What is SEO and why do You need it?

Where does the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) come from?

The first search engines emerged in the early 90s. Until Google appeared in 1996, many were created, including Yahoo. The boom of the Web began. People realized that there was really money to be made from them. So they came to the conclusion that they needed to attract traffic. What was the best method of attracting traffic? Search engines . At that moment, the owners of the websites began to think how they could reach the top positions… SEO was born!

1. What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website in the organic results of different search engines. It is also often named by its English title, SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

SEO is one of the “disciplines” that has changed the most in recent years. We just have to look at the large number of updates to Penguin and Panda , and how they have turned 180 degrees on what was understood by SEO until recently. Now with SEO, what Matt Cutts himself qualifies as «Search Experience Optimization» or what is the same, «everything for the user» is pursued.

• Authority is basically the popularity of a website. The more popular it is, the more valuable the information it contains. This factor is the one that a search engine takes into account the most since it is based on the user’s own experience. The more a content is shared, the more users have found it useful.
• Relevance is the relationship a page has to a given search. This is not simply that a page contains the search term a bunch of times (in the early days it was) but that a search engine relies on hundreds of on-site factors to determine this.

SEO can be divided into two large groups:

• On-site : On-site SEO is concerned with relevance. It makes sure that the web is optimized so that the search engine understands the main thing, which is the content of it. Within SEO On-site we would include keyword optimization, loading time, user experience, code optimization and URL format.
• Off-site : Off-site SEO is the part of SEO work that focuses on factors external to the web page we are working on. The most important factors in off-site SEO are the number and quality of links, presence in social networks, mentions in local media, brand authority and performance in search results, that is, the CTR that our products have. results in a search engine. Surely you are thinking that all this is very good and that it is very interesting but that you are here to find out why you need SEO on your website and what benefits you will obtain if you integrate it into your online strategy.

Once we know what SEO is, we must differentiate whether or not we follow the “recommendations” of the search engine. Black Hat SEO or White Hat SEO

• Black Hat SEO : Black hat is the attempt to improve the search engine positioning of a web page through unethical techniques or that contradict the search engine guidelines. Some examples of Black Hat SEO are Cloaking, Spinning, SPAM in forums and blog comments, or Keyword Stuffing. The black hat can provide benefits in the short term, but it is generally a risky strategy, without continuity in the long term and that does not add value.
• White Hat SEO : It consists of all those actions that are ethically correct and that comply with the guidelines of the search engines to position a web page in the search results. Given that search engines give greater importance to the pages that best respond to a user’s search, White Hat understands the techniques that seek to make a page more relevant to search engines by adding value to its users.

2. Why is SEO important?

The most important reason why SEO is necessary is because it makes your website more useful for both users and search engines . Although these still can not see a web page as a human does. SEO is necessary to help search engines understand what each page is about and whether or not it is useful to users.

We have an e-commerce dedicated to the sale of children’s books. Well, for the term “coloring drawings” there are about 673,000 monthly searches. Assuming that the first result that appears after doing a Google search gets 22% clicks ( CTR = 22%), we would get about 148,000 visits per month.

Now, how much are those 148,000 visits worth? Well, if for that term the average cost per click is €0.20, we are talking about more than €29,000/month. This only in Spain, if we have a business oriented to several countries, every hour 1.4 billion searches are carried out in the world. Of those searches, 70% of clicks are on organic results and 75% of users do not reach the second page. If we take all this into account, we see that there are many clicks per month for the first result.