What is SEO positioning & How to Create a Good Strategy

Any online marketing strategy must have SEO optimization as a pillar to achieve the objectives set. Without good SEO, your business has no future on the Internet. The Internet is a jungle where we all want to show ourselves ahead of the rest. SEO is what will make our position always go ahead of our competitors. So, What is SEO?

What is SEO and SEM positioning: Their differences

This basic practice for any online business, Search Engine Optimization, is opposed to SEM, Search Engine Marketing. The first refers to the searches carried out in the search engines and whose classification is given according to criteria, which the search engine (Google above the majority) imposes. The SEM results, on the other hand, are mainly categorized by the investment made through advertising campaigns. In one of them, you must follow good practices so that your position is the most advanced possible; in the other; you have to invest money to be at the top.

At this point, you should ask yourself if you want to do SEO and SEM positioning or if you prefer to opt for the two strategies to improve web positioning. The best thing you can do to improve your web positioning as soon as possible is to apply an SEO optimization strategy. While paying off in the long term, invest part of your money in an SEM strategy with sponsored content.

But, let’s focus more on what needs to be done in the long term, on what is undoubtedly one more ant job: SEO. But what exactly is SEO positioning?

What is SEO web positioning?

A good SEO strategy achieves that your company appears in the first positions in a specific search related to your business. But to achieve a good search engine positioning, you must consider all the criteria that Google values when classifying its results and work out a strategy so that your online business meets these criteria.

Google has been changing (and will continue changing) the rules for companies to adapt to its criteria, criteria that put search engine satisfaction above. The different algorithms that the house has been creating to analyze and classify the results always try to think like the person searching think so that the result is exactly what he needs. In this sense, the most popular search engine in the world (with a market share of 92.31%) considers two main factors: authority and relevance.

• Authority: Authority refers to the popularity of a website. The more content and linked links, the more visits you earn, and the longer you stay. All of that translates into greater authority. That is why it is essential to have the entire web-optimized well and valuable information.
• Relevance: Relevance refers to the relationship a page has to a given search. That is to say that the page linked in the result contains the search word and that all its content has to do with the search. It will be the Google robot that will “read” this content and determine its relevance.

The actions to consider when optimizing SEO web positioning will be located in three drawers: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. One refers to everything that must be done within the website that we want to position; the other depends on all those actions that are carried out outside and directly impact the web.

What is on-page SEO positioning?

 On-page SEO is mainly responsible for optimizing each page of your online business website to improve its relevance in any search carried out in the search engine.

Many actions must be taken into account to improve the on-page SEO of any website.

Loading speed

• Improve and optimize the loading speed of each page of our website. There is nothing more annoying for a user than entering a website and waiting more than five seconds for it to load and show us the page’s content. It is proven that if a web page takes more than 2 or 3 seconds, many users will close the page.

Images on the web

• This point is closely linked to the previous point because the more images a website contains, the more it will weigh and if they are very large and are not optimized, even worse. Therefore, reducing the weight of the images is vital for a website to load in its exact time.

Optimizing the images also means that each one transmits the correct information when the Google spider passes. To do that, you must put a descriptive name on each image, tag the images with the “title” attribute, etc.

Develop a good sitemap

• The structure of your website must be well-defined and make visible on the web. We refer to the structure of the pages that make up the website, translated into a kind of map. It must be located on your website for Google spiders to locate it while crawling and indexing your site.

Keyword strategy

•  Keywords are very necessary for search engine positioning. Each website is associated with a series of keywords that define it. For example, sportswear e-commerce should be positioned with the keywords of sportswear, online sportswear store, sportswear, etc. Some tools will help you find the right keywords, which have a higher search volume and a low competition level.

Then, we will also have to work on long tails, longer phrases that define very well a specific concept of the web and on which we want to position ourselves above others—for example, culottes for professional cyclists.

Headings structure

• Optimize the reading of each page with headings. The contents of each page of your website will be structured according to titles, subtitles, paragraphs, etc. Each of the titles should have its h1, h2, or h3 tag. Each of these headings should contain some relevant keyword. It is a question of usability for the reader, because quickly with a glance, you will understand what will be talked about on that page. And the same scanning the reader does will be done by the Google spiders. Whatever is in the h1 and h2 will give you an idea of how to index.

