SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization and is the set of techniques used, usually divided between technology, content, and authority, to achieve good positioning of a website’s pages on Google and other search engines, generating traffic. organic.
What is SEO?
You’ve certainly heard of Google, right? So, every time a page is published on the internet, Google (and other search engines) try to index it so that it can be found by those looking for it.
But there are thousands of pages being published every day on the internet and that makes for a lot of competition. So, how to make one page ahead of others?
This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in. As the translation itself suggests, SEO is an optimization for search engines, that is, a set of techniques that influence search engine algorithms to define the ranking of a page for a certain keyword that was searched.
On this page, you can study everything about SEO, from basics to advanced. At the top, there is an index to find the desired chapter.
How Google Search Works
Have you ever stopped to think about everything that happens between you typing your search and clicking on Google results?
What happens in that period is the secret to the search giant’s success. The quality and speed of its ranking turned the company into the largest search engine in the world, massacring competitors, even with the added share.
To give you an idea, the domain is so great that in the United States there is the verb to google, which is used in phrases like “ He googled you ”.
Here’s a better understanding of the work behind the most accessed results pages in the world.
Crawling, Indexing, and Displaying Results
These are the top 3 search return processes. Crawling is the process in which Google’s robots (called a Googlebot) identify pages to submit to the search engine’s index. For this, robots use algorithms to define the prioritization and indexing frequency of pages.
The process starts with URLs generated from previous crawling processes and is enriched with sitemaps. As you visit pages, Googlebot identifies existing links and also includes them in the crawl list. New websites, changes, and deletions are detected and updated during the process.
Next comes indexing, in which Googlebot processes each of the crawled pages to include them in its index. Here information such as page content, publication date, publication region, title, description, and structured data are indexed.
So when a query occurs, a search for matching pages is done in Google’s index, displaying the most relevant results. And it’s not relevancy based on guesswork: it’s determined by over 200 ranking factors.
In the search process there is also Google autocomplete and the classic “Did you mean…”, designed to save time, correct errors, and assist in the search.
Algorithm and Updates
Even if you’ve never worked with SEO, you’ve probably heard of Google’s algorithm or social networks like Facebook and Instagram.
These algorithms are responsible for filtering what is most relevant to you and not simply throwing all the content available on the page, without any sorting criteria.
Google uses more than 200 ranking factors to define the order of pages presented to the user for each search performed.
To increasingly improve the information presented to the user and its relevance, this algorithm is constantly being updated.
Google Ranking Factors
As mentioned in the previous session, Google sets the prioritization and relevance of results based on more than 200 ranking factors.
Every year several surveys are carried out to try to unravel all the factors used. The 10 main factors presented in a lot of these surveys include:
- Page Authority/Pagerank: Page authority is considered an extremely relevant ranking factor.
- Domain Authority: Pages that are part of a domain with more authority on the internet are more likely to rank better.
- Relevance of backlinks: Receiving backlinks from subject websites in your niche is much better than from other websites.
- Original and quality content: Search engines want to present results from sites that have robust and original content, so they prioritize them.
- Content Size: Larger content is considered less superficial about the subject and is generally preferred.
- Keyword in the title: It has a big influence on the on-page rating.
- Keyword in content: Having the keyword present in the first 100 words and also in subheadings shows strong signs of relevance to Google.
- Time on page: Google pays a lot of attention to how people behave when they visit the sites it presents.
- Page load speed: The lighter your page, the better it will rank.
- Responsive design: Google has been prioritizing mobile-friendly sites for some time.