What is SEO and How It Works

SEO concept with young woman using a laptop computer

SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization. It’s a part of the digital marketing strategy and is the process of improving your website to organically increase visibility. In other words, SEO involves all the changes that you can do to your design and content to help search engines rank your website higher. This makes it more attractive to your future customers without having to pay.

How does SEO work?

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing collect information from every page that they can find on the internet by helping people find what they are looking for. The search engines do this using an algorithm. This allows them to organize all the content that is available on the internet and offer the end-user the most relevant results for their search.

At the same time, search engines analyze each website to check how easy it is to navigate and whether the content is relevant, clear and consistent. The better content there is on the website, the search engines will reward us with a better position.

Some strategies to improve a website are:

Use keywords

They are words or phrases within the texts of a web page that help attract traffic, position in search engines and give consistency to the content. These words will guide the algorithms that search engines use to crawl websites and understand their content. These keywords are those that users type when conducting a search. Example: Digital MarketingHow to choose keywords for content?

Three factors must be taken into account:

  • Perform a regular search for keywords or popular topics that are related to the themes of our website. For this, there are tools such as https://www.semrush.com. In a future post, we will talk about this topic.
  • Related keywords: Synonyms or phrases that have to do with the keyword. These phrases give a more precise context to the search and allow the engine to more easily associate the content of each page with the keyword.
  • Review the Cost Per Click (CPC), which will give us an idea of ​​what our competition pays to advertise with that term.

Optimized content

Our text must be consistent with the chosen topic and must include the keyword, as well as a series of related terms. However, it is not the only important thing:

Share useful, original, well-written content, without spelling mistakes, with phrases that keep coherence and, if possible, optimize it by including links that expand the information on the topic.

Another key element to generate quality content is the use of optimized images, which are related to the content displayed. It is highly recommended that the images are light, include information on dimensions and are in jpg, png or gif format.

And most importantly: Dare to be different!

Optimize your URLs

Make your URLs easy for users to read and remember. This will help improve direct traffic.

• Seek that your URLs are as simple as possible.
• Avoid duplication in URLs
• Use only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens.
• If possible, the URL should contain the keyword

Be patient

Keep in mind that search engine optimization takes time. Having a high rank can take weeks or months and depends on many factors. It’s the work of an SEO expert to keep an eye on those factors and adjust them as necessary.