Optimized URLs

• You also have to make the URLs (the addresses of each web page) easy to read, that you have a good understanding of where the web page is going and that the keyword of the URL matches the keyword of the page. It is also a priority that the shorter the better.

 Responsive web design

• What is now a reality for practically all the web, until a few years ago, was difficult to see. We refer to a web design that is usable to view on any type of device, computer, tablet, or mobile. The key is to adapt the web pages to the size of the screens of each device so that it is easy to read. Google will penalize you if your website is not responsive.

Quality content

• Create quality content: there was a time when the most important thing was to fill all web pages with keywords. If on the same website it was said twenty times online sportswear store, much better because, that way, a better position in the search engines was achieved. Logically, this practice went against an optimal reading.

Currently and for a few years, Google prioritizes those content of value, well written, with a wide variety of keywords and long tails, and its users highly value that. But how do we tell the robot that this content is quality? Using short paragraphs, the natural distribution of the keywords (two or three times throughout the text is the right thing to do), adding a list of bullet points that includes indexed images or infographics with a good heading structure, etc.

How to get SEO off-page positioning

On-page SEO gives importance to everything that can be done within the web to offer a good user experience and, consequently, improves the positioning of the web; off-page SEO tries to improve it with a series of actions that can be done from outside the web. Off-page SEO will help you gain the necessary authority to improve your visibility in SEO search engines. This is achieved with a series of actions:

Page links with high DA (domain authority)

• Get quality inbound links: the authority of your website depends largely on others. In other words, other (quality) websites have links that go to your website. This will mean that this website considers that the content of your page is relevant and that it is related to theirs.

Google analyzes that these incoming links are organic, that the contents are related. So the key to doing good link building, which is what backlink building is called, is to create quality content that authentically attracts the attention of other websites and always works with the long term in mind.

Anchor text

• You have to take care of the anchor text, the text that describes the link’s content. Key in any link-building strategy means that when we (or they) link a content that talks about off-page SEO, the link is in off-page SEO or a phrase containing the keyword or the exact description. If the link leads to a supermarket page instead of leading to a page that talks about off-page SEO, Google will penalize you.

When that happens, when we are not interested in Google reading a link of questionable quality, we can put a No Follow. Thus, the page that receives the link does not benefit from the popularity or credibility of the link’s source page. This tactic was established when Google and other search engines began penalizing purchased links with a good Page Rank to increase the relevance of target websites. The No Follow attempts against the Spam that we can do or that they can do to us.

Guest Post

• Post on other blogs. The best link-building strategy will be the one that allows you to create and add links to your website from valuable websites. The best thing, in this sense, would be that you could publish content on this website or blog, valuable content for this third-party website, and include valuable links to yours in the text.  Guest blogging will therefore be the best way to make a good link juice.

Social media

• Spread your content on Social Networks. The viralized content through social networks gives us a popularity that does not pass by for the Google robot. So, if you publish valuable content, share it on the social networks that you consider. By sharing, you will receive more visits, more subscriptions, more followers. In addition, you will generate a greater community of followers around your brand. All these factors will meet all the requirements that Google asks to increase popularity and, in addition, gain positioning.

Infographics and graphic elements

• Enrich your content with infographics and graphic elements; graphic content, infographics, ebooks, etc. They are popular contents that tend to be more interesting than longer texts and act as the perfect “bait” to attract quality backlinks.

Marketing Video

• Make marketing video. One of the Social Networks that best help organic web positioning is YouTube. Videos are the content that receives the most visits, and Google always shows them at the top of the results list. For this reason, generating video content and sharing the link will generate a better positioning for you in the medium term.

What is technical SEO positioning?

There is a very important part of SEO that is hidden behind the code of each website. It is about technical SEO and, as its name says, the person in charge of it must be a computer technician who knows programming language. It is a very important piece for any SEO positioning company.

The technical SEO expert must review various aspects of the web to optimize it, which offers a better user experience and therefore improves the results in SEO search engines.

Optimize URLs

The structure of a website is very important for Google robots to know where they navigate. And in this sense, the URLs will be the gateway. That is why any URL must be SEF (Search Engine Friendly). These routes explain in a more intelligible way, both for humans and for Google, the specific page to which they point. A URL with numbers, signs, and abbreviations is not friendly, so the expert must change it so that the web page’s content and position on the web structure are both well understood.

