SEO. Explained from a Game of Thrones perspective.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Si estás interesado/a en conocer los aspectos más importantes del SEO y además, te encanta la serie Juego de Tronos, estás en el lugar correcto. ¡Te encantará!

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation is the process of improving the visibility of a website in the organic results of different search engines. It is also often referred to by its English title, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Wikipedia.

There are different search engines such as, for example, Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Given that in Spain the most used search engine is Google, this post is going to focus on explaining positioning from the point of view of this search engine.

There are a lot of factors that make this search engine rank your website better or worse compared to other websites, but there are two features that sum it up very well: authority and relevance.

The 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 most into account since it is based on the user's own experience. The more a piece of content is shared, the more users have found it useful.
Relevance is the relationship a page has to a given search term. This is not simply that a page contains a lot of times the search term (in the early days it did) but that a search engine relies on hundreds of on-site factors to determine this.

To make the world of SEO more enjoyable and fun on 6 March 2019 - and I'll explain why I'm setting the date - we're changing the title of this post to the following: Google Play.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Este título responde a lo sofisticado, complejo y misterioso que puede suponer trabajar la web para que Google la posicione en los primeros rankings, es decir, cuando un usuario busca en Google una palabra clave (keyword) con la intención de encontrar resultados deseados, Google crea un top 10 de páginas web con el objetivo de mostrar lo que esperas. Que tu página web aparezca la primera, la quinta o simplemente no aparecer, depende de cómo tan bien o tan mal realicemos el SEO en nuestro portal.

These links that make up the top 10 within the first sheet are known as the SERP's: Search Engine Results Page).

What are SERPs?

Let's comment on the following image. Imagine that each one of the territories that make up the Westeros are web pages that are posted on the Internet, whatever their subject. Now, let's imagine that we search in Google for a keyword: the best posts about online marketingWho will appear first?

It is now that the war for the Iron Throne in King's Landing (first position in Google).

The 7 main houses would be the positions from second to eighth. In other words, they are fighting among themselves to position themselves as high as possible.

All this is framed within the first page of Google. However, there are more pages with more results, but very few users search on those pages, and as we read, if you want to hide a corpse, the second page of Google is the best option. We are talking about The Wall and of the white walkers. Nobody wants to be a white walker.

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How does the Google spider work?

When we talk about websites appearing higher or lower, we mean that Google ranks your website and positions it above or below the competition. Google does this analysis by means of the Google spider. In Game of Thrones, Varys It could be compared to these spiders, as it knows all the content we launch and how we launch it.

In order for spiders to see your page, they need your pages to be visible and accessible on the InternetTherefore, pages that are not indexed or are under encryption or passwords cannot be analysed. A page is indexed when the Google spider has located it and can analyse it. This analysis carried out by the Google spider (Googlebot) is based on more than 200 different factors.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Como has podido comprobar, los profesionales que trabajan el SEO, deben seguir las indicaciones de Google (u otros buscadores) para poder optimizar los portales web. En este sentido, occupying King's Landing no easy taskMoreover, there is no step-by-step manual on how to carry out the SEO of a website.

On the other hand, it is important to stress that SEO evolves over time, and that what works today may not work tomorrow. For example, some time ago, filling in the meta description positioned better; today, this is not relevant.

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Google's tools

There are a series of tools belonging to Google with which it is important to work on the SEO of a website. It is important to have Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google My Business properly configured. As in the series, having the three dragons on our side will give us power and relevance.

With Google Analytics we will be able to know a series of statistics of our website, such as, for example, sessions, most visited pages, cities that visit our portal the most, etc.
With Google Search Console we will be able to say to Google: "Hello!", i.e. we will be able to launch our website on the Internet so that the search engines will proceed to analyse it, among other important issues.
With Google My Business (only in case of having a physical business): we will create a business card in Google Maps, and we will be able to detail opening hours, address, telephone number, etc.

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SEO Onpage

On Page SEO is a term we use to refer to the optimisations you can do on your website ("On Page"), to improve its organic positioning.

In other words, we are talking about everything that depends directly on you, as you are the one who controls your website. Therefore, the portal can be optimised by the owner of the website or the webmaster. One of the main actions of the SEO Onpage, is the strategy of internal links. It is about establishing links from one page to another, but all that glitters is not gold. In the north, the villagers in the cities revere the citizens of Invernalia because it is the capital. That is to say, within the same region (the North), strategic relationships are established in order to conserve and mature its power. And it will never happen that Puerto Blanco, for example, allies itself with another region outside the North. The same goes for the internal linking strategy. Categories should be created for pages and blog posts, so that links are made between related pages and posts, and never to other meaningless ones. For example, a post that talks about market research, we can put a link to the Market Research section in the main menu, and never to another one such as Digital Marketing. This is known as passing the juice between links.

On the other hand, a link to another external website is not going to be made, as this would be SEO Offpage.

Other aspects to be taken into account in the configuration of the SEO Onpage together with the link strategy are:

Keywords
Title
Alt Text
Anchor Text
Text density
Loading speed

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Offpage SEO

If the SEO Onpage works the Internal SEO of the website, the SEO Offpage is the one that is not going to depend completely on us, but we need support from external websites. Do you remember this wedding? It was a strategic marriage to achieve territorial power. Well, the same applies to external links, you have to earn them, and not everything goes. Let me explain.

