Posicionamiento en Buscadores (2012 Ed.)

Review

The book Posicionamiento en Buscadores (Search Engine Optimization), written by Fernando Maciá and Javier Gosende, exceeded all sales expectations in its 2009 edition. Consequently, Anaya decided to bet on a third edition of this “SEO Bible,” which went on sale in late January 2012.

This reissue was revised and updated in accordance with the evolution of techniques and the context of Search Engine Positioning. The publication gathers the fundamental knowledge so that any marketing executive or professional from other areas can understand and implement Web positioning at various levels.

The Posicionamiento en Buscadores book is a reference publication in the sector, presenting not so much technical and advanced knowledge (for which we have the book Advanced SEO Techniques) but rather a solid and firm foundation to start practicing SEO.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

1.1. Why Search Engine Positioning?
1.2. What will you learn in this book?
1.3. Who might be interested in this book?
1.4. Sources and tools

2. Search Engine Positioning: The Star of Digital Marketing

2.1. The need to promote our website
2.1.1. Horizontal portals of the main Internet access providers
2.1.2. Vertical portals oriented to B2C: company offer to the end customer
2.1.3. B2B business models
2.1.4. Information explosion
2.1.5. Survivors of the dot-com crisis

2.2. Digital marketing tools
2.2.1. Online advertising
2.2.2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
2.2.3. Search Engine Positioning: detailing the meaning
2.2.4. Non-intrusive marketing through email: Email permission marketing
2.2.5. Viral marketing
2.2.6. Social networks

2.3. The full digital marketing cycle
2.3.1. Traffic attraction: SEO, SEM, and banners
2.3.2. Traffic-to-customer conversion: the moment for usability
2.3.3. Customer loyalty or permission marketing
2.3.4. Converting loyal customers into advocates
2.3.5. Establishing a virtuous circle

2.4. But first things first

3. Why Invest in Search Engines

3.1. The need to evaluate opportunities of different Internet marketing strategies
3.2. Search engines: the preferred way for users to search for information
3.3. Growth of investment in search engines: our competition is already investing
3.4. Return on Investment: Search Engine Positioning is the cheapest way to acquire profitable customers
3.5. Search Engine Positioning as an ideal complement to offline campaigns
3.7. Promoting yourself in search engines: a land of opportunities

4. Defining Your Market Niche: What Is Your Website’s Goal?

4.1. Is there room for everyone on the first page of search engine results?
4.1.1. Identify your exact market niche
4.1.2. Recapping

4.2. Keys to a high-performance website
4.2.1. Defining target audiences
4.2.2. Defining tactical objectives
4.2.3. Defining resources and deadlines
4.2.4. Websites as business units focused on performance

4.3. How to measure and improve website performance
4.3.1. Check that your website is aligned with your strategic objectives
4.3.2. Your website must have tactical objectives to meet and a way to evaluate them
4.3.3. Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
4.3.4. Measuring website performance
4.3.5. Improving website performance

4.4. How does positioning help achieve objectives?
4.4.1. When the goal is traffic: constant traffic versus a traffic peak over time

4.5. The starting point of my Internet business plan

5. Seducing Search Engines

5.1. Search engines: the gateway to the Internet
5.2. How Google finds a needle in a haystack… thousands of times per second
5.2.1. How a search engine works

5.3. What do search engines look at?
5.3.1. Calculating relevance
5.3.2. Calculating popularity

5.4. Relevance and popularity: a guarantee for good search engine positioning

6. Keywords: The Beginning of the Strategy

6.1. Definition and importance of keywords
6.1.1. What are keywords?
6.1.2. Keywords: the most important part of a search engine positioning campaign
6.1.3. How do search engine users search?

6.2. Drafting the initial keyword list: sources and tools for inspiration
6.2.1. Make a keyword list with which you think potential customers would search for you: the personal list
6.2.2. Research, with the help of search engine keyword suggestion tools, what other keywords exist in the market
6.2.3. Research your competition’s keywords

6.3. Choosing keywords
6.3.1. Popular keywords
6.3.2. Keywords with low competition
6.3.3. Keywords with high visitor-to-customer conversion
6.3.4. Keywords similar to my content

6.4. Keyword distribution strategy on your website
6.5. Yes, but… how is all this applied in practice?

7. Choosing the Optimal Search Engine Mix

7.1. The search engine sector after the concentration process
7.2. Why choose search engines?
7.3. Getting to know search engines
7.3.1. Yahoo!: the directory that became a search engine
7.3.2. Lycos: a pioneer search engine that ended up as a portal
7.3.3. Inktomi: a great player lying low
7.3.4. AltaVista: another pioneer killed in action
7.3.5. Ask: a search engine with an innovative spirit
7.3.6. A European search engine: All the Web (FAST)
7.3.7. Google: everyone’s homepage
7.3.8. Bing: a contender that fails to take off
7.3.9. Attempts to challenge Google’s hegemony
7.3.10. Countries where Google is not the predominant search engine

7.4. So, which search engine suits me?
7.5. All the big ones… and a few more
7.6. I already know all the market players

8. Indexable Websites: The Starting Point

8.1. Indexabili… what?
8.2. What color is your hat?
8.3. The pages search engines see: when a word is worth more than a thousand images
8.4. How to choose a good domain
8.5. Domain and hosting: where do you want to geolocate your website?
8.5.1. So… where is my website?

