Do you want your website to crawl out of the darkness and into the light of the first search results page? If the answer is yes, SEO is what you need. Even if it is difficult to grasp at first, learning to master it is the key to develop your website’s positioning.

Do you want your web page to crawl from darkness to the light of the first results page? If the answer is yes, SEO is the strategy you were looking for. Even if the term SEO might be difficult to grasp at first, dominating its techniques is the key to success for positioning your web page.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to Martín (2018) SEO is a combination of tasks and rules used for positioning brands online. 

So basically, SEO focuses in positioning web pages in search engines. Although its functions go way beyond this. SEO positions:



• Products in a Marketplace such as Amazon.
• Local businesses in tools with Geo positioning.
• Restaurants in apps such as TripAdvisor.
• Accommodation businesses in booking web pages.

Thus, knowing about web strategies implies knowing all their characteristics. This way we can adjust our expectations towards them. 

SEO core concepts

There are two main qualities that search engines use to determine the position of a web page in their results. 

The search engine evaluates a balanced combination of page authority (PA) and relevance to decide whether to place a website in the first or last of the SERP.

Relevance

A website's relevance is defined by the level of accuracy between the search terms used and the actual search results. Simply put, relevance measures how much your website's information matches what the user is looking for.

We have to remember that search engines have the sole purpose of giving the users exactly what they asked for. Therefore, it is crucial that we place ourselves in our client's position. We ought to provide an answer to their questions and a solution to their problems.

In order to achieve being showed first to the user, we need to respond accurately to the search terms.

Page Authority (PA)

Page Authority represents its importance among the rest of information within a search engine. This quality has a huge impact in the results order. When two or more web pages are even in relevance, is authority that helps the search engine to prioritize one over the other. 

This "SEO algorithm" (Martín2018) can be measured with a variety of analysis software. The two top options are MOZ and Alexa.

MOZ grades both Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) with a number between 0 and 99. Higher the score, the more authority you have.

Alexa on the other hand, provides a global or national web page ranking. In this ranking, the lowest numbers have a greater page authority. For example, Google holds the place number 1 in the ranking. The second place is Youtube and the third Facebook. 

Meaning and functions of SERP

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. This is where a browser such as Google provides websites to users. The normal structure of a SERP is:

1. First results page with:
2. The search term's box. Then a list of sections to filtrate results by content.
3. After this, we can see the number of results and the time it took the browser to find them. 
4. Before the organic search results (those who achieve their positions by SEO strategies) we can see advertised web pages who paid to be shown first.
5. After this, we can see a box with search terms related to the ones we used. These are terms that other users have employed after the current ones.
6. Below this box, we find an index with the rest of the result pages. It is important to know that 90% of the time, users don't go beyond the first results page.
7. Finally, we notice that search engines do consider our geographical information to provide us with specific results.

Therefore, we can say that search engines take special notice in search terms and all the context it has about the user. That is why Google often includes pages with their Google maps information.

How does Google work?

Google is always acquiring new information. This browser is constantly visiting websites and downloading its content. 

This happens through "spiders" that visit website after website crawling through links. Links are responsible for the propagation of authority.

These spiders send all information to Google's databases. The information then is ranked by authority and relevance. And that's the way web pages get their assigned place in SERP. 

What should we expect from SEO? 

We now established that a search engine connects questions and problems with the solutions and answers of websites. 

As long as our website provides an answer corresponding to the words used by the user, we have way more opportunities to show up in the first results page. This means that our content has to be our greatest strength.

SEO is free

The sole cost of SEO is hard work. We have to invest our time and efforts in positioning our website. Search Engine Optimization is a task that will improve the positioning of information that once it's online it will stay there 24 hours. 

Results come with time 

All the perseverance, patience and time invested in SEO pays off mid or long term. So, in order to invest wisely, we have to stablish specific goals. 

A SEO strategy consists of developing and applying a plan, the use of keywords, the creation of new unique content and the construction of links that get us authority, etc. 

In order to do all that, we need to know all about the functioning of search engines as well as the way websites are ranked and included. Finally, we need to keep up with all actualizations and changes in its algorithms.

We need to focus our SEO strategy on both users and search engines.

We also need information about the functioning of all main browsers. As you might have noticed, browsers do not explain their algorithms thoroughly. 

What they do provide is user guides to get the best out of them as well as an explanation of every change that comes with time.

We can measure everything

There are multiple tools that will assist us to know all about the metrics of our web page. With this information we can point out which actions suit our situation best.

SEO is the ultimate tool to connect your website, blog or online store with users. It is a must to start on exploiting all the potential of our content in order to reach the ever eluding first result page.