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SEO strategies for search engines
We will talk about search engines, even if in this historical period when it comes to SEO we are certainly talking about Google given the large market share it holds.
What is SEO?
SEO aims to create a content or with a environment (site) in line with people's needs and, therefore, appreciated by search engines, which precisely want users to find answers to their needs, to be more used. Search engines look for perfection because that way they can sell advertising. So the pursuit of perfection is vital for them.
The snake
The engines search engines organize pages composed of search results ( sprinkle ) whose order is given by the evaluations carried out by the algorithms. SEO allows you to act on these mechanisms by making websites more “attractive” and perceived as having higher value, which increases the chances of reaching top positions. When we talk about SEO we talk about organic traffic, that is, traffic that does not come from ppc campaigns (paid, such as Google Ads).
Since results positioned high on search engine pages are more likely to be seen and visited, SEO optimization is of great importance for those who want to make their online business profitable.
SEO is an activity very important for both commercial and amateur projects, as it allows for appreciable visibility whatever the manager's purpose. For it to bring real benefits, it must be carried out by experienced people, capable of studying the specificities of the sector to develop the improvement strategies most appropriate to the context. An SEO consultant can help you with this task.
What are SEO strategies for?
Activities SEO optimization They make web content more relevant to people and easier for search engines to understand.
Technical SEO optimization It allows search engine crawlers to understand web content more easily for better rankings.
Unlike SEM (Search Engine Marketing), which involves the use of paid ads to promote the brand, SEO allows you to bring a website among the first results without paying directly to obtain these results.
SEO is, therefore, a convenient discipline for those who do not have the resources to afford prolonged advertisements, which require a budget from the beginning to appear, and once this disappears, it no longer produces effects.
In SEO, the user must be at the center
The Google algorithms , the world's most popular search engine, rely on countless, largely secret factors (at least 200, but most likely we're talking thousands, if not tens of thousands of items). SEO optimization activities aim to make a site more relevant in all aspects that affect the quality evaluation of Google and the other major search engines, so that the associated brand obtains commercial benefits from this increased visibility.
Very often, many people who do SEO do not aim to provide a great site experience for the user, but rather to please Google and this, with subsequent changes to the algorithm, could penalize them.
SEO Activities
Technical optimization allows search engines to better understand the contents of the website.
SEO optimization activities include:
- the inclusion of structured data so that the information on the pages is easily classifiable and searchable
- source code optimization to make it easier for bots to understand
- the use of structured data to provide clear information to search engines about the meaning of your elements
- Activating AMP pages, a technology that allows you to access a preview version of web pages much faster in loading than ordinary
- resolving technical issues that affect navigation and slow loading times
- image optimization to provide search engines with information about their meaning
- reducing all site elements in page load time
- optimizing the structure of the portal so that the contents are as similar as possible to the home page in terms of number of clicks
- graphic optimization of the site's visual elements
- get backlinks from authoritative sites
- reducing server response times
- constant updating of pages that no longer exist and consequent communication to the search engine
- the evaluation of the results
- mobile display optimization
The SEO consultant is responsible for implementing or having technical changes implemented so that the website's display is intuitive on all types of browsers and devices. This also and above all refers to the loading times, which must be contained between 1 and 3 seconds to guarantee user satisfaction.
Actions on social networks They are not directly a positioning factor , are a totally disconnected factor, however, sharing in social environments similar to your target, maintaining a close link with your audience, making your content more easily identifiable, indirectly helps to obtain practical advantages. for the benefit of pages like:
- highest number of pages visited
- longer residence time
- highest number of visits
Types of SEO techniques
SEO techniques can be defined as White SEO (when done in accordance with Google guidelines), Black SEO (when they expressly violate these provisions) and Gray Hat (when they are halfway between the two interpretations).
Search engines may penalize sites they perceive to be using techniques contrary to their guidelines to prevent them from obtaining undeserved results.
SEO consultants They are in charge of working on all the on- and off-page factors that affect ranking. In addition to the technical ones, there are other more nuanced ones, such as the age of the domain and the visibility of the brand, which are also important to give greater authority to web projects.
SEO optimization is done both in advance ( studying the target and the reference competition) as well as in real time and ex post (evaluating positioning changes) to decide the activities to be carried out to progressively improve the results of the portal.
This also includes analyzing technical flaws and aspects that can be improved to positively affect positioning.
Difference between indexing and classification
Search engines like Google send their own bots (crawlers or spiders) to the web, programs configured to discover new content, create a copy of it, and catalog it in their archive.
