The meaning of the acronym “SEO” is Search Engine Optimisation. It is basically the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website organically (without paying for advertising) through search engines.

According Wikipedia, Search engine optimisation or web optimisation is the technical process by which changes are made to the structure and information of a web page, with the aim of improving the visibility of a website in the organic results of the different search engines. It is also common to find the English name Search Engine Optimization, and especially its initials SEO.

SEO is one of the “disciplines” of digital marketing that has changed the most in recent years as a result of the various changes in the algorithm of Google (the king of search engines). These changes are aimed at the user experience. That is, to try to ensure that the results when a user makes a query are exactly what they wanted to find. At Wanna Sherpa, we know what we are talking about and we are experts in SEO and web positioning in Malaga, because it is a key aspect in any online marketing strategy.

If you are interested in learning more about the different disciplines within SEO and how search engines work, read on:

Why is SEO important in digital marketing?

The most important reason why SEO is necessary is because it makes your website more useful to both users and search engines, although search engines are getting more sophisticated every day, they still cannot see a website like a human can. SEO is necessary to help search engines understand what each page is about and whether or not it is useful to users. These are known as Digital Traffickers, the professionals who are in charge of carrying out SEO tasks to optimise web pages.

In order to understand more clearly what SEO means, we are going to put it in different parts:

• Traffic quality. The important thing when starting a business on the Internet is not to attract all users. Let’s say you are from the USA and you want to sell apples, you don’t want people to Google Apple (the brand) to buy a mobile phone or a computer and come to your website. This would not be quality traffic, you have to make it clear to Google what your business is about and your business is about apples, not mobiles.
• Amount of traffic. Once your target audience and potential customer is properly reached through the search engine results (SERPs), the more traffic, the better. This is quality traffic!
• Organic traffic is any traffic for which you do not have to pay.

How does SEO work?

Think of a search engine… Yes, you may have thought of Google, but there are many more like Yahoo! or Bing. The mission of these websites is to provide the best possible answer to the question or query that someone asks.

But… how does it work? For example, Google has a crawler or bots that is continuously collecting information about all the content that is on the Internet through links (hence the importance of a good link structure) just as any user would do when browsing the content of the Web, they go from one link to another and collect data on these web pages that they provide to their servers. In addition, these bots are able to see the syntax, the semantics of the sentences and know exactly if our website is to sell apples or computers (as long as the content is clear).

It is the bots themselves that decide which pages to visit, how often and how long they will crawl that website, so it is important to have an optimal loading time and up-to-date content.

Subsequently, organic search engines compile all that information and when you make a query it takes about 1 second to return millions of results for that query on the results pages. Impressive, don’t you think?

Key concepts to understand SEO in marketing

Authority

To know what is SEO in digital marketing, authority is key. Authority is basically the popularity of a website, the more popular a page or website is, the more valuable the information it contains. This factor is the one that a search engine takes into account the most because it is based on the user’s own experience, the more a content is shared, the more users have found it useful.

Relevance

Relevance is the relationship a page has to a given search, this is not simply that a page contains a lot of times the search term (in the early days it did) but a search engine relies on hundreds of on-site factors to determine this.

On-site SEO

On-site SEO is a decisive factor for organic positioning and is concerned with on-page relevance, making sure that the website is optimised so that the search engine understands the main thing, which is the content of the website. On-site SEO includes keyword optimisation, tagging, loading time, user experience, code optimisation and URL formatting.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO is the part of SEO work that focuses on factors external to the website we are working on. The most important factors in off-site SEO are the number and quality of links, social media presence, mentions in local media, brand authority and performance in search results, i.e. the CTR of our results in a search engine. I’m sure you’re thinking that this is all fine and dandy but you’re here to find out why you need SEO on your website and what benefits you will get if you integrate it into your online strategy.

White Hat SEO

It consists of all those actions that are ethically correct and comply with search engine guidelines in order to position a website in search results. Given that search engines give greater importance to the pages that best respond to a user’s search, white hat comprises the techniques that seek to make a page more relevant to search engines by providing value for its users.

Indexation

Once a bot has crawled a web page and gathered the necessary information, these pages are included in an index where they are sorted according to their content, authority and relevance; this way, when we make a query, the search engine will find it much easier to show us the results that are most related to our query.