Backlinks are any external link pointing to my website. Google takes the number and relevance of these backlinks into account. The more backlinks, the better, right? It is important to make it clear that it is not about quantity, but quality. And be careful! If you carry out a massive linkbuilding strategy without quality, Varys will see you and Google will know how to penalise you.

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White walkers on the prowl

Everything seems to be perfect, ideal and spring-like, until we come across the viruses, Trojans and all malware that exists on the Internet. Yes, it can harm us if we do not take serious action. The wall separates good from evilof course, it is assumed.

The same applies to SEO. We must implement measures (a containment wall) to prevent them from accessing our files and infecting our folders. If you have a WordPress, you have at your disposal a series of free security plugins. Of course, don't forget to activate your SSL security certificate which, by the way, Google will increasingly take into account. The SSL certificate makes your website secure (exchange http:// for https://).

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Choose a good hosting

It often happens that we buy the first hosting we see on Google or it is cheaper. Mistake! How many times has Cersei belittled Daenerys by calling her a foreigner... Well, indeed, choosing a foreign hosting can be a headache for national websites.

There are several reasons why it is important to choose a well-known, national hosting provider:

Customer service language in Spanish
That you IP is Spanish is one of the first things the search engine will consider when displaying the website.
Charging will be faster as it is hosted closer to you.
The maintenance or restart of servers is done at night, which means that if your website is hosted in Spain, almost nobody will be connected to your website; however, in other countries when it is night, in Spain it is daytime.

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There are several SEO factors that need to be done correctly or improve what has already been done. We are talking about web usability, weight and loading speed and density of text and keywords.

Usability refers to having a hierarchically structured website. It is not about putting many links and menus that may confuse the user. It should be a simple website and everything should link correctly to the sections that are related to each other.

The loading speed refers to the weight of the website. The heavier it is, the longer it will take to load and therefore, Google will penalise your website. To do this, reduce the weight of the images to a size of less than 100 kb.

If you optimise a section and you don't have enough well-optimised text, you're not going to get Google to reward you for it.

In short, you must have a well-structured army with a certain number of keywords in order to optimise your website.

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Typical linking errors

It often happens that while designing our website, we create pages that we are going to delete later because we don't like them. Pages, blog posts, images, products in your shop, etc. In Game of Thrones, when a King dies, the reign changes to his closest successor, quickly, without leaving a time gap between one and the other. The same should be true for your links. When you delete a URL, a 404 error is created, i.e. a page not found. This is an SEO fatality. For this, you must perform a 301 redirect to replace your old link with the new one.

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Short and long keywords

When we ask the CEO of a company which word or set of words they want to rank for in Google, they are very clear. They are usually short and very specific words; however, they are words that describe any competing company. For example, it is very difficult to position a new website with the keyword "search engine optimisation".marketing company"simply because there are 200,000 other pages competing for the same word. However, it is much easier to rank well for longer keywords, also known as long tail keywords. Our success will depend on getting right the exact words that your target audience will search for to find you. It is not the same to search for "clothes shopa', that '.clothes shop in the centre of Malaga"for example. In the first option will appear all the most famous marketplaces and those pages that are very well positioned and that are big brands. However, there are far fewer clothing shops in the centre of Malaga.

Try Googling "white walker" y " Daenerys of the Storm, First of her name........."and you will see how many results there are for each of these searches. The more there are, the harder it is to rank.

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TITLE

The title of a page is one of the most important characteristics in Onpage SEO. The title should contain less than 70 characters and should revolve around the main keyword, i.e. in the Title we are going to put the keyword, the more to the left, the better.

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SITEMAP

The sitemap is nothing more than the main link structure of your website. It is done to help Google and make it clear which are the most important links for when the spider comes to investigate us. It is the family tree of your website, or rather, the organigram of your website.

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Link Canonical

If you have several pages or products with similar text, you can make it clear to Google which is the page you want to rank and which is not. Remember that Google has very little time to analyse your website and you should make it easy for it to focus on what is important.

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Robots TXT

You can tell Google which pages you do not want it to index. This is mainly to tell Google which pages it should analyse in its very short analysis time. For example, there are sections of the main menu that we do not want to optimise because it is not relevant, e.g. contact, privacy policy, etc. By means of the robots.txt we will tell Google not to crawl these pages (disallow: /contact).

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Friendly links

As you know, it is important that the main keyword is in the URL. To this day, we can still see links like mydomain.com/8373-eed-?-dffefwe=1232.

It is a serious mistake not to modify the links so that the keywords of the post or page appear. If you have a WordPress, go to Adjustments > permalinks and select Name of the entry.

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Headings

Headings are the prominent headings within the body of the text. An H1 is more important than an H2, and an H2 will be more important than an H3. On each page, there can only be one H1 (there is only one queen). We will put an H2 depending on the amount of text and normally there can be between 1 and 2. (Army Captain and Hand of the Queen) H2. However, H3 may have several (Gentlemen). Visually, H1 has a larger font than H2, and so on.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]We hope you liked it and learned a little bit more about SEO. You still have a lot to learn about SEO, so we encourage you to keep learning as it is a wonderful world. Seeing your territory near King's Landing is exquisite taste.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]