SEO Técnicas Avanzadas

Review

Internet search engines are the great generators of profitable visits for most websites. Organic positioning—appearing among the top positions in the searches of our potential clients—is the most cost-effective way to drive quality traffic to our online projects.

Search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, or Yandex are the gateway to the web for the majority of users and reference hundreds of millions of visits daily. These search engines constantly update their algorithms to be more precise in their results and defend against unethical positioning techniques. Increasingly, online marketing professionals require advanced SEO knowledge to stand out from their competition while respecting search engine guidelines. In this book, Fernando Maciá pours fifteen years of experience, proposing a positioning methodology backed by the success of its practical application to hundreds of international projects.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1. Keyword Consulting

1. Keyword consulting in the SEO process
2. Not provided: toward an SEO without keywords?
3. Information to extract from keyword consulting
4. Google Keyword Planner
5. Google Trends
6. Keyword Tool
7. Google Webmaster Tools
8. Google Analytics
9. Search patterns
10. Trends
11. Seasonality
12. Keyword competition
13. Comparative visibility
14. Keyword selection strategies for our SEO campaign
15. So, which are the optimal keywords where we should position ourselves?

Chapter 2. Indexability Audit

1. Website accessibility for search engines
2. When should an indexability audit be performed?
3. Objectives and structure of indexability analysis
4. Preliminary recommendations
5. Indexability
6. Content audit
7. WPO
8. Web popularity
9. Reporting
10. Indexability as the basis for positioning

Chapter 3. Google Webmaster Tools: Instructions for Use

1. Basic configuration
2. Google Webmaster Tools preferences
3. Search appearance
4. Search traffic
5. Google index
6. Crawling
7. Security issues
8. The “other” search engine tools for Webmasters

Chapter 4. The SEO Workflow and How to Avoid Implementation Traps

1. Who are the main players in the function
2. SEO consulting in Web development projects
3. SEO consulting in Web site migration processes
4. Search engine optimization of an already published website
5. Implementation: the Achilles’ heel of SEO projects

Chapter 5. SEO-Oriented Information Architecture

1. Google Panda
2. Concept of information architecture
3. Taxonomies
4. Folksonomies
5. Thesaurus, semantic field and ontology
6. Flexible SEO-oriented architecture
7. URL syntax
8. Information architecture: a solid foundation for a well-positioned website

Chapter 6. Optimization: Improving Relevance

1. Page structure
2. Reactive and proactive positioning
3. Obsolete content
4. Recurrent offers and promotions pages
5. Newspaper archives / Archives
6. Copywriting strategies
7. Using structured data to generate rich snippets
8. Content marketing to achieve positioning goals
9. Squeezing on-page relevance

Chapter 7. International SEO

1. Why target international markets?
2. Domain types
3. International version structure: subdomains or subdirectories?
4. Domain geolocation
5. Content oriented toward international positioning
6. Multi-language and multi-country website structure
7. New international markup for alternative versions of international content
8. Additional recommendations for international SEO

Chapter 8. Mobile SEO

1. The unstoppable growth of mobile access
2. What makes web traffic from mobile devices different?
3. How to know if we need a mobile-ready website
4. How to check if our website is adapted for mobile SEO
5. How to optimize our website for mobile SEO
6. Responsive design websites
7. Website specifically programmed for mobile devices
8. Apps
9. What can negatively affect your website’s positioning for mobile?
10. Recommendations to optimize your mobile SEO
11. More references on mobile SEO

Chapter 9. Popularity and Authority

1. Off-page relevance factors
2. Google Penguin
3. Google Disavow Tool: a consequence of Google Penguin

Chapter 10. Web Analytics Applied to SEO

1. Definition of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
2. SEO
3. Conversion
4. Conclusion

Alphabetical Index

Foreword

The world of Internet marketing is not for the faint of heart or for those who do not possess a constant desire to learn something new every day.

This strength of spirit, this desire to know and “update” daily will be your most necessary qualities if you decide to be an SEO or a search engine marketing professional, because we—SEOs—have to deal on two fronts:

1. The users: humans.
2. The search engines, the algorithms, and their bots.

It is this positioning between “humans” and “bots” that makes SEO the most ambiguous and—at the same time—exciting of all Internet marketing disciplines.

