Factores de posicionamiento que usa Google

In another section, we answered the question “What is SEO?”, a question we hear very often.

SEO includes, as was mentioned, many ranking factors, that may vary depending on the search engine. We will refer to the ranking factors that Google employs, given that it is the world’s most widely-used search engine.

Firstly, let us review the anatomy of any result when a search is done on Google:

But then, how long will it take me to be first on Google? What do I have to do to be among the first 10 of a key phrase? That’s the key!

Among the factors to be considered when defining key phrases for an adequate strategy of search engine ranking are the following:

Choose key phrases well:

Let us assume that you sell “men’s leather shoes” and that they are made in “Costa Rica”… What happens if someone does a search with “men’s leather shoes in Costa Rica” and you appear first, with all the shoe models you have available, in a website responsive for cellphones and tablets, with everything ready for the person to make a purchase? There is a higher likelihood of doing business using more delimited phrases.

Given this, it is NOT the same to want to compete in Google with phrases such as “shoes” than to do so with “shoes Costa Rica”… or “men’s shoes Costa Rica”… or “leather shoes handmade in Costa Rica”… or “luxury handcraft shoes made in Costa Rica”… or, you get the idea!

The more you refine your keywords, the quicker you will reach the first page and begin to find those much-coveted potential clients, and better yet: qualified prospects!

By the way, phrases as long as these are called “long tail keyword searches,” and are very, VERY widely used every day, so, do not hesitate to position yourself in phrases with more words to obtain results quickly.

Here are some examples of how results vary as new words are added to the key phrase, and delimitations are done by country:

Frequency of updating

This is the point at which many companies stay! You can do the exercise by choosing your keywords correctly, but if this does not generate content regularly aimed at these keywords, you will achieve little or nothing. Though if you are lucky and your competitors are sleeping and don’t make changes to their sites, but this simply means leaving your fate in the hands of your competitors which is not something you want.

Define an SEO content strategy to generate optimized content for competing in the phrases that you want to achieve. And then focus on creating notes and content (videos, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, examples in Excel, and photo galleries) at least twice in a month.

Quality content

This is very important for you to consider: Google aims at high-quality content. Don’t upload just anything.

The times when you could merrily copy and paste content from another site onto your own are over, as Google now penalizes this. Besides, why would you decide not to provide your clients with valuable content? If you want people to decide to contact or call you, at least, take the time to tell them what you do differently for your competitors, and how they would benefit from buying your products or services. The creation and quality of contents are extremely important.

External factors

Another of the many factors that Google considers is the quantity, but particularly the quality of the incoming links. Years ago, it was easy to have inbound links where you pay $5 or $10 for a little program that you downloaded from the internet which sent your link to “thousands of blogs and search engines” through the web, and that was it. The next day, you woke up to thousands of incoming links on your site and Google began to improve your position on searches… easy, right?

But it turns out that Google noticed that this practice did not concentrate on the quality of content or the frequency of updating, or optimization… none of this! So, they began to penalize the practice, which is, besides, unnatural (Who could manually add to a website thousands of new pages in one day)?

Hence the importance, as was stated in the previous point also generating additional content such as videos (to upload on YouTube), presentations and PDFs (to share on Slideshare or Isuu), content that can be shared on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter, with links back to the website for generating additional traffic. All of this comes into play! And as you can see, it’s not something that can be done in 10 minutes, and that’s it. It requires commitment and a roadmap telling you what you have to generate in the different sections of your site.

Website optimization

As we said, having a website is not enough. Some companies have had a site for months or years without having benefitted from it, even though they may have a lot of content in it. Why? Because it’s not optimized! You must know how to optimize the content, particularly making use of titles that are relevant and different for each page, and are related with the rest of the content on the site, so that gradually, Google begins to identify that for the search “selling service X in country Y,” you have a relevant result.

Have you ever looked, say, for a hotel and ended up at the restaurant section of a website? This happens because of lack of optimization, for if the content is correctly optimized and indexed, people should always reach a relevant result on the site.

Merely organizing and optimizing the different content in a web redesign project can provide tremendous results, as in the case of our client Coronell & Lam, lawyers in the Colón Free Zone of Panama:

You now have a better idea of what ranking factors Google uses, but if you want to learn about this in much more detail, here we provide you with a 160-page PDF on Google’s quality content evaluation program… Enjoy)!

Contact us if you have any questions or learn more about our search engine ranking service.

By the way, here we also give you a very interesting dynamic infographic on how a Google search works.