What is seo?
After creating the SITE of your dreams, 9 out of 10 people ask the same question: And now, how do I get people to access my site?
Well, this would be the “Million Response” can be approached through several fronts: Brand Popularity, Social Networks, Sponsored Links, Campaigns, SEO and etc … We can also say that working together shows up much more. efficient than when treated in isolation. However, in this article we will focus on just one of them, SEO.
The acronym SEO for Search Engine Optimization, or as translated into Portuguese – Search Engine Optimization, is based on the application of various techniques / strategies on websites to rank better in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, UOL, among others.
This set techniques / strategies can be divided into two fronts: On-Page factors and Off-Page (or link building) factors. Every day millions of “robots” circulate on all Internet sites, they will define your search position. Let’s now understand some of these parameters:
On-Page factors are characterized by techniques that alter or improve internal aspects of the site. Among them we can list:
Alt attribute in images
Domain
Page titles
Meta tags, especially Meta Description
Heading tags
File URL
Content
Among others.
Regarding the off-page factors (link building) that are “configured” off-page, we can list:
External Links Anchor Text
Number of External Links
Quality of external links
It is noteworthy that while the above mentioned elements are paramount in any SEO optimization strategy, there are hundreds of other factors that are taken into consideration for the placement of a website. Only Google uses more than 200 factors from them, and from time to time, makes updates to improve content delivery to users. See below some of these updates and their impacts:
Florida (2003)
Florida was Google’s first major update and is considered the update that put SEO on the map.
When launched, it removed between 50 and 98% of the sites previously listed. The target was low quality (mostly affiliate) sites that practiced keyword stuffing, with domains that contained exact keywords, and a network of links pointing to the site’s home page.
Panda (2011)
Panda was a major update that affected almost 12% of search results. The goal was to penalize sites with low quality content by exploiting many ads and sites present in content farms. Since then, their updates have always been focused on the quality of website content.
After 27 updates impacting search results, it received the last one in 2015. Panda 4.2 was just a database update, but it ended up impacting many websites that still produced very low quality content.
Penguin (2012)
Also known at the time as Webspam Update, Penguin was the update responsible for containing excess content optimizations. At its launch it impacted approximately 3.1% of English search results.
Its objective is to identify and penalize sites that practice keyword stuffing and participate in schemes to generate links (techniques considered black hat).
Like Panda, this algorithm update went through a series of improvements and releases, until it came to version 4.0 (2016), when it was officially part of the Google algorithm and started to work in real time.
Hummingbird (2013)
Unlike your previous friends, the Hummingbird update was not only a complement to Google’s algorithm, but was a complete overhaul of it.
With the update, search results for users go far beyond the keyword: the searcher considers not only the search terms, but also their entire semantic universe, as well as the meaning of that search, including synonyms and the context in which they are searched. terms are embedded in the pages and also other more complex factors such as user location and even previous searches performed by them.
All of this is done to make the displayed results increasingly related to the user’s real search intent, not just the words of your search.
HTTPS / SSL Update (2014)
After warning and greatly encouraging webmasters to invest in security, in 2014 Google announced that HTTPS was becoming a ranking factor, a way to encourage online community migration and thus make the web safer.
This is because sites that have SSL certificates (and thus migrate to HTTPS) use encrypted information, which prevents data from being identified midway if intercepted.
Mobile Friendly Update – Mobilegeddon (2015)
Google’s mobile update became known as Mobilegeddon (reference to the movie Armageddon) for the impact that experts believed it would have. In practice, however, the impact was not that great.
In short, the update began to prioritize search engine-friendly sites for mobile searches, regardless of whether the site was more or less mobile-friendly: or not.
In 2016 Google released a new mobile friendly update, which had a lower ranking impact than the first, according to webmasters (the main reason being that most sites were already adapted).
Rankbrain (2015)
In 2015 Google announced that a system that used machine learning and artificial intelligence was officially incorporated into its algorithm to aid in the interpretation and presentation of search results: Rankbrain.
According to Google itself, the system has become one of the top 3 ranking factors, along with links and content. But unlike the other 2 factors, it was more difficult to optimize your site for this intelligence. What could be done was to explore the words that were part of the semantics of content and make clear the entire context of their content.
Fred (2017)
The Fred update was released to identify sites with low quality content and lots of advertising banners.
According to John Mueller, Google’s webmaster trends analyst at the time, “If you are following good SEO practices, the only reason for penalizing your site is the poor quality of content.”