We, SEOs, are Technical Marketers; this is our mark of distinction from all others: Social Media, Content, or Email marketers.

SEOs are marketing people and, as such, we have the obligation to know deeply how search engines work, in order to get companies to communicate better with their audience through their websites and thus respond to their real needs.

In other words, we are Don Draper in a geek version.

You too can be a Don Draper thanks to this book you hold in your hands.

The reason is simple: few people have such a great knowledge of real SEO as Fernando Maciá Domene.

What you are going to read and learn is the result of years of work in the trenches, not a simple regurgitation of best practices. SEO has evolved a lot, and it is no longer just a matter of keywords and meta tags. Semantic search, Mobile Search, SEO for video marketing, international SEO, local searches, digital PR… SEO is present in all the moments of a site’s online marketing and exerts its influence over them. All this is the result of an evolution, which is why an updated edition of this book was so necessary.

Dear reader, do not be frightened when reading the table of contents of this second edition of SEO: Advanced Techniques; be brave and move on to the first chapter. You will see how Fernando is capable of explaining even the most complicated technique with clarity.

The work of the SEO, in part, resembles that of a researcher. The SEO investigates, analyzes, discovers what an audience needs and the words it uses to satisfy that primal need which is searching.

Searching implies questions, queries, and these questions are made up of words: the famous keywords.

Every search engine marketing project starts from keyword consulting and Fernando, appropriately, begins this second edition of SEO: Advanced Techniques with this task, and he does it with extreme detail, explaining how to perform it with clarity and success.

The deeply practical nature of this book is evident from the first chapter: tools are the protagonists, both those that Google itself offers us and some of the best paid instruments.

Understanding the language our audience uses, however, is only a first step in an SEO project. In fact, it might not have much utility if our Internet presence—our website—is not optimized so that engines can index it correctly.

The indexability audit or technical audit, as it is also known, is where the technical nature of search engine marketing professionals predominates, and where SEOs become the ideal connection between the Marketing department and the IT department.

If you are an SEO with a background in Information Sciences, or if you come from the world of programming, in this chapter—as well as throughout the entire book—you will find already known terms and techniques, but from the perspective of search engine marketing.

If, on the contrary, you are one of the many who arrive at SEO from the world of communication and marketing, thanks to the ease Fernando possesses for explaining apparently complicated things simply, you will be able to make yours all those essential technical know-hows to be able to develop well the work as a search engine marketing professional.

But if I have to suggest a part of Fernando Maciá Domene’s book, it would be Chapter 5: “The SEO Workflow and How to Avoid Implementation Traps.”

This chapter is a step-by-step guide to the different production phases of an SEO project, which clearly indicates what questions we should ask ourselves when we are implementing a Web Positioning strategy according to different scenarios (new website, domain migration, optimization of existing sites…).

We were saying earlier, when talking about Keyword Consulting, how SEO resembles the work of a researcher. Such a nature of our work is confirmed in many other moments, with everything related to the architecture of a site and its contents being the most relevant. Jargon such as taxonomy, folksonomy, thesauri, ontologies, and semantic fields are important and, more and more, common in the daily work of an SEO. Why? Because Google (and not only Google) has changed tremendously, moving from being a search engine almost exclusively based on keywords and links to a very complex system that sees web semantics as its true engine.

Since Hummingbird, the revolutionary update of its entire search algorithm that took place two years ago, Google is much smarter at understanding the content published on the Internet and, therefore, also more capable of offering better results to its users.

Building a website that knows how to explain to Google, thanks to precise architecture and web semantics techniques, what it talks about and what needs it responds to, is nowadays mandatory.

If quality has always been important in the work of an SEO, now it is even more so. Achieving success in Google with low-quality tactics, or directly against Mountain View guidelines, has become enormously complicated. We could say, in fact, that the world of SEO has evolved so quickly also because Google has decided—once and for all—to clean spam from its search results.