8.6. Information architecture on a website
8.6.1. Types of website structure
8.6.2. Content organization on the server
8.6.3. Navigation: how to leave doors open for search engines
8.6.4. Static pages and dynamic pages
8.6.5. Internal search engines

8.7. Code validation
8.8. How to leverage your CMS to position your website
8.8.1. Making the CMS the best SEO tool

8.9. What we want to hide: The Robots Exclusion Standard
8.10. Ensuring website indexability: 15 points to keep in mind
8.11. How to apply Google Webmaster Tools to improve indexability
8.11.1. Domain in Google Webmaster Tools
8.11.2. Crawl errors
8.11.3. HTML suggestions
8.11.4. Crawl statistics
8.11.5. Sitemap statistics
8.11.6. Set crawl rate
8.11.7. Set domain geographic targeting
8.11.8. Set preferred domain

8.12. Everything in sight

9. How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines

9.1. Understanding indexing and saturation
9.2. Achieving the robot’s first visit
9.2.1. Entering search engines the slow way: submission forms
9.2.2. Entering search engines the fast way: how to get found

9.3. Ensuring the robot knows all the pages on our website
9.3.1. Google Sitemaps
9.3.2. Other types of sitemaps for Google
9.3.3. Sitemaps for Yahoo!
9.3.4. Sitemaps for Bing
9.3.5. Submitting sitemaps via Robots.txt.
9.3.6. Submitting sitemaps through other means

9.4. Google Places
9.5. Where else should I want to be?

10. Web Relevance

10.1. What is Web Relevance?
10.2. Factors that improve web relevance in page design
10.2.1. Page structure
10.2.2. Page title: the Title tag
10.2.3. Meta tags: the description meta tag and the keywords meta tag
10.2.4. Hierarchy tags: h1, h2, and h3 headings
10.2.5. Page structure: text and content.
10.2.6. Page structure: images
10.2.7. Internal links
10.2.8. Semantic or friendly URLs
10.2.9. Domains with keywords
10.2.10. Boosting Rich Snippets with microformats
10.2.11. Sitelinks
10.2.12. Positioning of PDF files inserted on the web
10.2.13. Content difficult for search engines to crawl: Flash content and other animations

10.3. Creating new content to position
10.3.1. Creating a News section
10.3.2. Creating a Tips section
10.3.3. Creating a blog or forum
10.3.4. Avoiding duplicate content

10.4. Optimizing web relevance on dynamic pages
10.5. Ensuring our website’s relevance: 10 points to keep in mind

11. Web Popularity

11.1. I think first, I get links, and then I exist
11.2. How do search engines see links?
11.3. Defining the way to measure a website’s popularity according to Google: PageRank
11.4. Sources of quality links: what kind of pages should they come from?
11.4.1. Links from pages with high popularity
11.4.2. Links from pages of different origins
11.4.3. Links from aged pages
11.4.4. Pages with related themes

11.5. Link format: how do search engines like links?
11.5.1. The importance of anchor text
11.5.2. Links Google does not follow: NOFOLLOW links
11.5.3. Other factors that add value to a link

11.6. Transmission of link juice
11.6.1. Using the Nofollow attribute to improve link juice transmission

11.7. Active link building: linkbuilding
11.7.1. Directory inclusions
11.7.2. Link submissions in forums
11.7.3. Link submissions in blogs
11.7.4. Link submissions in press release portals and article directories
11.7.5. Link exchange
11.7.6. Link submissions in social networks: factors affecting search engine positioning
11.7.7. Penalties for buying links

11.8. Passive link building: linkbaiting
11.8.1. First step: writing good content. What content is most linked?
11.8.2. Second step: applying copyleft to our content
11.8.3. Third step: distributing our content

11.9. Increasing web popularity, but at a slow and natural pace

12. Limits in Search Engine Positioning

12.1. The fight for top positions: does anything go?
12.2. The rules of the indexing game
12.3. Look forward… but watch the rearview mirror
12.4. When to use the “turbo”
12.4.1. Hidden text
12.4.2. Fictitious or hidden links
12.4.3. Irrelevant words
12.4.4. Cloaking or elusive redirects
12.4.5. Doorway Pages

12.5. But… what is this website about?
12.6. So… what is the verdict?

13. How to Measure an SEO Campaign

13.1. The need to measure results
13.2. Measuring indexing: do search engines know all my pages?
13.2.1. How is the number of indexed pages calculated?
13.2.2. Measuring indexing with Google Webmaster Tools
13.2.3. Indexing: a game of patience

13.3. Measuring search engine visibility or rankings
13.3.1. How many keywords do I measure?
13.3.2. How do we measure keyword position rankings?
13.3.3. In how many search engines do I measure visibility?

