital traffic for brands as well as complementing other marketing channels. Increased visibility and higher rankings in search results may have a significant impact on your bottom line.
However, search results have evolved in recent years to provide users with more direct responses and information which is most likely to keep users on the results page instead of leading them to other websites.
Also note that features such as rich results and knowledge panels within the search results can increase visibility and give users more information about your company right in the results.In short, SEO is the basis of a global marketing ecosystem. Once you understand what users of your website want, you can then apply this knowledge through your campaigns (paid and organic), on your website, through your social media properties, and more.
Types of SEO
So, the various SEO types are:
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO
- Content SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Local SEO
- Mobile SEO
- eCommerce SEO
The most important are Technical, On Page and Off Page SEO.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is exactly what the name implies, that is, the technical parameters that affect the visibility of a Web site within search engines.The main purpose of technical SEO is to make sure that search engine crawlers can crawl and index a website without any trouble.
The most important technical SEO guidelines are:
- Check and optimize your robot.txt to make sure that search engines can properly access your website.
- Add and verify website with Google Search Console and indicate your chosen domain.
- Use the COVERAGE report to find and correct crawl faults.
- Create an XML site map and submit it to all the main search engines.
- Optimize the structure of your website and URL.
- Follow SEO Friendly webdesign.
- Build web sites that load quickly on desktop and mobile devices.
On-Page SEO
On SEO Page has to deal with the page itself and how to make it easier for search engines and users.It is worth noting that, although search engines look at a website as a whole, ranking is done on a page basis.
Therefore, it is important to pay attention to optimizing each page of your website.
The most important on-page SEO guidelines are:
- Optimize your page titles. It is a crucial SEO factor. Page titles are displayed in search results and should be interesting for users to click on. The title of a page should also give search engine bots sufficient hints about what the content of the page is all about.
- Optimize your H1 tag. Whereas the page title is displayed in the SERPS, the H1 tag is the header of a page. An optimized page has just one H1 tag and generally has the same values as the page title.
- Optimize your headings.Besides the H1 tag, a page must have subtitles (H2, H3) for the various sections. When content is long, subtitles make it easier for users to read the page and for crawlers to digitize it.
- SEO of the images.All images used on a page must be properly optimized, otherwise search engines cannot understand what they represent. Things like file name optimization, file size optimization, and ALT text optimization are critical to image SEO.
- Page formatting.Publishing a page with text and pictures without spending time embellishing the content is not a good SEO practice. While Google cannot ‘see’ a page like a human, it has ways of understanding what a page looks like or if it is full of ads and popups and this is considered during the ranking process.
Off Page SEO
Off Page SEO is everything about promotion. While previous SEO types focused more on the website’s infrastructure and content, SEO has to do with the techniques you can use to promote your website on the Internet.
Popular web sites are more likely to rank among the most popular on Google than the less popular ones.
The most important off-page SEO methods are:
- Linking building.Link building is the process of obtaining SEO feedback from other Web sites.These backlinks act as “trust votes” and enhance the authority of the target website (provided they do not have the nofollow attribute attached to the link).
- Brand promotion.Google likes to rank known brands at a high level in outcomes
because people trust them.
In addition to promoting your website to obtain backlinks, you should also work on promoting your brand and encourage conversations about it in various social networks and forums.Google can pick up these signals and reward the websites that people are talking about.