What is SEO and why do I need it?

Where did the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) come from?

The first search engines emerged in the early 90s. Until Google appeared in 1996, many were created, including Yahoo! The Web boom began. People realized that money could really be made from them. Thus they came to the conclusion that they needed to attract traffic. What was the best method of attracting traffic? Search engines . At that moment the owners of the webs began to think how they could reach the first positions … SEO was born!

SEO focuses on organic search results, that is, what are not paid:

But hey, let’s get to what matters and the reason why (I think) you are reading this chapter:

1. What is SEO?

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 frequently named by its English title, SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

SEO is one of the “disciplines” that has changed the most in recent years. We just have to look at the large number of updates that there have been to Penguin and Panda , and how they have given a 180 degree turn to what was understood by SEO until recently. Now with SEO, what Matt Cutts himself describes as “Search Experience Optimization” or what is the same, “all for the user” is being pursued.

Although there are thousands of factors that a search engine relies on to position one page or another, it could be said that there are two basic factors: authority and relevance

• Authority is basically the popularity of a website. The more popular it is, the more valuable the information it contains. This factor is the one that a search engine takes more into account since it is based on the user’s own experience. The more content is shared, the more users found it useful.
• Relevance is the relationship a page has to a given search. This is not simply that a page contains a lot of times the search term (in the beginning it was like that) but that a search engine relies on hundreds of on-site factors to determine this.

SEO can be divided into two large groups:

• On-site : On-site SEO is concerned with relevance. It makes sure that the web is optimized so that the search engine understands the main thing, which is the content of the web. Within the SEO On-site we would include the optimization of keywords, loading time, user experience, optimization of the code and format of the URLs.

• Off-site : Off-site SEO is the part of SEO work that focuses on factors external to the web page in which we work. The most important factors in off-site SEO are the number and quality of links, presence in social networks, mentions in local media, brand authority and performance in search results, that is, the CTR that our clients have. results in a search engine. Surely you are thinking that all this is very good and that it is very interesting but that you are here to find out why you need SEO on your website and what benefits you will get if you integrate it into your online strategy.

Once we know what SEO is, we must differentiate whether or not we follow the search engine’s “recommendations”. Black Hat SEO or White Hat SEO

• Black Hat SEO : Black hat is the attempt to improve the search engine positioning of a web page using unethical techniques or techniques that contradict the search engine guidelines. Some examples of Black Hat SEO are Cloaking, Spinning, SPAM in forums and blog comments, or Keyword Stuffing. The black hat can provide benefits in the short term, but it is generally a risky strategy, without continuity in the long term and that does not add value.

• White Hat SEO : It consists of all those ethically correct actions that comply with the search engine guidelines to position a web page in the search results. Given that search engines give greater importance to the pages that best respond to a user’s search, the White Hat includes the techniques that seek to make a page more relevant to search engines by adding value to its users.

2. Why is SEO important?

The most important reason SEO is necessary is because it makes your website more useful to both users and search engines . Although they still cannot see a web page like a human does. SEO is necessary to help search engines understand what each page is about and whether or not it is useful to users.

Now let’s put an example to see things more clearly:

We have an e-commerce dedicated to the sale of children’s books. Well, for the term “coloring pages” there are about 673,000 monthly searches. Assuming that the first result that appears after doing a search in Google obtains 22% of clicks ( CTR = 22%), we would obtain about 148,000 visits per month.

Now, how much are those 148,000 visits worth? Well, if for that term the average cost per click is € 0.20, we are talking about more than € 29,000 / month. This only in Spain, if we have a business oriented to several countries, every hour 1.4 billion searches are carried out in the world. Of those searches, 70% of clicks are on organic results and 75% of users do not reach the second page. If we take all this into account, we see that there are many clicks per month for the first result.

SEO is the best way for your users to find you through searches in which your website is relevant. These users look for what you offer them. The best way to reach them is through a search engine.

3. How do search engines work?

The operation of a search engine can be summarized in two steps: crawling and indexing .

Tracking

A search engine crawls the web crawling with what are called bots. These go through all the pages through the links. Hence the importance of a good link structure. Like any user would do when browsing the content of the Web, they go from one link to another and collect data about those web pages that they provide to their servers.

The crawling process begins with a list of web addresses from previous crawls and sitemaps provided by other web pages. Once they access these websites, the bots look for links to other pages to visit them. Bots are especially attracted to new sites and changes to existing websites.

It is the bots themselves that decide which pages to visit, how often and for how long they will crawl that website, that is why it is important to have an optimal loading time and up-to-date content.

It is very common that a web page needs to restrict the crawling of some pages or certain content to prevent them from appearing in search results. For this, search engine bots can be told not to crawl certain pages through the ” robots.txt ” file .

Indexing

Once a bot has crawled a website and collected the necessary information, these pages are indexed. There they are arranged according to their content, their authority and their relevance. In this way, when we make a query to the search engine it will be much easier to show us the results that are most related to our query.

In the beginning, search engines were based on the number of times a word was repeated. When doing a search, they crawled those terms in their index to find which pages had them in their texts, ranking better the one that had it repeated the most times. Nowadays, they are more sophisticated and base their indexes on hundreds of different aspects. The date of publication, if they contain images, videos or animations, microformats, etc. are some of those aspects. Now they give more priority to the quality of the content.

Once the pages are crawled and indexed, the time comes for the algorithm to  act : algorithms are the computer processes that decide which pages appear earlier or later in search results. Once the search is done, the algorithms check the indexes. This way they will know which are the most relevant pages taking into account the hundreds of positioning factors. And all of this happens in a matter of milliseconds.