3 key points to understand SEO
If you already have a website or blog and have been researching the best techniques to create your website for a while then you have almost certainly heard of SEO strategies. That’s why today we want to give you this guide to help you get started with basic SEO: definition, tips and tools.
1.- What is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization is a set of strategies for search engine optimization. Remember that most of us when we surf the Internet do not have the exact addresses of the pages we want to visit, this is when we turn to search engines, either Google, the ore popular of all, Bing, DuckDuckGo or Yahoo, then we enter any word related to what we want and the search engine gives us a list of hundreds of pages that can serve us.
The important thing is to know why a search engine shows you the first one page over many others and the truth is that they do it following an algorithm that nobody knows 100% and that is constantly changing to deliver better results.
However, even though we do not know the algorithm in detail, we do know some strategies that help search engines identify our page, tag it and show it as a result in certain searches.
Although there are several search engines, Google is the one that is at the forefront and is “all-terrain” because it is used to search for all types of information, articles for sale, web pages, social networks, images, videos, etc. That is why SEO recommendations are always oriented to Google’s algorithm.
2.- Improve your content
Some years ago Google’s algorithm was not as sophisticated as it is today, so for your page to be positioned you needed to indicate some keywords and that these appear several times in the text, it was also recommended that you add several links in your blog posts.
If your SEO strategy follows these principles, let me tell you that you have to stop doing it as soon as possible, because for some time now Google’s algorithm has become so sophisticated that it can read and interpret each post as a person would, so now it prefers pages with clear, concise and original content, so it is important to take this into account when you create content. Here are 3 tips to optimize your appearance in search results.
Keywords
Keywords are hashtags that indicate the content of your text, they are easy to identify because they appear as bold words in the text. Although it is true that Google has started to penalize the indiscriminate use of keywords, it is still important to use them in the text. Ideally, the main keyword should be in the title, in a subtitle and appear as a name and attributes in your multimedia content. Also, it is convenient to use some secondary keywords related to the main keyword in the text.
Links
A very important point for your SEO strategy within your content is to place links to external pages. This is essential because it is Google’s way of measuring the authority of a website. When the Google robot finds a website, it scans its content and if it finds links, it goes to that page, to evaluate it, so the more links that go to a page, the more authority it has and the easier it is to recommend it.
That is why it is very important that all the links in your entries work perfectly, so house the broken links, i.e. links that lead to a 404 error, otherwise Google will not be able to measure the authority of your website. In addition, it will rate your website as an undesirable user experience.
Multimedia
Another SEO recommendation that you have to start practicing has to do with the multimedia content of your website. If it is normal for your website to upload images and videos you must take into account the file name and the meta information of the same, if you have titled the photo of your restaurant as “DCMI677.jpg” it will be more difficult to appear in the search results for “nearby restaurants” than if you title it “buen provecho restaurant.jpg”.
The best tools
While it is true that we do not know perfectly how Google’s algorithm works, we can access some tools that can help you measure and improve your strategies and in fact they are very easy to use, as many of them are just a plugin that you have to install on your website. Here are some of these tools and the best way to use them.
Yoast SEO
When it comes to SEO Yoast SEO is the king of plugins, you install it on your site built on WordPress. Its most important advantage is that it is very easy to use, because it has a very intuitive interface that allows you to measure the readability of your site, it also provides you with important indicators to be able to improve these strategies or implement others. Another advantage of this plugin is that it facilitates optimization for social networks, which is an important aspect to attract traffic to your website.
Broken link checker
When we talk about SEO remember how important are the links inside your website so that search engines can find your page, that is why the links inside each post must work and be updated, luckily for this task we have a tool that will make our life easier, we refer to Broken linker checker.
This plugin helps you detect the links on your page that lead to a 404 error, detect this and correct it is a very important part of your positioning strategy because the Google search engine identifies these errors as an unfavorable user experience which can subtract in your positioning.
Broken Link Checker does the dirty work, scanning your website to give you a list of broken links and their location, once this is done you just have to remove these links or correct them. What is recommended is that you disable this plugin once you have the scan because it can affect the performance of the page.
Rel NoFollow Checkbox
Another feature of the links that Google takes into account to position you is the quality of them, because it also qualifies as undesirable user experience that you direct your readers to a page with only link or that is only spam, so it is very important to be checking that in each entry you make sure that the links to which you direct are of serious pages as important as yours. Luckily for this there is the Rel No Follow Checkbox, this plugin makes sure that your links do not affect your ranking by adding to each external link an attribute “rel nofollow” thus keeping advertisers away and allowing you to maintain a good ranking.
3.- Google Ads
While it is true that Google is not the only search engine, it is also true that it is the most used browser and the one that sets the guidelines for the algorithms of other search engines, this means that if you position yourself well in Google, you can position yourself well in any other browser, luckily Google itself gives you several tools that help you get a better positioning, here we show you what they are:
Google Trends is a tool that everyone who has a website and especially a blog must have yes or yes, because it allows you to analyze search trends, this helps you generate content ideas that can be within the most searched topics, of course this tool can help you to assess how sought after are the topics you deal with on your website.
Google Analitycs is a basic tool for those who do digital marketing or for those who want to position and bring more traffic to your website, as it offers statistics to monitor the performance of your website, conversions and visits.
Google Search Console this is a tool that can help you remove URLs and negative backlinks from your website, it also provides information on crawl errors and search analysis of your website.
Google Keyword planner this is one of the best free SEO tools that Google offers us to find keywords, the best thing is that it will not only suggest Keywords but it will give you analytics on their frequency of use and changes over time.
As you can see SEO strategies go far beyond writing a clear text, it is important that you are in constant review so that your page works perfectly and can offer an excellent user experience. Tell us, do you know any SEO strategy that we did not mention here?