Avoid content duplication

It is an error that happens precisely because of a bad optimization of the URLs. Duplicate content is created when the same content can be accessed from different URLs and is indexed with different URLs. As a result, Google penalizes any type of content published on the same website. But when this happens, there is a solution that every technical SEO expert knows: canonical tags. Determining the URL with this tag (rel = canonical) indicates that this is the correct address that search engines should index.

Improve the WPO

The WPO is the Web Performance Optimization. It mainly refers to all those techniques that accelerate the loading of a website so that the user experience is more satisfactory.

Work on the metadata

The metadata is the data that speaks of the data that describes the content of the files, they provide the information. For example, each metadata can inform us that it is a title or a subtitle, or that it is a link, or that it is an infographic, etc. The metadata gives information to the server, the browser, and the trackers. They are very relevant for web positioning as they help search engines index and rank websites. The metadata is always in the header of the HTML document.

Improving security

For a few years now, to improve the security of any website, it is better to change the HTTP protocol to HTTPS to prevent the website from being easily hijacked by unauthorized parties. In this way, it encrypts the data to ensure a 100% reliable transmission.

Work on the source code

The technical SEO expert must at all times analyze the web pages and explore their HTML code. You will need to locate and remove unnecessary code snippets, remove unnecessary tracking codes, and try to compress the content.

Monitor the structure of the links

The search engine robots will analyze each incoming or outgoing link, and that is why the structure of each link must always be checked. For external links, it will be necessary to review the DA of each one and determine which can be No Follow and which Do Follow. For inmates, you have to know how to place them on the correct pages. Placing many internal links in the home that goes to subpages improves navigation, and Google recognizes it. You also have to check the anchor text, the position of the links in the text (the higher, the better), and the number of links (do not flood the pages with links, which affects the link juice).

How does SEO positioning work internally?

Any SEO positioning strategy must be established with a calendar of objectives to be met throughout the months. Doing SEO is an ant work: the positioning will improve little by little as the web is optimized, backlinks are created, and the content goes viral in an organic way. In this way, Google will measure your popularity and relevance. But how does web positioning work internally in Google?

Crawlers, spiders, or robots

Let’s go in order. The first thing is Google crawlers, spiders, or robots. Different terms meaning the same thing: a bit of programming software whose goal is to crawl web pages, read them, and get the information to a web server. This robot will be in charge of reading the content of your website (the source code, Html), it will send it to the Google server that will index it according to its relevance ( keywords in this sense are vital). Once you have the web page indexed, when Google receives a search related to your web, it will list it according to whether the search matches more or less according to keywords, images, etc. This list is what is known as the SERP, Search Engine Results Page, the search engine results page.

Google’s algorithm

The Google algorithm will determine the position that the search engine of your website will determine when a related search is given. The algorithm will have the last word when deciding the position of a result in the SERP. It has more than 200 criteria to evaluate each website, but they are mainly summarized in the user experience, relevance, authority, loading speed, and ease of navigation. Much of these criteria have to do directly with the content. We have already actively and passively highlighted the importance of content quality, but how does Google know which is quality and which is not?

One of the new updates regarding the algorithm is in the integration of BERT, an Artificial Intelligence system that focuses on better deciphering the user’s language in their searches so that queries that cannot be “predicted” and classified can be better answered.

The main feature of BERT is bidirectionality; it parses a sentence that includes a link in two directions. That is, if we have a phrase with a link, it will not only read the anchor text, it will also read the words before it and those after it to get an idea of the general context in which the link is located and determine if the content matches the search. This new system favors searches by longtail keywords; the results will be much more precise. The same Pandu Nayak, vice president of Google, explains it very clearly in an article about BERT, and it is understood very well with the following comparison:

Final Thoughts

We have explained to you in a general way what SEO positioning is, but it is only an approximation. There’s much more. It is not an easy task, and the specialists need to be constantly updated. We are at the mercy of Google and its changes, but Google’s strategy will always favor the user to understand in detail what exactly they are looking for. That is, to read exactly the thought of the person you are looking for.