SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is the set of techniques aimed at advantageously positioning a website in the results of search engines like Google or Yahoo!.

An adequate SEO strategy can have multiple benefits for a business. It can provide visibility, improve credibility, and increase your brand's reputation. It's also an excellent sales channel for products and services. In addition, it can substantially improve customer relations and satisfaction.

If you want to learn more about what SEO is, its benefits, its history, and how it works, stay tuned for this article.

What is SEO?

SEO is the practice of optimizing a website for strategic search engine ranking.

Generally, we aim to achieve the highest possible rankings for certain key search engine results. We target searches relevant to our business, trying to connect searchers with a need our company addresses. This could be a need for information or a need to acquire a specific product or service.

To evaluate the results of an SEO strategy, the traffic or sales generated on a website through different search engines are usually measured. This can be easily observed with tools such as Google Analytics.

However, we can make the mistake of thinking that more traffic is always better, and that's not true. Sometimes less traffic is better, but it's better targeted. In other words, we need to consider the relevance of our traffic.

The right thing to do is to align SEO objectives with the business's strategic goals. It's important to understand that ranking for certain smaller, but more meaningful, searches can have a much greater impact than searches that drive more traffic to the website.

Benefits of SEO

SEO is one of the digital marketing investments with the highest ROI. It's highly beneficial in all business sectors, but its value in business is particularly significant. business-to-business

Among the benefits of SEO are:

• Grants visibility to brands, products, and ideas. It's a channel used to present products and services, promote ideas, educate users, generate culture, etc.
• Get sales. It's a customer acquisition channel that gets users to visit a website and make a purchase. It also inspires trust and builds quality relationships. It produces customers who found what they were looking for, not those who were persuaded by an ad that may have misled them.
• Provides credibility a website, its brand, the organization behind it, and its values. Ranking in search engines is a sign of authority and quality. Users tend to trust Google's organic results.
• Improves the user experience.A customer who can search for information about a product before, during, and after the purchasing process benefits greatly from the information available on the web.
• It is very profitable. According to Forbesthe average return on investment in SEO is 748%. Furthermore, global investment in SEO is expected to double over the next eight years.

History of SEO

The first search engines were more like the Yellow Pages of the Internet than they are today. A vast repository of web pages where, at first, domains were entered manually.

This began to change when the first crawlers or spiders emerged. These are bots that navigate the web using hyperlinks to index domains in a database. Over time, these bots also began to compile relevant information about websites, which would help search engines decide which web pages deserve top search rankings.

The first search engines

Between 1993 and 1994, there was a boom in search engine-related technologies. These include:

• W3Catalog: first web search engine based on a directory listing.
• JumpStation: first crawler-based search engine.
• WebCrawler: The first search engine that analyzes the entire content of a page to search beyond page titles.

In the following years, search engines such as Lycos, Altavista, and Yahoo! became market leaders. However, Google emerged in 1996 and, within three years, became number one thanks to its innovative algorithm.

The first SEO job in history

Legend has it that SEO was born in 1997, when Bill Thompson, manager of Jefferson Starship, a band formed by former members of the legendary Jefferson Airplane, wanted to show his new website to his concert promoter. Upon doing so, he noticed that the website wasn't showing up at the top of search engines. Thompson, angrily called his web service provider, Cybernautic, asking why his website was showing up on the fourth page of search engines.

The Cybernautic team wasn't sure what the answer was. However, after some research, they found a solution. They wrote the text "Jefferson Starship" multiple times on the website, using the same background color to make it difficult to read. Thus, by having "Jefferson Starship" written more times, search engines perceived the band's website as the most relevant for this term and ranked it first.

Although this story is legendary and we don't know how much of it is true, we can affirm that this was the first way search engines prioritized the relevance of results. Today, by the way, it's a highly penalized practice and one I don't recommend to anyone.

The SEO revolution: Google and links

The first major revolution in the world of SEO came in 1996, when Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google, which would become the leading search engine from 2002 onwards. From 2007 to the present, Google has dominated the online search market, accounting for around 80% of global online searches. The reason why Google triumphed over the rest of the search engines is simple. Google offered searchers
Google offered users higher-quality, more relevant results. But how did Google prioritize websites with the highest quality and relevance? It did so through a key innovation in its algorithm known as PageRank.

PageRank allowed the quality of websites to be evaluated based on a factor that had become fundamental to search engines: links. By analyzing which pages and domains linked to other domains, it was able to assess the relative value of each web page.

That is, if a website receives many third-party links, it can be assumed that many people cite and share that website, so it's likely of higher quality and relevance. Similarly, if several links within a web page point to a key site, that page is likely important.

This innovation was responsible for Google's overthrow of the major search engines that dominated the internet in the 1990s. Today, the algorithm has become much more sophisticated. We'll explore its evolution in the next section.

SEO evolves: Google Core Updates

Since its founding, Google has constantly implemented innovations in its algorithm. The goal of each of these updates has always been to offer users the best possible results. It has undoubtedly yielded positive results. These updates are known as Google Core Updates.

In Google's words:

Major updates are historically known by SEO experts and have popular names like Florida, Caffeine, Panda, Penguin, Venice, Hummingbird, etc.

These updates have allowed us to more accurately understand domain quality, penalize spam practices that sought to rank websites that weren't helpful to users, and prioritize newer content in certain searches where freshness is important.

