What is SEO?

Natzir Turrado gives you the keys to better understand what SEO is and why you should take it into account for your website

An online presence is essential today, so you have to think about how to position yourself. There are few methods for increasing your hits on Google, so it is important to learn what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is, why it is important, and how search engine positioning and search engine optimization work.

Natzir Turrado is a SEO and digital analyst and has worked with important web portals. He is also a professor of marketing, UX, and digital analytics. Here he will explain what SEO is and the basics to improve your presence in search engines.

What is SEO?

The definition of this acronym is Search Engine Optimization, which consists of increasing free traffic from search engines to your website through a set of techniques and strategies aimed at attracting customers. It seeks to create relevant content related to specific search keywords that will make it appear higher on the Google results page when that word is searched. It focuses on organic search results, i.e. those that are not paid for.

Bill Slawski, SEO director of Go Fish Digital, offers this insightful definition: "SEO is marketing carried out with an understanding of the framework or frameworks of the web". This means that the web framework has a number of challenges, limitations, and advantages: as the web and its users evolve over time, so too must SEO.

Why is SEO important?

The main reason is that it makes your website more useful for both users and search engines. SEO helps search engines understand what each site is about and whether or not it is useful to users. It means users can find you through web searches relevant to your page.

How did this term and discipline come about?

It emerged with the birth of the first search engines, in the early 1990s, but was consolidated when Google appeared in 1996. Users realized that there was real money to be made from websites, so they needed to attract traffic, and what was the best way to attract traffic? Search engines. Thus, the directors and owners of various websites began to think about how they could reach the top positions.

How do search engines work?

Their functions are divided into two main terms: tracking, when the search engine scans your website through links, they pass from one link to another to collect data that they provide to their servers. That's why it's so important to have optimal loading time and your content updated.

The indexing comes when the page has already been tracked and the information has been collected. The page is ordered according to its content, its authority, and its relevance. Thus, the search engine will be able to show the most suitable results with different queries.
It is important to mention that current search engines give more priority to the quality of the content and in aspects such as date of publication, multimedia content, microformats, etc.

How do you best apply SEO?

Getting to know the fundamental pillars:

- On-page SEO: focused on optimizing the content and structure of the page to make it relevant to Google. This is achieved by improving the relevance of the contents.

- Authority: you may have great content, but if Google thinks you're unreliable, you may not show up. Google is likely to consider you have more authority when other pages link to your post.

- Rankbrain: is an algorithm, developed by Google, that sorts results without human intervention. AI and machine learning help sort the results. At this point, all you can do is to make sure that users are satisfied when your page is shown in the results.

With these three pillars, SEO can multiply the impact of your websites, not only on users, but also on research and sales cycles. You could say that it is free advertising that takes advantage of social exchange to build trust and credibility around your brand.

Natzir Turrado teaches the Domestika course Basic Principles of SEO, in which he teaches the keys to organic positioning to improve your presence in search engines using different SEO techniques and strategies, such as the creation and optimization of content to attract more traffic through keyword searches.

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