What Is SEO And How Does It Work To Be Number 1 In Search Engines + [SEO GUIDE]

Join us in this post and discover what SEO is, the basic concepts you should know, and what techniques you have to use to be #1 in Google.

What is SEO and what is it for?

SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, which translates as “optimization for search engines”. SEO is the application of a good number of techniques that pursue the objective of improving the position of a website in the search results of Google and many other search engines and directories. That if we talk about APP positioning in mobile markets we call it ASO positioning.

Search engines work like large libraries and store millions and millions of pages and content, index them, order and classify them and show you the best results for your searches. And that’s where SEO comes in, Search Engine Optimization, a science that uses specialized techniques to help Google index and put your content first.

Thus, the algorithm of a search engine performs its calculations and evaluations to decide which results should appear first, sharing space with the ads of companies that have decided to invest resources to position themselves among the first results through programs such as Google AdWords. This last practice is called SEM ( Search Engine Marketing ).

What are Results Pages or SERPs?

The SERPs ( Search Engine Results Page ) is nothing more than the results offered by a search engine and the elements that can be found in the results are:

• Web pages. They correspond to web pages indexed by Google.
• Local businesses are located thanks to the results of Google My Business.
• Images. Google doesn’t just index websites, it also works with the images they contain.
• News. Google filters the pages of any news source on the web.
• Maps. Known by all, it offers geolocated information.
• Videos. Google also indexes the videos that appear on the web and filters the results with its YouTube platform.
• Books. Google Books is Google’s service.
• Applications Known as ASO positioning
• shopping
• Sponsored links that come from Google Adwords
• Featured snippet or zero position

What types of search exist in SEO

One of the most interesting classifications is the one that differentiates searches based on user intent. Created by Broder in the year 2000, it has become one of the most useful. Choosing which types of search you need for your website is essential when making an adequate SEO strategy.

These are the three types:

1# Brand search

It arises when the user knows what he wants to visit, but without knowing its web address. They are those that are made through the name of brands, products, or specific websites. This type of search will benefit the product or service being searched for but will be indifferent to the rest. Approximately, they account for 10% of total searches.

2# Transactional Search

Transactional searches are those that are performed to complete a transaction. They do not have to be direct sales, they can be newsletter subscriptions, resource downloads, and any other type of leads. These searches make up another 10% of total searches, making them extremely valuable for those lucky landing sites.

3# Informational search

We arrived at the most common type of search! And is that 80% of the searches correspond to informational ones, which define those searches through which users try to find out, regardless of whether it is about their nearest bookstore, the most recommended digital marketing course, or the best way to cook an omelet They are searches with a variable value, depending on the topic and the depth of the keywords, but they give rise to opportunities as diverse as generating traffic, discovering brands, obtaining links and getting leads.

How does the Google search algorithm work?

More or less roughly if you search for digital marketing, for example, Google will look if your content talks about digital marketing, if your site has authority for that subject, if the author of the article is an expert, and if the word digital marketing is present in the title, in the subtitles and you talk about it in the content. It is also able to know if you use the right jargon to talk about that topic.

In addition, if your content is good, it may be cited by other websites, so, under equal conditions, those contents that are more cited are better.

And finally, Google uses artificial intelligence to analyze how the user interacts with your content, which is why it is so important that your page loads quickly and hooks the user you are looking for with content that offers differential value.

We can summarize the main SEO criteria in the:

1# Keywords. SEO works with the keyword or keywords that will be used as a guide for the search engine to understand the content of a website or category. These keywords will have to be related to the theme of the page, otherwise, the search engine will not understand the information.

2# Reputation. A good reputation is generated when all the requirements that a web search engine asks for to position correctly begin to be met: quality and original content, differentiated, that responds to user demands.

Links between web pages matter. When one web page contains links to another, it is usually a recommendation that the web page contains good information. The links you get must be of quality and from related sites.