Over time, Google has also learned to filter out illegal or copyrighted content, understand where a user is searching from in order to offer relevant local content (restaurants, businesses, etc.), or return results from pages that do not jeopardize user safety.

The algorithm's most recent innovations are geared toward better interpreting content and user search intent through artificial intelligence designed to understand natural language, better understanding voice searches, and delivering results optimized for mobile devices.

SEO evolves: Google Core Updates

Since its founding, Google has constantly implemented innovations in its algorithm. The goal of each of these updates has always been to offer users the best possible results. It has undoubtedly yielded positive results. These updates are known as Google Core Updates.

In Google's words:

Major updates are historically known by SEO experts and have popular names like Florida, Caffeine, Panda, Penguin, Venice, Hummingbird, etc.

These updates have allowed us to more accurately understand domain quality, penalize spam practices that sought to rank websites that weren't helpful to users, and prioritize newer content in certain searches where freshness is important.

Over time, Google has also learned to filter out illegal or copyrighted content, understand where a user is searching from in order to offer relevant local content (restaurants, businesses, etc.), or return results from pages that do not jeopardize user safety.

The algorithm's most recent innovations are geared toward better interpreting content and user search intent through artificial intelligence designed to understand natural language, better understanding voice searches, and delivering results optimized for mobile devices.

How does SEO work?

The logic of search engines

Search engines like Google are generally businesses. They make their living off paid advertising. They're interested in having as many users as possible because that way they can sell more ads and make more money.

For this reason, they need to retain users. Some, like EcosiaThey do this by allocating around 35% of their revenue to planting trees. Most achieve this by ensuring that users feel as satisfied as possible with the results when they search for something.

In other words, the fundamental purpose of search engines is to understand and best meet users' search intent. This way, they will more frequently use the search engine that most frequently returns satisfactory results.

Over the years, search engines have improved their technology to deliver relevant, high-quality results. This leads SEO professionals to consider a number of factors that help us improve websites' strategic ranking.

SEO positioning factors

If in the mid-nineties the best way to achieve positioning for a website was to saturate it with keywords, today this practice can lead to a website being considered SPAM.

To understand the ranking factors, you must understand that they are all subordinate to the fundamental principle that guides the operation of search engines: satisfying the search intent of users.

All SEO ranking factors can be summed up in two: content relevance and quality.

Relevance: A page is considered relevant if it meets the user's search intent. That is, it will be more relevant the closer it comes to providing what the user expects or needs to find at the time of the search.

Quality: A page is considered quality to the extent that it satisfies the search intent. That is, the user ends their session concluding, "This helped me."

However, to understand this, search engines look at hundreds or thousands of small technical factors.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of factors to consider that are traditionally considered ranking factors. Some can have a positive or negative impact, with significant differences in their relative weight:

• Domain age.
• Main keyword in domain name.
• Domain registration time.
• Relevant keywords in the subdomain.
• Domain ownership history.
• Public WHOIS information.
• WHOIS owner penalized.
• Type of TDL.
• Keyword principal en el Title Tag.
• The Title Tag begins with the keyword.
• Keywords in the meta description.
• Main keywords in H1.
• Keyword density.
• Content length.
• Presence of table of contents.
• Depth of thematic coverage of the website.
• Loading speed.
• Uso de Accelerated Mobile Pages.
• Duplicate content.
• Rel=Canonical on a page similar to another.
• Metatitles.
• Meta descriptions.
• Alt Text of images.
• Image descriptions.
• Image size.
• Image quality.
• Date of publication of the content.
• Magnitude of the editions.
• Frequency of editions.
• Keywords located in the first paragraphs.
• Keywords in H2, H3, etc. tags.
• Links to third-party pages.
• Semantization through links to third parties.
• Grammar and spelling.
• Originality of content.
• Mobile version usability.
• Hidden content.
• Number of external links.
• Multimedia content.
• Interlinking.
• 404 errors.
• Readability.
• Affiliate links.
• Errors in HTML.
• Domain Authority.
• PageRank of the page.
• URL size.
• Horizontal domain architecture.
• Category of the page.
• Keyword in the URL.
• Cite sources of information.
• Bullet points.
• Design usability.
• Presence of contact page.
• Authority of the author.
• Semantic architecture.
• Presence of a sitemap.
• Little downtime.
• Server location.
• Use of CDN.
• Use of SSL certificate.
• Duplicate meta tags.
• Cumulative Layout Shift.
• User reviews.
• Anchor texts de los backlinks.
• Links to .edu or .gov sites.
• Etiqueta nofollow.
• Number of domains with backlinks.
• Excessive number of 301 redirects.
• CTR.
• Bounce Rate.
• Good URL syntax.
• Returning users.
• Direct traffic.
• Bookmarks en Chrome.
• Number of comments.
• Average session time.
• Geolocation.
• Legitimacy of social networks.
• Brand search volume.
• Maturity of social networks.
• Brand mentions on the Internet.
• Business data on the Internet.
• Address and telephone number on the Internet.
• Too many ads or pop-ups.
• Interstitial Ads.
• Keyword Stuffing.
• Auto-generated content.
• IP penalized for SPAM.
• Hacked Domains.
• Too many low-quality links.
• Unnatural links.
• Links from irrelevant sites.
• Low-quality directory links.
• Buying and selling links.

Are you interested in SEO?

Microtactics is an Industrial SEO agency and our experts can advise you on how SEO can help your business. If you are interested, contact us. with us via email info@microtactics.net.