13.4. Measuring web popularity: how many links point to my website?
13.4.1. Measuring popularity through search engine commands
13.4.2. Measuring external links with Google Webmaster Tools
13.4.3. Measuring external links with online tools or specialized programs

13.5. Measuring web traffic
13.5.1. Effects of search engine positioning on web traffic
13.5.3. Measuring keyword opportunities

13.6. Evaluating SEO company promises: search engine positioning or qualified web traffic?
13.7. Calculating the return on investment in an organic search engine positioning strategy
13.8. Toward a quality measurement system

14. Search Engine Positioning for Other Media: Blogs, Local Search, Mobile, Videos, and News

14.1. How to position a blog in search engines
14.1.1. Optimization of code and content of a blog
14.1.2. Content creation in comments
14.1.3. Updating functionalities
14.1.4. Beware of excessive advertising
14.1.5. Improving my blog’s popularity

14.2. Positioning in Google Places
14.3. Positioning videos on YouTube
14.3.1. Positioning in YouTube’s internal search engine
14.3.2. Positioning in YouTube search results
14.3.3. Creating a YouTube channel
14.3.4. Identifying video themes
14.3.5. Writing the video title
14.3.6. Writing the video description
14.3.7. Writing the tags
14.3.8. Obtaining external links to the video
14.3.9. Boosting the video’s popularity factors

14.4. Positioning in Google News
14.5. Search engine positioning for mobile devices

Introduction

When, in the late 90s, the concept of “search engine positioning” began to sound in North American Internet specialist forums, we could not even suspect that, some years later, it would be the origin of a highly specialized new activity that moves an ever-increasing economic volume.

While some boast of working in search engine positioning since the very beginnings of the Web in the early 90s, it was really the revolution in the world of Web search marked by the emergence of Google, followed by all the new second-generation search engines (Yahoo!, MSN Search, Ask, etc.), along with the lesson learned during the dot-com crisis of the year 2000, the two facts that created the appropriate competitive conditions for the takeoff of search engine positioning. On the one hand, the new search engines based on automatic indexing agents (robots, spiders, or crawlers) require that websites show a certain type of characteristic that allows the free transit of these agents through the content as well as that their contents are organized in such a way that the search engines are capable of properly calculating their relevance to a certain category of searches and their prominence, regarding other contents classified in the same category. On the other hand, the dot-com crisis leads to proposing new investments in the Network in terms of performance measurement and return on investment, aspects that favor the creation and implementation of web traffic analysis tools. This real-time feedback allows knowing the improvements obtained from the different traffic promotion strategies and verifying the optimal performance of search engine positioning as the best way to bring qualified traffic to a portal.

From the observation that most users only click on the first search results, companies and institutions have begun to dedicate an ever-increasing part of their promotion resources to ensure that their portals appear among those top positions in the searches of their potential customers. Today it is understood that not being in the top positions of search engines is, for most companies, the same as not existing on the Internet.

The volume in your hands responds, therefore, to a real need for companies to understand what search engine positioning consists of, detect the deficiencies presented by their portals, introduce appropriate corrective measures, and measure results to increase the performance of their websites.

The book explains what search engine positioning consists of, why it is important for any Internet initiative from which a return on investment is expected, which sectors can benefit most from this type of promotional strategy, and what its role is relative to other types of promotion. Rather than pursuing top positions in very specific search terms per se, we believe –and our experience demonstrates so— that the ultimate goal of search engine positioning is to achieve significant increases in qualified web traffic: people interested in products or services whose visits will ultimately translate into an improvement of their profit and loss statement.

The manual also provides formulas to increase a site’s popularity and warns about those prohibited practices or those not recommended by search engines and whose use, even unconsciously, can lead to the expulsion of the Website from a search engine’s index. Beyond presenting the latest trick or technique, we have approached search engine positioning as a global strategy involving aspects related to programming, content, and popularity generation, which ultimately produces side effects in website usability improvements, value generation for the Network in the form of original content, and a more satisfactory browsing experience for users.

Finally, the book guides you in interpreting your web traffic data and how to build a “dashboard” from different statistics that allow you to discover what your customers are looking for, and how and where they are looking for it. In this way, sustainable and improvable results over time are guaranteed.

We trust that you will find the language used accessible and that the multiple examples will be quite illustrative so that you can apply the shown techniques in your specific case.

Dedication and Acknowledgments

Dedication

I dedicate this book to all the people who, as clients, suppliers, or consultants, mark the history of Human Level Communications. I could not have grown personally or professionally without them. Heartfelt thanks.

–Fernando Maciá Domene

To my wife Anahis and my children Leandro and Martín.

–Javier Gosende Grela

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the Spanish-speaking SEO community for its generosity in sharing knowledge and experiences on and offline. Also, express my thanks to people who proactively act as catalysts in the recognition of new Internet professions. Especially, to Ismael el-Qudsi, Guillermo Vilarroig, Miguel López, Miguel Orense, Montserrat Peñarroya, Fernando Muñoz, Ricardo Tayar, José Llinares, Lakil Essady, and very especially, to the editor of my books at Anaya Multimedia, Eugenio Tuya.

–Fernando Maciá Domene

I want to thank all the professionals and clients I have worked with. From each of them, I have learned new things. Thank you for allowing me to be a sponge that absorbed part of your knowledge and experiences.

–Javier Gosende Grela