3# Words in the links

Content matters. Therefore, SEO is responsible for seeing if there is quality content and if it attracts and responds to user searches. If you get it then you will see how your probability of being nº1 is greater.

4 # The authority

Search engines take into account the popularity of a website and therefore all the information it contains. The more popular a website is on a subject, the more relevant information it is considered to have. But you must understand that if you have authority in Digital Marketing, Google will hardly position you for other types of content.

5 # The importance of the web within the search engine.

This depends on several elements that make up the on-site SEO and that determine the position of the links on the web. And many more factors that you can learn about in Google patents.

Types of SEO: on-page and off-page

One of the first steps that website owners usually take is to take care of the quality of a site to provide Google with useful search results that provide a user with a definitive answer as soon as possible. However, you must know that you must differentiate between two types of SEO, each of them with different strategies:

On page SEO

We speak of SEO On-page when we refer to all those actions aimed at improving the positioning of a website that are carried out within the same web page. They would be factors such as page load time, image optimization, and the use of responsive designs.

The  SEO on the page  works with:

• keywords
• Loading time
• user experience
• Code optimization
• URL format
• The meta tags
• metadata
• <alt> in images
• internal links
• website structure

Surely you have also heard about the importance of keywords or keywords (which they are), but SEO on a page is much more than that. It is not just about repeating or placing the keywords correctly, but about knowing the user experience, finding out what they are looking for, and what content can be generated from their searches and needs. To do this, you have to take into account the following:

• Do not fall into the Thin content (content that Google considers of low quality). If the content is not relevant enough and of poor quality, it will not show up favorably in the SERPs.
• Think about the user. For the reader to be able to spend a long time on the website, you need to have readable, well-structured, and good-looking content.
• original content. Duplicate content is penalized by Google and will only worsen the visibility of the website.
• The content offered has to be related to user searches.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO brings together all those techniques that go beyond a website to improve its positioning. It is fueled by external factors such as inbound links, social media noise, and brand authority. Working to get backlinks is the essence of this type of SEO.

Seo Off-page works with

• quality content
• Backlinks inappropriate comments on blogs, forums, or news.
• Register in quality directories
• Collaborate with other pages in exchange for putting follow links
• Contact experts to share content

Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO

In addition to SEO On Page and SEO off-page, there are two approaches, actually three to do SEO. Play against the Black Hat SEO rules, follow the White Hat SEO rules, and a middle ground that is the one that most uses Gray Hat SEO. In the end, in SEO, sometimes you have to take risks, but always be careful not to throw back the work you have done.

1# Black Hat SEO

The black hat is used in cowboy movies to represent the bad and ruthless cowboy. Well, black hat SEO also tries to challenge search engine norms through techniques that allow it to obtain better results.

Black hat SEO tries to improve its positioning but in a risky way, providing short-term benefits but not advisable to obtain results over a long period. How does Black Hat SEO work? Here are some techniques:

• Cloaking. It is a content over-optimization technique that works to show a type of content to the search engine that is different from the one that is shown to the user.
• Spinning or Spinning items. It is a technique that modifies web articles using automatic software that changes words to synonyms and turns out to be low-quality content.
• hidden text. As its name implies, hidden text is about making words that are repeated more than necessary invisible with the same background color of the page. In this way, they go unnoticed and the user cannot recognize them.
• Comments on blogs. Writing worthless comments is also a black hat technique. Most of the time it consists of distributing comments indiscriminately and that do not contribute anything.
• Buy expired domains. Buy domains that have expired but retain their authority or create a PBN.
• keyword stuffing. It is the excessive use of keywords that usually appear in meta descriptions, paragraphs, lists of numbers or words, and in the anchor text.
• Page hijacking. This is the hijacking of a web page. Its actions consist of creating a page the same as another and making the search engine believe that the copy of the website is the original.
• Buy and sell links. Buy and sell links from high-ranking pages to rank better.
• Link spam. This technique consists of creating many blogs and performing the link-building technique.

