The survival of a digital project depends on being found. Not appearing in the top positions of search engines limits the scope of the project and web traffic.
This post will see what Web Positioning and SEO Positioning is, why it is so important for your page, the key points and some free resources to analyze any website.
Index
- What is web positioning?
- What is an SEO Audit?
- Key Points of On Page SEO Audit
- Other Aspects to Improve SEO
1. What is Web Positioning?
When we talk about positioning, we refer to the "position" in which a website appears in the results pages or SERPs when a user searches for specific terms. That is, if a user searches for "buy red shoes", where does our online shoe store appear, for example.
A search engine is a web platform that “searches” for specific texts among the web pages it finds on the internet. The objective of these search engines is to offer the user the most appropriate results for the search they have carried out and order them according to the relevance they consider they have.
For a digital project it is essential to appear among the first positions to have visibility and for users and potential customers to find your website.
Factors that influence Web Positioning
There are four major criteria that search engines take into account when analyzing and deciding to position a website.
Relevance
It has to do with how related a website is to the search term that the user entered.
Page Authority
It refers to its notoriety or popularity. Consider that if a page is linked naturally it is because its content is valuable.
User Experience
They reward pages where users spend time, engage with your content, and convert.
Website optimization
The speed and loading times directly influence the user experience and the operation of the website.
Types of Web Positioning: SEO and SEM
When performing a search on Google, two types of links to websites appear on the results pages (SERPs of Search Engine Results Page ): sponsored links or ads and the so-called organic or natural results.
Organic Positioning in Search Engines or SEO
SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) is the set of actions that allows you to optimize a website both at a technical and content level, to make it easier for search engines to index it and for the pages to come out in the first positions.
The famous search engine algorithm is the process that applies the criteria that decide the order. The different updates improve these criteria in a continuous quest to improve the adequacy of the results to the users' searches.
What is SEO On Page or SEO On Site?
They are those actions that are carried out on the web page itself that you want to position. They are related to the structure and clarity of the page.
What is Off Page SEO?
They are external actions aimed at obtaining links that point to the web. They do not depend on the direct action on the page but on the quality of its content.
Search Engine Marketing or SEM
SEM ( Search Engine Marketing ) consists of paying to appear among the first sponsored links in the SERPs, for a search related to a previously defined set of keywords.
Why is SEO Positioning so Important?
SEO techniques will allow us to have an attractive and useful website for both search engines and users.
Search engines control most of the traffic that browses the web and are the main resource for Internet users to make queries. In fact, organic traffic can account for between 50% and 90% of total traffic depending on the type of website and sector. The greater the number of visitors to the web, the greater the chances of converting or selling.
A good positioning improves brand visibility, increases traffic to the web and increases the chances of conversion . Hence the need to appear in the first positions.
2. What is an SEO Audit
An SEO audit consists of an in-depth review of all the aspects used by search engines to order search results, with the aim of detecting errors and correcting them.
This optimization improves the readability of the page for search engines in general and for Google in particular, which translates into better positions and more visits .
Within the technical SEO analysis, 3 areas of analysis can be differentiated.
Strategy and keywords
Every website must have an SEO strategy and some keywords or keywords on which it is expected to obtain results. The SEO audit reviews and adjusts this strategy to the objectives of the web and the digital project.
Current positioning
On the defined keywords, it is necessary to analyze the current web positioning, its evolution in recent months, the main results of each search and the websites that are competitors. This will give us an overview of the current situation and how it has come to be.
On-page SEO
All the technical and design aspects of the web that search engines take into account when displaying results are analyzed. Its optimization facilitates the work of search engines and improves the positioning of the web.
3. Key Points of the On Page SEO Audit
Below we review the most important points of SEO on page, with documentation and free tools to start evaluating any website.
Indexing of the Web and Site Maps:
The first step to appear in search engines is that they have knowledge of the web and each of the pages that we want to appear. This is done through the "site map" or sitemap , a file ".xml" in which the pages that make up the web and their hierarchical relationship are specified to search engines.
The easiest way to know if Google is indexing a page is to enter the domain in the search engine and check if it appears in the results.
