The SEO is a very broad discipline and includes some technical aspects, but that does not mean it very difficult to start or is only a matter of experts.
Understanding the main aspects of SEO in Google and how to improve them is available to anyone. Even if you decide to hire SEO agency to take care of your website, it is essential to have some concepts clear. In this beginner’s guide we explain the basic things you need to know to position a page.
How does SEO work on Google?
The SEO ( ” search engine optimization ” for short), is a discipline that is responsible for improving the position in which a web appears in search engine results . As in our country Google is practically a monopoly, when we talk about SEO we usually refer to SEO in Google.
The objective of SEO is for our website to appear in search results when a user has a need related to what we offer. For example, if we have an online shoe store, what we want is to appear among the first places when someone searches for “shoes” in Google.
In order to offer its service, Google has a series of robots that continuously track websites and store the information they find in an index. When someone does a search in your search engine, Google consults that index to see which pages are related to that search. Next, it applies an algorithm to decide the order in which the pages will be displayed and finally they are shown to the user in the search results.
The exact formula of the algorithm that Google uses to decide the displayed pages is not public and is also updated regularly (up to 200 times a year). It is no longer as before, that the updates were a few times a year and very large, now they are small and constant. But we do know that there are two basic aspects of SEO in Google: relevance (related to SEO on page) and reputation (related to SEO off page).
- On- page SEO is about optimizing the internal structure and content of a page, so that Google robots can easily understand what it is about and include it in the index according to its main themes.
- The SEO off page basically is to generate inbound links to the site from other websites. Each of these links gives a kind of “reputation points” to the page; It is as if the internet is a democracy and each link counts as a vote in favor of the page.
Google SEO: basic recommendations to improve the positioning of a website
Keywords
The keywords or keywords are the terms that users enter in the search box of Google . The theory is that the more those keywords match the text on the web, the more likely it is to appear in a good place among the search results.
Therefore, part of the job in SEO is to find out which are the keywords that interest us the most. The idea is that they are related to what our brand offers and that they do not have too much competition.
When using keywords on our website, it is very important to remember that we are writing for users, not for Google robots . That is, it is important that the keyword is present, but the text should always be useful and pleasant to read.
Quality content
Continuing with the previous point, one of the keys to appear among the top positions in Google’s results is to offer content that really is the best to answer users’ questions and solve their needs .
Creating quality content takes time, but we also have to think that it is an investment that will continue to bear fruit in the medium and long term. Not only will you get Google to consider your most relevant page, but you will also be helping to improve its reputation, since if your content is useful, there will be other people who link to it.
Think that these contents are a tool to capture leads or generate sales. Not everything is about traffic, but about converting.
Loading speed
Excessively slow websites despair users and are also penalized by Google’s SEO . Therefore, when creating our website, we must keep in mind that it is fast when loading.
Another very important aspect that we have to take into account is that it is optimized for mobile phones , since the mobile version is the first thing that Google takes into account to decide the positioning of a site in search results.
URLs
There are many different ways to generate the different URLs for a website’s pages. In general, Google likes that they are as simple as possible and that they contain the keywords by which we want to position. For example, www.zapateriaonline.com/zapatos-tacon would be a good URL for SEO on Google.
Titles, descriptions and headings
Each page of your website should have its own title , which is short, descriptive and includes the keyword (preferably at the beginning). Likewise, we must also customize the description of each page.
The title and description are what users see on the Google search results page, so they are a decisive factor in encouraging them to click or, on the contrary, skip them.
As for the headings , they are labels that serve to indicate the subtitles and sections of each of the pages of our website. The title is identified with the label H1 , the next level of hierarchy would be H2, and so on up to H6. It is recommended to use at least the H1, H2 and H3 to correctly structure the contents and make them friendlier for both users and search engines.
Link building
It is called ” link building ” the creation of links to your page from other internet sites. This is the aspect of Google SEO that has the most limitations, for example, we cannot pay to get links or use spam techniques.
The idea is that if you create quality content and actively promote your page, you will naturally generate links over time.