SEO Introduction

SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. It is the practice of increasing both the quality of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through organic search engine results.

White Hat X Black Hat

• White Hat SEO: stands for the SEO best practices, techniques and strategies that follow engine rules, focusing on providing more value to people.
• Black Hat SEO: stands for techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. Using it causes a high risk of being penalized.

On-page X Off-page

• On-page SEO: refers to optimizing the content on the page such as URLs, body content and headers for usability and relevance to a search query the target is most likely to use.
• Off-page SEO: refers to optimizing factors outside of a website to improve its search engine rankings such as building backlinks and establishing social media presence.

Google Algorithms & Ranking

More than 90% of all search queries in the world are handled by Google. That’s why, when talking about SEO, we focus on optimizing and performance for Google since you will be reaching more people in it.

Ranking Process

Here is the broken-down process:

• Crawling: the search engine uses “spider crawlers”, a bot, to scour the web for new or updated content.
• Indexing: when the content is found, the spider crawlers add a copy of the new information into the search engine’s database.
• Ranking: the index is fed through the algorithm to match the best set of data within their database with the search query made by the user.
• Result: the data set is presented to the user in the form of a search engine results page.

Ranking Factors

Here are the most important factors for ranking:

• Backlinks: the more authoritative sites that link back to a particular web page, the higher that page will rank.
• Relevant copy: your website should contain content that is relevant, related and useful to your audience.
• HTML tags: using the correct tags to build the structure of your website are a great way to improve the ranking. Also using alt tags to describe images can help the Google Image’s engine.
• Core Web Vitals: building a website with fast loads and a lot of stability helps to improve the user experience of their searches, giving it a better ranking.
• User behaviour: even though is not confirmed by Google, many SEO specialists believe that how long the user spends on your website affects the ranking.
• Mobile Optimization: Google judges equally mobile versions and desktop versions, this means that it is important for your website to be responsive.

Algorithms factors

Google’s algorithm has a set of rules to determine now results should be presented to users. Some of its rules are:

• Meaning of your query: to return relevant results, the search engine looks at the meaning behind the user’s query.
• Relevance: when the website contains the same keywords as the user’s search, it would help to show the it more frequently to the users.
• Quality of content: it favours the most reliable (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) information available.
• Usability: a high usability scores means the site will appear more frequently to users.
• Context and settings: the search results might change because of related to your past history search, search settings and location.

Optimizing for E-A-T

Keeping the content up to date, building more high-quality inbound links, making sure the content is factually accurate and written by experts are good ways of building a good SEO. That is one of the examples on optimizing your website using E-A-T:

• Expertise: this means that the content created was written by someone that has expertise on the topic.
• Authoritative: this means the content created have a author in the background that is known, that has some brand recognition.
• Trustworthy: this means users can trust the website for real and factual informations.