Probably if you’re reading this it’s because you’re interested in how to position a website but you don’t have a very clear idea where to start, or what SEO is, what it’s eaten with and what it’s for.
Well let’s start with the basics, SEO is Search Engine Optimization or search engine optimization, this means that we take the necessary actions to increase the visibility of a site in search engines (read Google or Bing, basically).
The basis of any SEO strategy, moreover, the basis of any Digital Marketing strategy must always be your user. We know that you love your brand and that you want to promote it and tell the world the amazingness of your products, but get on the user’s feet. What’s more, you’re an internet user, instead of finding valuable information you were looking for, would you like to be trying to pressure you to consume a brand, a product? When you clicked this league, were you hoping to find the brand or the information?.
So, as much as you love your brand, your main focus of the site and everything you do digitally must be your user, it is vital because it will be the cornerstone of our SEO strategy and will help us make all the decisions along the way, always benefiting the experience of your future customers so that they at the same time, profess your brand.
Well, without further ado, let’s now move yes to the steps you need to follow for your site to earn search engine locations:
- Site optimization
- Creating content
- Backlink construction
Ready, those are the steps and good luck!
… right, well, we’ll dig a little deeper.
Let’s address the steps and dig a little deeper into each one over three installments. Yes, this will be the first of three to put together a triple AAA SEO strategy.
SITE OPTIMIZATION
More and more users are connecting from mobile data or public WiFi points (work, Starbucks, Infinitum Mobile…) and as we know, at least in Mexico, the internet may not be the fastest or most stable, and yes, we have adopted the idea of responsive sites but not sites mobile first,even though most connections (about 70) come from mobile. If you have access to some kind of traffic analytics on your website, the balance is likely to be at least 60 mobile tickets.
So why do we keep designing desktop first?
To be fair, I repeat: we have adopted the idea of responsive sites, but it is very different a mobile first site than a responsive desktop site. The first is precisely objective design, the second is graceful degradation.
What’s the big difference? Speed.
Let’s get back to the first point, more and more users are connecting from mobiles, and these wonderful artifacts, although advanced, are not omnipotent and are slower than a desktop computer and its connection, more unstable. Think the last time you connected to the internet and you despaired because a page that didn’t load fast, probably this page was developed with desktop in mind, and yes, surely desktop works great. Instead, think of a quick page on mobile, the most common are news, you sure hadn’t thought about the speed of that page until now, you just wanted to read the content and they served it quickly, now which of the two experiences did you like the most? Which one are you likely to give him tap again?
But why is site speed so important to SEO? Regarding the user experience, Google is a user-driven platform, it means that it puts users first, not advertisers or their internal apps, and the dynamics are logical:
If my users find useful and fast content they will use my browser more; If my users don’t find content useful and fast, they’ll stop using my browser.
This is more real than ever on mobile, where it is very likely that the connection is by data and the urgency of the information, greater, such as: finding a restaurant, an address, immediate services, learning to put on a tie, reading an article before arriving at the next station… the possibilities are numerous and all with urgency of time, then we don’t want a page that takes 10 or 15 seconds, we need a page that takes less than 3 seconds on mobile.
In this way Google believes that we are fast and if we add the rank factors, we are making sure to gain positions and visibility.
How to Optimize My Site?
There are basically 12 points where we can (should) optimize a page, some with certain secondary sections, to say that we have an efficient page for SEO:
- URL’s well structured with main KW’s: Have“sitio.com/artículo/los-mejores-audífonos-de-100” instead of “sitio.com
- Correct semantic structure: Have properly labeled HTML5 elements that contain vital KW those who need them.
- Server errors: Avoid lost URLs or poorly indexed content from returning.
- Decrease 404 (lost pages).
- Remove duplicate (badly canonicalized) content.
- Have content well hierarchical and accessible to search engines (do not block in robotx.txt and have a sitemap.xml structure)
- Quick pages
- Optimized images (at the size and resolution native to the device).
- As few server orders as possible (try to delete style sheets or scripts).
- Prioritize static content (load HTML before JS).
- Caching.
- Code minification (remove spaces and redundancies).
- .gzip server compression (Google zip).
- Ux
- Responsibility (to look good on ALL mobile devices).
- Separate buttons.
- Readable text.
- Understandable images.
It is not the intention of this article to talk about each particular point because they all have their complexity and we can extend ourselves a lot to solve them all, but for references you have the guides of Google Web Developer and, most importantly, always ask yourself: What does my user want?
We hope soon to be able to address each of these points so that you can have a super optimized site for search engines, but especially for users.
With this we finish the first installment of the three steps of the successful SEO strategy, look forward to step 2: Creating Content.
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