To check if a website has the sitemap file configured, it is as easy as typing “ yourdomain/sitemap.xml” .
You can go into more detail with the Google Search Console tool , which allows us to check which sitemap files the search engine is reading and their update dates.
Configuration of the robots.txt file
The robots.txt file is a file hosted on the web domain that controls the access of search engines and indicates the location of the sitemap of the page. In this way, search engines are helped with a more agile indexing and, as in the case of sitemaps, the pages they can access are defined.
You can check if a website has a robots file and what types of permissions by entering “ yourdomain/robots.txt” in the address bar .
Google provides a complete guide to creating and configuring the “robots.txt” files. If you are a WordPress user (as we are at BaseCero Marketing) and want to know more about this topic, this article can be very useful.
Page Yield
Google, and the rest of search engines, penalize websites with high load times . The use of many external resources or the incompatibility of modules and plugins worsens the performance of the web and makes it drop in search positions.
To evaluate the performance of a website, there are many online tools that offer great detail of the SEO elements and help identify those with problems.
Although the best known tool is Google's PageSpeed Insights , we have excellent alternatives at gtmetrix.com and webpagetest.org if we want to get out of the “Google dictatorship”.
Website URL review
URLs are one of the elements with the highest visibility for users and search engines. The web addresses must be "friendly", clear and descriptive of the content to improve the user experience and the positioning of the page.
For example, it is not the same if the footwear section of an online store is called www.domain.com/cat/prods01221, than if it is www.domian.com/catalog/prods01221
How is a friendly URL:
- Short: Google gives more importance to the first words of the URL
- With the keywords of each page
- Description of the content
- Unique per page: multiple URLs pointing to the same page is considered duplicate content
Image SEO optimization
The means of the web page are audiovisual elements, mainly images, which are read by search engines through the names and meta-descriptions of the files. In addition, loading images is one of the processes that consumes the most resources when opening a website.
To improve reading by search engines we have to work on the keyword strategy in the file name, in the title ('title') and in the description ('alt'). In addition, its size and resolution must be optimized . An easy way to inspect these elements in an image is to right-click on it and hit “inspect element”.
Tools such as gtmetrix and webpagetest provide information on the loading times of web images and possible problems related to them.
To learn more about suitable formats and resolutions, you can visit this Citizen 2.0 post .
Header Tags (H1, H2, H3…)
Headers rank the information displayed on the page, helping users understand it at a glance and improving their browsing experience.
The so-called H1 is the title of the page, the most important tag, in which our main keywords must appear. The rest of the h2, h3, h4… tags are used to structure the sections and subsections. They would be like the titles and subtitles of an index.
Search engine robots or crawlers review the content of the page through the header structure . The introduction of keywords and a clear and simple structure help to index the website and improve its positioning.
You can check this structure with the WebDeveloper extension for Chrome by clicking on “information>view document outline”.
4. Other Aspects to Improve SEO
User Experience
Having a good user experience is increasingly important for search engines. To the extent that users spend more time on the web reading information and interacting with content, search engines will consider that visits to the page are more satisfactory and appropriate to the keywords that triggered the search. This will improve both relevance and page authority.
UX design or user experience is a very extensive area, but as a basic rule we will apply common sense and simplicity as the basis of web design, always thinking of making it easier for users to visit.
Quality and original content
Quality content is the best tool to position a website organically. The texts of the web, in addition to having the keywords chosen in the strategy, must be clear and accessible to users.
The periodic publication of original content, through a blog or a news section, is a good way to update the web page frequently and another opportunity to position ourselves through the keywords of its texts and images.
Offering relevant content generates a loyal and interested audience that improves traffic and interaction with the content of the page, two award-winning factors in web positioning.
Proof of this greater importance is BERT , the latest update to Google's algorithm, which improves search results by incorporating semantic analysis into the interpretation of words.
In conclusion, Web Positioning is key to the development of any digital project, depending on a multitude of technical and content factors. It is necessary to know the most important points to detect problems that may affect the position of the page. Constantly working on the SEO optimization of the web is a way to ensure results in the medium and long term.
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