Google’s mission is to organize Internet content, striving to recommend the most relevant answer abut SEO from the most reliable source in the most appropriate format for the user who performs a search.
SEO is the art and science of persuading search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to recommend your content to their users as the best solution to their problem.
SEO is a continuous process of analysis and optimization of a website or any other platform such as YouTube.
In the optimization process hundreds of factors act that must be taken into account, yes, there are hundreds of factors, it is not an exaggeration. It makes all the sense that it is so, since the algorithm learns from how users search for and interact with websites and there are many types of users, even over time the same types can evolve and form new ones.
The two great areas of SEO
Table of Contents
SEO is divided into two areas, on-page SEO, which includes everything that happens on the website, and off-page SEO, which covers what happens outside the website.
SEO on-page
- Speed
- Mobile friendly
- Code quality
- Security
- User experience
- Quality of content
- Internal linking
Off-page SEO
- Registration in directories
- Press releases
- Branded content
- Content aggregators
- Social networks
- Websites that link to us
- Brand mentions
How the Google algorithm (s) works
The algorithm of Google, which we can call the magic and secret recipe, is the one that orders and commands how websites should be classified in search results, the algorithm according to Google, undergoes several daily slight modifications and some large annual updates. This means that SEO professionals are continually training and updating our knowledge base.
It is made up of several algorithms that control the different areas that Google has considered important to be treated by a dedicated algorithm. Let’s see which ones;
Google algorithms
Panda : Evaluates the quality of the content.
Penguin : Evaluates the abusive and intentional use of links.
Hummingbird : quality and intent of the searches.
Pigeon : local positioning / local SEO
Fred : Evaluates the abusive use of advertising on websites.
Bert : understanding of natural language
Most important SEO factors
As we said above, there are hundreds of factors and it can be overwhelming to try to assign a weight to each of them. What factors do you focus on to work?
The answer is it depends, it depends on your business model, who your customer is and how the competition does it. The first and most complicated thing is to choose the right strategy. In certain business models we must focus on certain factors and prioritize them, such as the content for a digital newspaper, or a correct web architecture for a large ecommerce, depending on the model, the competition and your client.
The experience of the SEO manager plays an important role in directing and managing the right SEO campaign.
Some of the factors or areas that we consider essential in most business models are:
Technical SEO
Having a website that offers correct performance and security seems obvious, but it is not easy to achieve. From server response time to full page load, including everything that happens in between these two points make up a large number of important factors to consider.
To achieve this, we must involve specialized staff in servers and web development, who follow Google’s guidelines to obtain a fast, stable and secure website.
A page load time of more than 3 seconds can be considered a long load time.
There are basic tools like Google Page Speed that quickly assess the performance status of a website.
The content
The quality of the content is one of the most important factors, not only for Google, but also for your client. With quality content you can get more and better customers.
It is something that seems logical but that not all companies that work on SEO apply, delegating the content to a third party, without experience or extensive knowledge of the business model, the client or competition.
Making good content is extremely complicated, the digital world is full of content and that a user stops a few minutes to read your content and finds it interesting is not something that all websites achieve, usually due to the poverty of the content.
From Thedigitalcyborg.com we recommend that the content be prepared by a specialist in the field. We recommend our content on content marketing and SEO if you want to dig deeper.
Link Building
Google counts the quantity and quality of links on other websites that point to your website. It is Google’s way of knowing how relevant you are to third parties.
Obviously, it is not the same as a medium linking you to a medium such as El País or El Mundo to a totally unknown website. In addition to its authority, it values other factors such as the sector, whether it is related to yours or not.
Remember that there is a specific Penguin algorithm that is responsible for managing the Link Building, with all the intelligence you can and should imagine, since it learns day by day through artificial intelligence and the manual intervention of Google personnel.
Buying links to increase the authority of a website or page is a common practice, which Google persecutes and punishes. From ArunSEO we do not recommend the purchase of links and we do have really good content and as a consequence, that you receive links / mentions from third parties. You can dig deeper with our Link Building content .
EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness)
We believe that experience, authority and reliability are very important for most websites and sectors, as they could be for any business outside the digital world. The reputation, experience and trust that we transmit to the customer are decisive factors in the purchasing processes, it could not be less in the digital world, not only we say it, Google says that the EAT is very important.
Google takes this into account and values it positively, which seems logical to us and is accepted even by our culture.
When Google started taking EAT into account, many websites were affected and their web positioning decreased, as they were not considered as reputable and trustworthy sites. The EAT is not a factor in itself, we would say that it is the consequence of working well on several factors.
With this introduction you have been able to see that the discipline of SEO is a broad area and involves multidisciplinary knowledge, and that you should not start working without prior analysis and strategy.