Once identified, these programs follow the links that connect one page to another to continue finding new content to catalog.
The classification is el order in which users' search results are sorted on search engine pages. It is decided by search engine algorithms based on the correspondence of the web pages in question with a series of parameters that are considered relevant to user satisfaction.
Hence we have the fundamental difference between index y sort out .
Indexing means making content crawlable and memorable to search engines.
El Positioning is the next step to indexing and consists of creating an order of the sites in the SERP (search engine results pages) based on their estimated relevance with respect to the searches carried out by people.
It goes without saying that a site must be indexed to have a chance of ranking for given searches.
Positioning is not only influenced by “objective” factors off page (external to the website) and on page (internal to the website), but also by the preferences and habits of the users in question. In fact, Google tends to personalize search results based on viewing history, history of previously visited sites, and geographic location.
For this reason we can all see different SERPs with the same searches, especially if they are written from mobile devices, which are therefore greatly affected by the geographical position to define the ranking.
Optimizing internal links.
Internal links are important elements of a portal's architecture, which connect resources and facilitate the transmission of importance to the pages that we want to make more visible.
Optimizing internal links allows you to:
- Make information consultation more immediate
- Encourage navigation on the site.
- Set a hierarchical priority between site pages
Links consist of hyperlinks and the words that include those links. The words underlying the clickable links constitute the anchor texts and influence the perception of importance and relevance to certain topics of the linked pages.
For this reason, it is necessary to choose words relevant to the user that are capable of making them understand the topic easily. Anchor texts like “click here” are not useful for this purpose, while text like “New Year's Meat Recipes” is much more explanatory.
Precisely due to the fact that texts continue to be very influential in positioning, we must be careful not to use them blatantly with the sole objective of improving positioning.
We can aim to use keywords that are close to the terms that people would use to search for answers to their needs. Each one uses particular formulas, so it is better to use your ideas in a varied way, so as not to give Google the impression that you are building a network of links that is too forced.
SEO and content creation
SEO guides the creation of content relevant to people's real needs. SEO experts study people's search intent and try to find the best way to respond to it.
Consultants study the competition of the ranked sites to understand the strengths that have allowed them to reach those positions, and identify untapped areas of optimization that allow them to improve the ranking of client sites.
Search engines try to give people the most timely and accurate answer to their needs. For this reason, they are interested in bringing to light those contents that, according to their own algorithms, can best respond to users' information and purchasing needs.
Creating original, quality content in line with your audience's search intent allows us to reach the top positions of search engines, become reference points for our audience and obtain qualified traffic useful for conversions.
Target analysis includes several steps such as:
- Understand what your typical users are really interested in and the type of needs they have to satisfy
- The type of language most appropriate to convey a given message.
- Study the competition to identify strengths to inspire and find areas of improvement to exploit
Therefore, an SEO writer is in charge of creating original and useful content for a specific audience, so as to respond to the needs of the typical user in a better way than those of the competition.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the first step of SEO activity that allows you to understand people's needs and decide what is the best way to satisfy them, in order to position yourself effectively.
Keywords are the terms that people use to find content that meets their needs. Keywords can be dry (consisting of only one or two terms) indicating generic topics, or long-tail keywords (consisting of four or more words) indicating more specific topics.
Research volumes
The search volumes They correspond to how many times in a month the keywords are searched. Understanding monthly search volume allows you to get an idea of the number of potential visits that can be obtained by optimizing content for given keywords. If you choose a keyword with zero volume, users are unlikely to search for our site.
Relevance
SEO is responsible for analyzing the intent behind the keywords entered to determine if it is in line with the monetization methods of the site in question.
The research intentions can be:
- Informative, when it comes to information searches ("SEO guides")
- Navigational, when they are oriented to a specific source of information.
- Transactional, when their purpose is to obtain products and services.
These considerations make it possible to create content that is truly useful for the target audience and, at the same time, capable of converting visitors into business contacts.
Competitiveness
Each keyword is characterized by a certain degree of competition depending on how much it is searched and how many topics you want to rank for it.
The more competitors have important resources at their disposal to position themselves, the greater the competition they will face to achieve the first positions .
In particular, dry keys (i.e. consisting of 1 or 2 words) are generally more difficult to rank for, as they represent a broader search intent than specific ones and are therefore searched by a much larger number. of people.
Keys like “shoes,” for example, are handled by the most renowned stores that can offer answers to the many search variations of this key.