All these Black Hat techniques are persecuted by the different Google algorithms such as Panda, Penguin, Pigeon … etc.

2 # White Hat SEO

Just as there is a “bad guy” in the movie, there is a character who follows the rules and does everything correctly. That’s what happens with white hat SEO or white hat SEO: it follows all the rules of the search engines and works as ethically as possible to position its pages in the SERP.

Unlike the black hat, the white hat seeks to add value to the user through various techniques and not deceive the search engine. How does White SEO work?

Link baiting technique. This technique is based on offering good content to make the user fall in love. If something makes the Internet user spend time on a website, it is eye-catching and differentiated content from the rest, how?

There are different ways to generate traffic on your website and to make said users decide to include this content on their website:

Spread creativity. It can be difficult but it is a matter of knowing what makes the difference. Creativity is one of the qualities of a website that generates more engagement.

Post information before anyone else. The SEO professional is also there to that; detect what are the current issues, and trends and predict which topics will be the most prominent. In addition, it finds topics that users have searched for on the Internet and for which there is little published information.

Generate discussion. Making some noise brings traffic to the website. Many users enjoy discussing and sharing their opinions on different topics of interest that have previously passed through the SEO filter.

Accompany with multimedia content. The web does not just text and visual content is becoming more and more successful. For example, a post accompanied by images has much more power than text alone.

Content curation. It is very important that to generate quality content, the content is filtered, grouped, and selected to share with the audience.

Some tools that help in content curation are:

•          Feedly
•          Pocket
•          LinkedIn Pulse
•          Ready4Social

It makes it easy for search engines to track. No magic method helps to be the first in the results list but some techniques improve visibility such as improving the HTML structure of meta descriptions and microformats. You can also help Google by putting a link to your content so that it discovers it or asking it to crawl that page from Google Search Console.

Mobile-friendly content. Online browsing through mobile phones is already greater than that of desktop devices. That is why we already talked about mobile-first design and usability and with it the need to apply specific designs and adapted loading strategies to improve the user experience.

Why you should invest in SEO

Most of the companies that have taken the step of adapting their businesses to the digital world have realized the importance of spending time working on the SEO of their websites to multiply their traffic and the sale of their products and services. Improving our website with Google in mind is key to achieving a powerful return on investment. We give you the main reasons why SEO is important for your business:

1# Web positioning will multiply your traffic

It’s a fact: the better a website is positioned in search results, the more traffic it will get. According to Google itself, the first result of your searches reaches a click-through rate of over 28%, something that drops below 3% in the case of the tenth result. The data speaks for itself, right?

2# SEO increases your visibility

The more relevant words related to the sector of your products or services position in the first results of Google, the more seen and recognized you will be by your potential customers. At this point, taking into account long-tail keywords with a minimum of monthly searches and competition that is not significant is a good idea, as well as creating new content using keywords judiciously and writing the content thinking (always) in SEO.

3# Being #1 in the SERPs improves your credibility

Those brands that appear at the top of Google results are more reliable in the eyes of those who seek answers to their questions. One more fact to think about less than 1% of those who carry out a search click on the results of the second page. Google has become the crystal ball that always hits. You will never forget it! Turning your website into a benchmark depends, to a large extent, on the care you pay to SEO…

4 # Being the number 1 in SEO is equivalent to being the best

When someone who is part of your potential audience comes across you on more than one occasion through Google results, they will likely begin to see you as someone familiar, improving your brand image. If, in addition, you work on loading time, a clean design, and take care mobile optimization, users will stay longer on your website, something that will affect the perception of the audience and search engines.

5# SEO gets quality traffic

Whoever reaches your web page from Google searches will do so from a very specific choice of keywords. Taking care of SEO will help you attract the right people: those who are interested in your products and services. Being able to become the most attractive option in a search engine depends on your content and techniques (choice of a good title and subtitles, use of appropriate language, and the necessary links…)

6 # SEO attracts recurring and long-term traffic

The resources you invest in SEO sometimes take time to show results, but once we manage to position ourselves, these results generate long-term and lasting traffic.

