How to Use SEO Techniques

How to Use SEO Techniques

SEO positioning is improved by working on two aspects: internally or externally,

depending on the control level that the Webmaster has over the website.

Internal SEO means undertaking actions to improve content, code and/or

accessibility, aspects related to the website to be controlled by the Webmaster or

68 T. Piñeiro-Otero and X. Martínez-Rolán

company. Regarding this, keywords must be adapted to the website [31]. Such

keywords must be included on:

• Title tag: the website title, visible on the top bar of the browser.

• Meta tags: even though they are losing importance (especially meta tag keywords), meta tag description is very useful, both for Web crawlers and for users,

as the content of that tag is used as a rich snipped in the browser results.

• Links: using keywords on friendly URLs.

• Content: keywords must be within the content of the website. In order to be

considered relevant, the content of each website has to be over 300 words and

the position and density of keywords have to be looked into. Regarding location,

in order to optimise the use of keywords, they have to be placed near the Web

heading and on the title or subtitles of the text. Likewise, in order to improve

positioning, the density of keywords should be over 2 % but not over 5 % so that

browsers do not penalise the site.

With the latest update of Google’s algorithm, content has become more

important. Offering original and quality content is one of the recommendations by

Google for those who want to get started in the optimisation for Web searches.

Apart from selection and use of keywords, improving Web positioning requires

the development of other actions on the website’s structure and code.

For example, having a sitemap helps Web crawlers index the website. A sitemap

is a file with different URLs that make up the website.

Another action in this line is to indicate to Web spiders which content is relevant

and which is not, so that they trace it (or not) and index it (or not). This action is

done through the robots.txt file, located on the root directory of the website.

On the other hand, external SEO focuses on aspects that are less controllable for

the company, for example incoming links (coming from other websites), with the

goal of gaining popularity and higher quality of the links. A link is perceived as a

quality link when it is created by a site or reference platform from the sector the

company is in and/or that works on the same topic.

Since 2012, Google penalises malpractice related to external links, for example

link farms (group of websites that all hyperlink to every other site without having

any type of theme or sector link); therefore, it is important to work in order to create

quality links to other websites relevant for the sector.

This technique is known as link building and can be implemented through

concrete actions such as:

• Exchange of links between different websites sharing themes and content.

• Links from social networking sites such as forums or social networks, adding

the link and the signature to the message or the content shared.

• Link baiting: publishing content that encourages visitors to create links from

their websites to that content. The key to success lies in their viral or mimetic

nature, and though it is a technique that is difficult to master, the results are

outstanding.

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Quality external links could also be improved by registering a website on general

or theme-based directories. This practice is no longer used since Google stopped

considering them in their update of the algorithm in 2013.