Penguin or Panda are only the most famous updates that Google has launched throughout these last four years, and that have given SEOs so much work.

In SEO: Advanced Techniques you will find the necessary techniques to detect potential problems in this regard and, if the case arose, solve them.

The (damn) links, however, continue to have great importance in SEO. The concept of Popularity is still among us, but with a renewed nature, so we no longer talk about Link Building, but about Link Earning.

Links are not built; they must be earned. The punishment is, sooner rather than later, a penalty.

It is in this area where the marketing nature of SEO has taken control over pure technique, leading SEO to approach disciplines such as Content Marketing and Social Media, to work synergistically with them, to obtain a common goal for all: the success of the client.

SEO does not have the duty of creating the content or promoting a brand on Social Media, but it does have the duty of informing content marketers about the topics their common audience seeks, and helping Social Media professionals to identify those sites and people that can help amplify the promotion of those contents… and, thus in passing, help to obtain those links that are useful to enhance the Popularity of the website.

Fernando, moreover, presents two chapters dedicated to two facets of SEO that have come to have great importance:

1. International SEO.
2. Optimization for mobile devices.

Both are a clear mirror of the times we live in.

In the case of international SEO, it is precisely the need for companies to open up to international markets—partly due to the economic crisis we are still suffering—that has given it maximum relevance.

In the case of optimization for mobile devices, the reason is evident: the use of the Internet in mobility is about to exceed the classic use from a desktop PC also in the field of searches. If we think about it, the aforementioned Hummingbird is largely due to Google having understood this change in the search habits of its users.

Finally, like every marketing discipline, SEO must also be measured. The relationship between SEO and Web Analytics has always been very strong, but over the last few years it has become even closer. Everything in SEO must be measured: Visibility, Traffic, and Conversions. Without a deep knowledge of Web Analytics, and its instruments, we will not be able to set objectives and KPIs, we will not be able to isolate and identify failures or successes and, above all, we will not be able to inform our clients about our work.

Because SEO has changed; it is no longer a matter of Positioning and “being in first position.” SEO has evolved and has become even more complex. A complexity that should not scare us, but quite the contrary, because we have at our disposal books like this new edition of SEO: Advanced Techniques by friend Fernando Maciá Domene, which can help us improve in our daily work.

And to those who tell you that SEO is dead, answer them that SEO will die only when people stop looking for answers.

Gianluca Fiorelli (@GFiorelli1)

Introduction

When the first edition of this book hit bookstores in late 2011, it quickly became a reference book within the search engine positioning professional sector. Although several books on SEO had already been published in Spain at that time, and a good number in other languages like the great The Art of SEO by Eric Enge and Rand Fishkin, the truth is that Search Engine Positioning: Advanced Techniques was received with enthusiasm for its rigorous but also educational approach.

I am indebted to a large number of clients who since 2001 have entrusted their SEO projects to my consultancy Human Level Communications, since with them I acquired the experience that I wanted to share in that book. I also owe much to the universities, business schools, consultancies, and events that trusted me to provide training or give talks on this exciting field. The irreplaceable experience of spending many hours teaching what search engine positioning is to people with absolutely diverse professional profiles, training, and experience levels has ended up teaching me which is the most effective pedagogy to introduce others to the twists and turns of algorithms, keywords, search results…

Equipped with that invaluable background, I propose in the next pages to bring this book up to date, which is already a reference in Spanish-speaking SEO, and go one or two steps further. Time passes very quickly and, as they would say in the sector, if you work in SEO, even more so. Since late 2011 to the date this book is published—mid-2015—many things have happened in the world of search engines. And although much of the foundation of the first edition remains fully valid, others already show the rapid pace of obsolescence and require a profound update.

What will you find in this book?

Regarding the original structure of Search Engine Positioning: Advanced Techniques, this edition introduces some slight changes. To begin with, the description of the SEO landscape as a professional activity is omitted. Organic search engine positioning is today a fully recognized and consolidated digital marketing activity. Aspects related to search engine optimization are a mandatory part, at a greater or lesser level of depth, of practically all training programs related to online marketing that are taught with great profusion in multiple formats in business schools, universities, professional associations, city councils, local development offices, etc.

