Many believe that SEO is a kind of black magic that only a few can practice … And yet, positioning a blog or a website can be as simple as having a good understanding of the 3 basic pillars on which it is based.
This is what Nacho Monterde comes to explain, and when an SEO expert of his stature tells it that well, it only remains to read and learn. 👌
I’ll leave you with Nacho!
Modern SEO in 3 basic pillars
There are more than 500 factors that influence the positioning of a web page. There has always been an attempt to identify, order and even classify them by many professionals in the sector.
Formerly, this classification was made, above all, between onpage factors and offpage factors, that is, between factors related to the page itself (content, structure, internal linking, HTML, etc.) and external factors, mainly link building (external links). Onpage SEO and link building have always been the 2 pillars of classic SEO.
Since the arrival of the Panda algorithm in 2011, a new set of factors began to influence SEO in an increasingly important way.
Panda was an evolution of Google’s algorithm focused on detecting and penalizing poor quality content.
Initially, Panda mainly penalized stolen, empty, duplicate or very poor content.
Today Panda has evolved a lot and measures much more than just content factors. Currently evaluates, above all, the response that users have to a specific site or page. This evaluation is made against a new set of factors that constitute what I consider the third pillar of modern SEO.
The factors of this third pillar receive various names according to the authors who cite them: user satisfaction, CTR in the SERPs, social repercussion, brand prestige, brand searches, bounce factors, etc. I consider that the name that best describes this set of elements is user response, since this is really what Google evaluates.
These are, therefore, the 3 pillars that I consider to include all the factors of modern SEO.
The objective of this post is to review the most relevant factors of these 3 pillars , and for this we will start with the 2 classics and leave the most innovative and modern until the end.
SEO onpage
Onpage SEO refers to all the elements related to the content of the page itself.
The main function of onpage SEO is to indicate to Google what content you are offering and for which keywords you want to position yourself. There are dozens of factors in onpage SEO. We will now see its most important factors, indicating in each case examples from the Zalando website.
Title
Also known as the “meta title”, it is the <title> tag located within the <head> of your website. It should be brief, preferably no more than 10 words, and it can be aggressive, meaning that it can clearly indicate what you want to position.
For important projects, which aspire to stand out among users, it is advisable to include some reference to the brand or name of the portal that works as a brand reinforcement and thus allows improving user response (we will see this later).
It is therefore common to combine branded keywords in the title, being preferable to leave the brand for the final part, so that Google gives more relevance to the keyword.
As usual, Zalando provides us with a good example of this. The title of your women’s boots section is this: <title> Women’s boots | Online selection at Zalando </title>.
Meta description
It is the text that Google usually displays as a description when it displays your page in its results. You must describe your product or content in no more than 156 characters (if you exceed them, this text will appear cropped).
This text should not be aggressive and should be focused on the user. It should be understood as a marketing tool that encourages the click on your result, but not as a purely SEO tool (in the classic sense of including only keywords).
In Zalando’s example the meta description would be: <meta name = »description» content = »Free return and guaranteed refund | The latest in women’s boots | Don’t miss the new collection and join the fashion only with ►ZALANDO!” />.
As you can see, Zalando tries to convince you to click on his result, but without obsessing over writing an unreadable collection of keywords like he did years ago.
Meta keywords
I include this factor only to indicate that it is absolutely irrelevant. Google does not read them (some search engines do, but their influence is minimal). Therefore, it is not worth investing effort in writing the meta keywords well. I usually choose not to include this tag.
In the Zalando example, this portal simply leaves it empty: <meta name = »keywords» content = “”/>.
URL or slug
The url is also very important. We must also indicate there what product, content or service we are offering.
The part that follows the domain (after the slash /) is known as a slug. It must include only alphanumeric characters and clearly describe the target keyword.
Example: https://www.example.com/woman-shoes/
H1
This tag serves as the visible title of the content. Usually at the top of the page or section. We must therefore indicate the main keyword of the content there, which usually coincides with its title.
Zalando’s example is (removing styles): <h1> Women’s boots 1814 items </h1>.
In my opinion something sub-optimal, when including the number of articles in the h1.
Contents
Content is considered both an onpage factor and a user response factor. At the on-page SEO level, what we must know is that if we have duplicate, empty or poor quality content, we must hide it from the search engine to avoid penalties.
This can be done with the robots metatag with the code: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”/>. Using the value “noindex” we tell search engines not to index the content of that page. By “follow” we tell them that the links do want them to transmit strength.