El keyword analysis It allows you to focus on those terms that are individually characterized by having lower search volumes compared to the most searched words, but that in general can bring more consistent amounts of traffic and, above all, discounting less competition, with greater chances of success.
A good strategy is to target keywords that are not too generic - characterized by acceptable competition - to create content that can offer better answers to your users than those of the competition.
keyword research tools
There are many tools that help in keyword analysis.
Google Ads Keyword Planner It is a very suitable tool for comparing search volumes and competition, particularly for search keywords with commercial intent.
It is a free tool that offers valuable insights into monthly search volumes, historical trend statistics, and ideas for relevant keywords to use in your ads.
Google Search Console allows you to get highlighted information on the keywords that drive real website visits. By analyzing impressions (the views of the content on the SERP) and clicks, it is possible to draw conclusions about the attractiveness of the content for the audience to which it is directed.
SEO is concerned with defining performance indicators (KPIs) based on which to evaluate the performance of the content and the results obtained in general from the site. This way you can periodically implement improvements to improve the performance of the portal.
seozoom y Semrush are two professional suites that allow you to analyze search volumes, competition and estimate search intent for keywords. These tools help create content tailored to particular search needs and optimized for search engines.
Screaming Frog is a tool that allows you to simulate Google spiders to have a representation of the way you see our website. We can identify pages that receive more internal links, discover pages with tags not optimized, find images with an invalid ALT tag and other information to improve the SEO optimization of websites. The screaming frog is a fundamental tool for those who practice this profession
Local SEO
Local SEO consists of optimizing portals to make them more relevant from a local point of view. In fact, many searches are directed to a circle of local products and services, and search engines adapt to better meet the needs of those who write them.
To do this, the SEO consultant aims to increase the authority factors that allow improving positioning at the local level:
- Google My Business Listing Optimization
- Presence in local directories
- User Reviews
- Optimizing texts in the local area
- Quotes from local sites
As mentioned, it is very important to promote a correct brand presence through the Google MyBusiness page. GMB is a profile in evidence on the right of the SERP that constitutes the reference point for local brands. MyBusiness cards can be optimized in terms of texts, images, videos, posts, to provide timely and complete information to users.
These pages can also be viewed from Google Maps and allow local searchers to directly identify local brands suitable for their needs.
SEO content optimization
The content should respond as much as possible to the needs of the public and be easier to navigate. In fact, the public expects to find an answer to their needs in a short time.
We live in an increasingly hectic world and speed really makes a difference. For speed, understood as the time spent in the query, both the loading times and the useless times of the texts are important to extend the stock.
In addition to providing relevant information to our audience, we should aim to make it easily understandable by search engines, so that they have no doubts about its validity.
SEO optimization also aims to make the content created more useful for your goal over time. This also includes periodic rewriting and expansion of pages that you want to always keep useful and up-to-date for your audience. Keyword research allows you to evaluate how search intent changes over time, and from this information you can make changes or rewrite content to make it more useful to your audience's changing needs.
On-page SEO optimization aims to make a web page more easily understandable and relevant to search engines.
There are several types of bookmarks, HTML tags, that can be implemented to provide information about the page to search engines.
Title
The title tag is used to establish a title of a piece of content for search engines. it has that structure
Title for Google
SEO copywriting activities aim to make this title clear to search engines and invite readers. Therefore, on the one hand, it is necessary to target the words that are representative of its content, and on the other hand, clearly convey the benefit that it is capable of offering the reader.
For example, a catchy SEO-optimized title could be:
Streamyard Guide: Why you can't do without it again
In this way, the keyword “Streamyard Guide” is improved and the viewer is given the idea that it is a really valuable software that absolutely must be improved.
You can aim to use keywords as far to the left in the sentence as possible to highlight them to search engines, but still prioritize the naturalness of the text .
Description
Descriptions are tags that serve to report short descriptive texts of the page content to search engines. They are a preview of the content and are very important not so much for SEO purposes but to convince the reader to enter the page.
Descriptions, if evaluated in terms of SEO writing, are an excellent complement to increase CTR (click through rate), that is, the relationship between the clicks obtained and the number of times a content has appeared in the results.
A good description SEO optimization practice is to create attractive but short texts (no more than 150 words) and encourage readers to act through appropriate calls to action.
In this guide, we explain how to set up Streamyard and why it's the ideal software for recording and streaming.
URL
The URL is the path to a resource on the Internet. The URL may consist of a generic string of letters and numbers, but in this way it is not indicative to users and search engines.
