What is SEO and why do I need it?

Where did the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) come from?

The first search engines emerged in the early 90s. Until Google appeared in 1996, many were created, including Yahoo! The Web boom began. People realized that money could really be made from them. Thus they came to the conclusion that they needed to attract traffic. What was the best method of attracting traffic? Search engines. At that moment the owners of the webs began to think how they could reach the first positions ... SEO was born!

SEO focuses on organic search results, that is, what are not paid:

1. What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website in the organic results of different search engines. It is also frequently named by its English title, SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Wikipedia

SEO is one of the "disciplines" that has changed the most in recent years. We just have to look at the large number of updates that have been of Penguin and Panda, and how they have given a 180-degree turn to what was understood by SEO until recently. Now with SEO, what Matt Cutts himself describes as "Search Experience Optimization" or what is the same, "all for the user" is pursued.

Although there are thousands of factors that a search engine relies on to position one page or another, it could be said that there are two basic factors: authority and relevance

Authority is basically the popularity of a website. The more popular it is, the more valuable the information it contains. This factor is the one that a search engine takes into account most since it is based on the user's own experience. The more content is shared, the more users found it useful.

Relevance is the relationship a page has to a given search. This is not simply that a page contains a lot of times the search term (in the beginning it was like that) but that a search engine relies on hundreds of on-site factors to determine this.

SEO can be divided into two large groups:

On-site: On-site SEO is concerned with relevance. It ensures that the web is optimized so that the search engine understands the main thing, which is the content of the same. Within the SEO On-site, we would include the optimization of keywords, loading time, user experience, optimization of the code, and format of the URLs.

Off-site: Off-site SEO is the part of SEO work that focuses on factors external to the web page in which we work. The most important factors in off-site SEO are the number and quality of links, presence in social networks, mentions in local media, brand authority, and performance in search results, that is, the CTR that our clients have. results in a search engine. Surely you are thinking that all this is very good and that it is very interesting but that you are here to find out why you need SEO on your website and what benefits you will get if you integrate it into your online strategy.

Once we know what SEO is, we must differentiate whether or not we follow the "recommendations" of the search engine. Black Hat SEO or White Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO: Black hat is the attempt to improve the search engine positioning of a web page using unethical techniques or techniques that contradict the search engine guidelines. Some examples of Black Hat SEO are Cloaking, Spinning, SPAM in forums and blog comments, or Keyword Stuffing. The black hat can provide benefits in the short term, but it is generally a risky strategy, without continuity in the long term and that does not add value.

White Hat SEO: It consists of all those ethically correct actions that comply with the search engine guidelines to position a web page in the search results. Since search engines give greater importance to the pages that best respond to a user's search, the White Hat includes the techniques that seek to make a page more relevant to search engines by adding value to its users.

2. Why is SEO important?

The most important reason SEO is necessary is that it makes your website more useful to both users and search engines. Although they still cannot see a web page like a human does. SEO is necessary to help search engines understand what each page is about and whether or not it is useful to users.

Now let's put an example to see things more clearly:

We have e-commerce dedicated to the sale of children's books. Well, for the term "coloring pages" there are about 673,000 monthly searches. Assuming that the first result that appears after doing a search in Google obtains 22% of clicks (CTR = 22%), we would obtain about 148,000 visits per month.

Now, how much are those 148,000 visits worth? Well, if for that term the average cost per click is € 0.20, we are talking about more than € 29,000 / month. This only in Spain, if we have business-oriented to several countries, every hour 1.4 billion searches are carried out in the world. Of those searches, 70% of clicks are on organic results and 75% of users do not reach the second page. If we take all this into account, we see that there are many clicks per month for the first result.

SEO is the best way for your users to find you through searches in which your website is relevant.

How do search engines work?

If the intention of SEO is to get better positions for the search engine results, then it is necessary to understand how these search engines work.

Tracking

Search engines draw a network on the web using bots, which are responsible for crawling web pages through links, in a similar way to which a user would surf the internet.

This tracking process begins by browsing previous web addresses and sitemaps, once bots access these sites, they look for links to other pages to visit them.

Indexing

When crawler bots have entered a web page, it records all the necessary information and indexes it according to its content, its authority and its relevance. In this way, when you make a request in the search engine, it will be easier for it to show us the information that is related to your request.