The difference with Search engine visibility compared to other models of Internet advertising is that the user voluntarily seeks a service, product, or information. It resembles people searching for information and for ease of explanation we will use the outdated yellow pages as that simple example. This means that the search meets a need and, in some cases, can be the start of a purchase process, either in its comparison phase or a person’s final decision. Being in the right place at the right time can become a clear business opportunity for nearly every business. SEO allows people to control, within a certain degree of certainty (no one can guarantee fixed search engine rankings), the possibility of increasing its chances of being visible. This is the first step to redirect searches into purchasing opportunities, which is supported by other disciplines such as web analytics and optimizing landing pages.

How do search engines work?

To understand how Search Engines work, it is best to make a comparison with the performance of scientific articles or doctoral theses in the field of research. Search engines use the same principle: they first comb the Web for content, which represents billions of documents, finds the necessary options and then indexes and sorts them all out. Afterward, the engine will then calculate each site’s popularity using the same principle but based on links. That is, the number of links pointing to a page and the quality of them (depending on the subject and relevance of those pages). A reliable search engine optimization expert can follow existing links and establish potential relationships between the different pages. These recovery processes are considered multi-format informational portals. That is, they can be applied to different types of documents such as pictures, videos, maps, news, pdf documents, etc.

What makes SEO viable?

There are three pillars of SEO: Indexing ability, content, and popularity. Indexability refers to the ability of a website to be properly accessed by search engine robots, allowing it to be stored in the search engine’s indexes. When a site is indexed correctly by a search engine optimization consultant, there is a correspondence between existing content on the web and the data stored by the browser on its index. The number of pages accessible from a website is known as its “number of indexed pages” and websites should maximize this in order to be successful. Search engines provide information about the number of pages that are stored on each site, allowing people to compare between existing pages and those stored in search pages.

Once the search has accessed and indexed the content, it is important to make certain decisions. Such content must contain the terms that website owners need in order to correctly position their site. These terms must be placed in certain areas of each document or page and an appropriate number of times. Some recommendations to consider are:

• Taking into account the user’s language. Often the user’s terminology is different to the language used internally inside the company/institution.

• Generate content adapted to the different types of searches. It is difficult to optimize a page for many words, so it is recommended to use different pages to capture traffic from different pages.

• Combining the content with the appropriate HTML tags allows people to easily understand and include the terms that interested him or her most.

And lastly, a website’s popularity can determine its ranking. Popularity refers to the number of times that a website is linked, and also depends on the quality and type of sites that link to them. Another way to organize a company’s SEO activities is to divide techniques into offsite and onsite departments.

Some of the main problems that can be detected during an SEO campaign are:

Searchers have access to endless amounts of pages through browsers, some of which will not allow the user to run various commands. Thus, despite the advances in SEO, searchers still have trouble accessing content made with Flash technology or sites that require javascript code execution. Searchers access different content by following links. If the content is not linked or a person has to follow many links to access it, search engines may have trouble accessing such content. Server problems are also a huge issue because they redirect inappropriately, due to a very slow response time or a server crash, both of which can cause indexing problems or a loss of indexed pages. Hiring an organic SEO expert could help businesses stay away from issues like this.

A link can have a text that people can read, known as an “anchor text“. Links to a specific “anchor text” makes for the most relevant pages for searches with that text. The links must be made with technologies understandable by search engines. Because of the importance of the links and the abuse associated with most of them, many websites have turned to an SEO consultant that can generate HTML tags (otherwise known as “no-follow links) that have no value for search engines.