7# It is profitable.

Compared to other methods like Adwords paid to advertise, long-term SEO is profitable for high search queries. There are no requirements regarding the time in which a link is in the search engines or terms of cost, although it is true that the CPC (cost per click) in the first phase is higher once applied, the cost is maintained.

3# Market Share

Search engines have more market share. About 80% of customers review the products and services on the website.

The figure SEO is responsible for detecting what these issues are and responding to user demands as soon as possible.

Advantages and disadvantages of SEO

There are many reasons why working on the SEO of your website benefits you, but it is also true that you must know how to do it so that its use gives you an advantage over your competitors and not the penalty of your website for abusing practices. misunderstood.

Among the advantages of SEO are:

• Free or low-cost traffic attraction
• It is one of the most loyal sources of traffic in the long term
• Obtaining qualified traffic from the use of keywords
• We will inspire confidence in potential users: and improve our reputation
• Improving the quality of our website

Among the disadvantages of SEO are:

• These are techniques that require training, time, and effort.
• Results may take several weeks to see
• The impact of SEO techniques on Google varies at the same time as the search engine algorithm does: we must be willing to update content and make constant improvements
• Just as we work on SEO ourselves, so will our competition: reaching the first position is never guaranteed
• The results that are positioned through the payment of ads (SEM) will always be above, although our positioning will be organic.

How to be an SEO expert

You have more and more specialized training to train you in positioning a business through the use of SEO techniques.

The search and reading of specialized bibliography, the monitoring of accounts in social networks oriented to the study of SEO, and the search on the net about the latest updates of the Google algorithm and its influence on organic positioning will help you become a professional who can become the SEO Manager that every company needs. In case you want to take some notes on this, we give you some tips:

• Work on the quality of your website and avoid not very functional designs, because they will affect the user experience and influence the perception of search engines

• Take care of the loading time of your website. On the net, you will find many tools, such as Page Speed, with which to analyze the speed. If it takes more than four seconds to load you should focus on its improvement.

• Optimize the images taking care of the Alt + Title tags and their weight.

• Always work with H2 and H3 tags to structure the elements of your page. Remember that by H1 we mean the main title.

• Create content taking into account the keywords you want to work with and carry out a study of the positioning of these keywords in Google beforehand.

• Don’t neglect Off-page SEO and worry about getting good quality backlinks, which above all are natural. Guest blogging is a good option.

SEO trends for this year

In a year full of changes in the Google algorithm, Serps, and SEOs have undoubtedly moved a lot in the face of this new situation. Being able to identify the user’s search intention and offer exactly the best content for each search intention is becoming more and more important. And the use of AI by Google makes its Rankbrain gain importance.

On the other hand, the loading speed of the web and a well-hierarchical and orderly structure is essential because Google wants its users to have an incredible experience with its brand. In addition, voice marketing or voice searches through Alexa or Google Home will be used more and more and will be more complex. In this post, we leave you all the SEO trends for this year.

SEO tools you will need

There are many and varied tools that an SEO needs. To do a technical audit, to track your rankings, to discover content opportunities, or to track your competition. In this post, we leave you the 20 best free SEO tools and we advance some of them.

• MOZ
• AHREFS
• MonkeyLearn
• Sistrix
• Keyword Tools
• Google Adwords
• Google Trends
• Google Analytics
• SEM Rush

Differences between SEO and SEM

In practice, they are very similar because, in the end, they are two ways to appear in the first search results. However, the big difference between the two is that in SEM you will appear in exchange for paying, and in SEO you will appear if the search engine algorithms consider that you are the best result.

Do you like the post? We would love to read your opinion in the form of a comment. Do not forget that, if you have been thinking about training in SEO for some time, you can start with our free online SEO course for beginners.  You will learn to increase your visibility and control organic positioning in search engines with the best professionals in the sector. Cheer up and become the leader of the future you dream of!