Poor content is more frequent than we think. A page with 200,000 user profiles indexed with a majority of empty profiles, they suppose 200,000 almost identical pages, something undesirable.
Internal links
Links between sections of our own page distribute force throughout the web. All the sections that we want to enhance must be linked from the rest of the domain.
The most common way to do this is through the top or side menus.
🔗 Link building
It is the second of the pillars of classic SEO and consists of obtaining inbound links to your page to give it strength.
We can apply different strategies to get links, which are usually differentiated based on their aggressiveness, that is, based on the naturalness with which these links are achieved. Each has its risks and benefits.
In this article, we are going to describe the factors that you must take into account to make a link building without risks, that is, not very aggressive.
Anchors
Anchors are the text of a link and Google takes it into account when it comes to understanding the content it points to. Following this idea, in the past it was common to use anchors with exact keywords to condition Google. Nowadays that is risky as it is very unnatural.
The anchors, therefore, must be as varied as possible, if we want to follow a secure link building strategy, trying that at least half of your anchors are natural. This means that some must be branded or url, others may include keywords, and some must use unrelated words.
This would be an example of anchors for women’s shoes section:
- Woman’s Shoes
- Woman Shoes
- https://www.example.com/woman-shoes/
- example.com/woman-shoes/
- en/woman-shoes/
- Zalando’s women’s boots section
- here
- source
As can be seen in this list, the objective is to vary the anchor by combining keywords with natural texts.
IP, network and origin
The origin of the links must also vary as much as possible and avoid receiving too many close links. By “close” we mainly refer to links from the same IP or class C.
We must not abuse links like this.
If they are from a different IP but the same network, we can also have problems, again, if we abuse. The clearest cases are origins that share Adsense or Analytics, although there are other examples, such as the same Whois (owner) or that the domains in turn are linked to each other.
Whatever the reason for the relationship between 2 domains, we must seek the maximum variety between the origins of the links.
Theme
The links from portals of the same subject (or similar) provide 2 advantages: contextualization and greater naturalness. We must look for the majority of links to be like this.
If at least 50% of the links come from a portal with the same theme, Google will be much less likely to penalize us.
👤 User response
User response refers, in essence, to how a user responds to our page, and is the key to understanding modern SEO. It is our third pillar.
To obtain good ratings from Google we must look for 3 objectives:
- That users choose us.
- That users stay on our page.
- Keep users coming back.
These objectives are specified with the following SEO factors or metrics:
CTR
It is the most important. We must bear in mind that the main tool that Google uses to measure the user response of a page is its own search engine and the CTR is its best metric.
The CTR is the rate of clicks that a result receives in the SERPs. If the CTR is high, your page will go up. If it is low, it will go down.
We must understand that the CTR is the final visits (clicks), that is, no return. If a user enters your page from Google, and 30 seconds later returns to Google to end up in another result, this will harm your positioning.
This helps us understand the importance of the meta description explained earlier.
CTR encompasses several other factors, but we will discuss them separately.
Brand prestige
More and more, the big brands are positioned above the small portals. This has various explanations and reasons, but one of them lies in the user response and the CTR.
Big brands get more clicks than unknown brands. Faced with a fashion search, many users choose Zalando in the list of results, or choose Engadget before technology results. Unknown portals will have a harder time receiving that click, and for this reason the prestige or brand recognition greatly influences SEO.
Permanence
Again related to the CTR is the time spent on your page.
The more time and more interaction our users make on our pages, the better user response we will have.
This affects both visits from Google (CTR) and those from other sources, social or direct.
Bounce Rate
Very similar and opposite factor to residence time. The bounce rate is the number of users that leave our page as soon as they enter. Naturally we must try to keep it minimal.
Return
If Google detects recurring visits, it will be a very good indicator for him. Pages with loyal users (like the big brands), will rank better than pages with no user return.
🚩 Conclusion
We have seen some of the most important elements of SEO and each of its 3 pillars. Whenever we design our strategy we must keep them all in mind.
One way to do this is to start with the user response, designing our portal and choosing our content to have a high user response and, if possible, some brand recognition.
Secondly, we must do the onpage review of the page, making sure to indicate well to Google what content we offer and distribute the force well to all the objectives of the portal.
Finally, in the link building phase we must enhance the portal seeking not to take risks.
Whatever our strategy, if we follow these 3 references, we will have a better chance of achieving our goals.