For this reason, CMSs generally allow you to rewrite URLs to make them easier for both bots and people to understand and remember.
URLs can be rewritten to include the relevant keywords you want to rank for. It may be better to adopt a short URL, for example composed of 3 or 5 words, so as not to frustrate positioning efforts and to make it easy to remember.
Label H
The tags They allow you to define text in relief with respect to the rest of the page. They are very useful to define the titles of the paragraphs and to indicate to search engines the topic that each of them deals with. Usually only one tag is used , which usually corresponds to the page title, followed by other tags which decrease in importance as the number increases.
We can have multiple tags H2 >, H3 >, H4 > etc. depending on the depth we intend to give to the structure of the page.
Therefore, we can have a paragraph alignment like:
SEO: everything you need to know
What is SEO?
Indexing and positioning: the differences
....
SEO content optimization
Qualification
Description
SEO Images
Images can also be optimized to make them more meaningful to search engines. In fact, we can reduce its weight, with the same quality, to reduce page loading time. A good tool to do this is definitely squoosh.
To let the illustrations speak, we can also optimize the text fields that belong to the images, such as the file name and Alt tag, to make their meaning clearer to search engines.
To optimize most of the aspects relevant to on-page SEO, sites managed with CMS, structures that simplify content management, provide for the use of plugins, functions that can be implemented to obtain certain results.
Such plugins, like Yoast, allow you to directly affect contents to make them more relevant on the SEO side.
Please note that installing Yoast does not install SEO on your site. You will simply have installed a tool that can help you initially, but those who do serious SEO have rules in mind and they are not rules that a plugin can understand. Above all, SEO should not be schematized but diversified.
Link building
SEO drives towards getting links from other sites. Links are hyperlinks that link one site to another. Links are very important “certificates of esteem” that search engines use to get an idea of the importance of sites.
Just as in academia, awards and publications serve to give an idea of an academic's authority, backlinks are a measure of how much a site can be trusted.
In fact, the idea that Google cultivates is that the more links a site receives, the more trustworthy it is and, therefore, it is worthy of appearing among the first results. This has made backlinks one of the main positioning factors and has qualified link building as one of the most important strategies in digital promotion.
SEO consultants are in charge of selecting the portals in line with the sites to be promoted at the level of thematic affinity, and more importantly, in order to transmit value.
Purchasing links is expressly prohibited by Google guidelines. In fact, Google is well aware of the role that hyperlinks play in ranking attribution, as well as how much webmasters artificially try to improve rankings.
Despite bans, link building is often done artificially for immediate financial gain. Over the years, Google has refined its algorithms by introducing mechanisms aimed at identifying and obstructing processes known to obtain unnatural backlinks.
We have for example:
- Links purchased on portals created for the sole purpose of selling them
- Low-value content posted only to supplement links
- Reciprocal link exchanges from portals
- Links with texts still with an explicitly commercial purpose
- Links obtained in large quantities in a short period of time
SEO consultants are in charge of developing a long-term link acquisition strategy in a natural and competitive way with the client's resources. They take care of obtaining a reasonable ratio between non-nofollow links (which transmit value for ranking purposes) and nofollow links (which transmit link juice).
A reasonable ratio between links useful for positioning and others that are neutral actually makes it possible to generate a reasonable link profile from the point of view of search engines.
The texts can still be of different types:
- Generic, when they do not give particular references on the subject of the link (for example, "Click here", "This site"
- Commercial name, when they consist of the name of the site or its path (for example, "www.sito.com")
- Commercials, when they aim to increase relevance
SEO consultants are in charge of identifying the most appropriate words to link to sites, which are significant for positioning but not extremely forced from the point of view of the algorithms.
This allows a progressive and natural growth of positioning to be sustained over time, which keeps the site safe from possible penalties.
As you can see, SEO is a complex but very important discipline to increase the importance of a website. what do you think about it? Let's talk about it next!
How to become an SEO specialist?
To become an SEO specialist, you need to study hard, fail hard, and understand how to please Google. Any SEO has been banging their head for days before figuring out how to improve the rankings of their site and their customers.
There are excellent courses, but without a doubt a private consultation with those who do this work daily is the shortest way to learn well and quickly.
Where is SEO applied?
As we have said basically when we talk about SEO we talk about Google and at most Bing, but now SEO has also begun to flourish in other sectors where even today it is certainly much easier to take positioning since Google's algorithm is undoubtedly the most complex,algorithm at the moment.
