SEO is one of the pillars of all digital marketing, and even more so if we are using an inbound methodology. If you know the secrets of organic positioning, you will be able to ensure a quality and low-cost source of visits to your website for a long, long time. Prepared? Well, let’s see how natural positioning works and how we can improve it.
How does organic positioning work?
We call organic positioning or natural positioning the place a website appears among the non-paid search results of Google and other search engines when a user searches for a specific keyword.
It must be emphasized that although improving the organic positioning It may have a cost in consulting, tools, hosting and other resources, we cannot pay Google to appear higher in search results. On the other hand, we can pay to place an ad in the search engine when users search for a specific keyword… but in that case we would be talking about SEM and not SEO.
Each search for a keyword has thousands or even millions of possible answers in the form of a web page. To decide which ones to show and how to order them, Google follows a process in three steps:
- Tracking– Google bots or “spiders” crawl the web for pages and “read” them based on an algorithm to see what type of information they contain.
- Indexing: Once they have detected existing pages, the bots place them in a kind of index, taking into account their content and their relevance for different keywords.
- Publication: When a user enters a search on Google, the search engine shows them the results from its index that it considers most relevant, based on a series of algorithms that only they know.
How can I improve my organic positioning?
Since Google’s algorithms are not in the public domain, the natural positioning It is not an exact science and results can never be predicted with 100% accuracy.
But that does not mean that we are working blindly, since Google publishes a series of guides for webmasters indicating the best practices to improve the positioning of a website. And in the same way, we must be careful to avoid positioning practices expressly prohibited by Google, since this can lead to a penalty.
To decide which results to show, Google is fundamentally based on two criteria: the relevance and quality of a website, on the one hand, and its authority and reputation, on the other. Let’s see how to improve each of them.
Relevance and quality: on-page SEO
He on-page SEO It covers organic positioning practices that involve improving our own website. These are the main elements that Google spiders take into account to determine the quality and relevance of a page:
- The structure of the URL. We must ensure that the URLs are as clean and clear as possible and that they always contain the keywords for which we want the web page to appear. To do this, it is interesting to carry out a study of the most relevant keywords in our sector.
- The architecture of the website. Search engines highly value websites in which the information is organized in a structured and easily understandable way. In addition, a well-organized website also improves the user experience. A very important aspect of web architecture are internal links, which allow the user to be directed in a natural way from one site to another and also indicate to robots which content is related to each other.
- The titles and descriptions of the different pages of the site. They should be as descriptive as possible and contain key words. You must also keep in mind that they are your “letter of introduction” to users, since it is the first thing they see when they search for a keyword.
- The sitemap and robots.txt file. The sitemap helps Google spiders understand and rank your site more easily. The robot.txt is used to indicate which pages of the site should be included in the index and which should not.
- Website loading speed. Pages that are too slow and those that are not correctly optimized have worse natural positioning.
- The contents. The texts on your website must have an adequate keyword density, as long as this does not harm the ease of reading and the user experience. It is also advisable to clearly structure the texts with titles and subtitles (reflected in the H2, H3, etc. tags) and correctly label the images and videos.
Authority and reputation: off-page SEO
He off-page SEO It is the other side of the coin, since it refers to actions that take place outside our own website. The main objective of off-page SEO is generate links to our website from other sites. Every time a page links to another, it “passes” a little of its authority to it and makes it score points for the search engines.
There are many tactics that we can use to get external links to our website:
- Sign up for directories of pages related to the theme of our site.
- Leave comments on other sites, for example, on blogs in our sector. We must always keep in mind that comments must offer real value, otherwise we will be falling into spam.
- Do guest posting, that is, publish articles on other people’s blogs that include a link to our site.
- Participate in link exchanges. This technique used to be very popular and can sometimes be considered fraudulent, so you always have to make sure you are following Google’s rules.
- And above all, publish quality content, which becomes a reference on the topic so that users can link to it of their own free will. Nothing can replace a job well done!