To promote your company, product or service, the Internet is the perfect medium. In fact, at the present time, it is indispensable to have a web page if you want to compete with your competitors. But it is not enough to create a website and just stand around waiting for users to come and visit you. Unless what you offer is something really unique, the Internet is replete with websites similar to yours.
When users need to search for something related to your business, they do it through Internet search engines. What you need is that those search engines rank your website higher than your competitors’ websites. And to achieve that goal you need SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is one of the main branches of Online Marketing and it is the set of techniques that serve to improve the visibility of a website in the organic results of the different search engines around the world.
The goal of SEO is to help your online project to appear in the first positions in the organic results list of the search engines. If you are well positioned, you will have more chances that a potential client will click on your link.
Basically, this is achieved by optimizing the contents of your website according to the most relevant keywords searched by users.
Organic results
When you are searching, for example, in Google, you get two types of results: organic results and sponsored results. Sponsored links are the product of paid advertising campaigns carried out with Google’s Adwords tool and appear visually differentiated from organic results.
The organic results are the natural results of a correct optimization of its contents thanks to the correct application of SEO techniques.
OnPage SEO and OffPage SEO
SEO is applied at two levels: OnPage and OffPage. OnPage SEO deals with the adaptation of content, also including structural and technical components. With OnPage optimization, you get more visibility by improving the structure and quality of the website, focusing on its content, its format and its images.
OffPage SEO focuses on actions that take place outside the site. These actions affect the site in an indirect way. Important factors of OffPage SEO are inbound links and mentions from other sites or from social networks.
KEYS SEO ONPAGE
The key points in OnPage SEO are:
- Unique Content: The information offered on our website must be valuable, new and relevant, avoiding duplicate content and plagiarism. The correct use of keywords is very important.
- Structure: The information must be legible and well-structured, following the correct disposition of the different format elements (titles, subtitles, paragraphs, lists).
- Multimedia content: All types of multimedia content (images, videos, graphics) are ideal for the enrichment of the text, but it is important that the keyword(s) are also present in the file name, in the title and in the description (Alt).
- Metadata: Metadata (Meta Tags) comprises information that browsers and search engines can interpret. The most important attributes for an OnPage optimization are the title and description.
- Links: Internal links do not only help users to navigate in a website, they also help search engines such as Google. For OnPage optimization it is important that the route that a user follows is not that long.
- Programming: OnPage SEO also has to take into consideration the optimization of the source code, applying a search engine friendly design, avoiding excessive load times, crashes or failures in the code, etc.
Keys OffPage SEO
These are the two main aspects of OffPage optimization:
- Linkbuilding: Links are one of the most important factors in determining the position of a website, since they measure the degree of estimation of a webpage. Linkbuilding is one of the strategies of OffPage SEO that consists of convincing other web pages to link to the page of interest that search engines consider relevant and position it better in their rankings. The technique can be done naturally, when other websites link without prior agreement, or artificially, when the links are simulated to have been achieved naturally. A few days ago we gave you some advice on how to do Linkbuilding.
- Social signals: We are talking about all those indicators that come from the different social networks. It is a fact that the positive signals received (for example, the number of “I like”, the number of times a content is shared or the comments it generates) are not completely irrelevant and that companies active in social networks achieve an increase in visibility, qualified visits and customer engagement.