So the book dives, from the first chapter, into aspects related to SEO activity. In this, it follows a scheme similar to the one we apply in our professional activity at Human Level Communications: setting visibility objectives, indexability audit, content optimization, templates, and information architecture, popularity generation, and finally, evaluation to identify more opportunities for improvement.
Based on this simple but effective work scheme backed by years of experience, the first chapter dives directly into keyword consulting through which we identify visibility objectives that respond to the search intent of our potential clients. We study what, how, how much, and where people search on the Internet. We identify search trends, seasonal patterns, competition, and related and anticipatory searches. We will see the tools that help us in this task and how to make the most of them.

Next, we address the indexability audit. It involves carrying out an exhaustive examination that allows us to identify the obstacles that a website may present to be correctly crawled and classified by a search engine.

Google Webmaster Tools are a set of functionalities gathered in this interface that provides invaluable information for the work of an SEO. We dedicate an entire chapter to explaining how to correctly configure this tool and how to interpret the abundant data that we can extract from it.

These early phases of website optimization are usually the stage where the origin of all failures in search engine optimization projects is forged. The lack of cooperation from website programmers, the impossibility of making changes to server configuration, or indefinitely postponing the implementation of the recommendations gathered in the indexability audit can ruin positioning projects that are born with the best of intentions. We address in a specific chapter what the most frequent problems of SEO projects are in three different scenarios: the participation of an SEO consultant in the development process of a new website; SEO consulting in the migration of a website; or the optimization of a site already published. The experience of countless projects is reflected with absolute frankness in this chapter which, I trust, will be able to avoid more than one failure for some reader.

Chapter 5 focuses on aspects related to relevance improvement, mainly by modifying the site’s information architecture, improving the page structure, and focusing texts and metadata on the keywords we have set as an objective. It is about squeezing the maximum traffic generation potential of the site’s current content by aligning it with visibility objectives and adding crawlable information for those types of content that are not directly crawlable, such as images or video.

Google’s Panda update has meant new requirements regarding keyword density and the possibility of penalty for over-optimization. For its part, the Hummingbird update directs the search engine toward semantic search, for which the use of synonyms, reformulations, analogous expressions, etc., must be favored to not abuse target keywords. This usually implies reviewing the generation patterns of titles, descriptions, alternative image texts, heading texts, link texts, etc., to make sure we are in compliance with Google’s new requirements to achieve optimal relevance.

Two specific search engine optimization scenarios are addressed in two new chapters: international SEO and optimization for mobile devices.
The optimization of websites oriented to an international audience in multiple countries and different languages centers the content of Chapter 6. We will see how to focus content generation oriented toward international audiences, how to structure the different versions of a website, and how to take into account the peculiarities of other local search engines like Yandex or Baidu. An exhaustive chapter in which all possible scenarios of an international website are addressed.

The growing use of tablets and mobiles is increasingly affecting the way more and more users search and access Web content. We will see how websites have to be prepared so that they position correctly for these mobile and geolocated searches.

Once these two scenarios have been analyzed, we focus on popularity generation by identifying those contents that respond to user needs and that can generate “resonance,” that is, multiple echoes in the form of social mentions: retweets, likes, +1 and, ultimately, traditional links from other Web content. The Google update called Penguin has notably increased the control exerted by the search engine over the legitimacy of incoming links, penalizing the positioning of those websites suspected of having manipulated their popularity by artificially increasing their links and orienting their anchor text toward positioning goals. This update has also opened the door to the possibility of being the target of a negative SEO attack, so we see how to detect these situations and defend against them.

The book concludes with the evaluation of results, including the tools and procedures we use to measure the degree of improvement that a website in the process of optimization experiences and how to apply Web analytics to continue identifying new objectives and new opportunities for improvement.

The book includes an extensive bibliography and also online references of verified value, as well as a useful alphabetical index that will allow the reader to find the pages in which the term that interests them is discussed.

Who is this book for?

Despite being written in a simple and educational style, this book assumes that the reader is already familiar with the most common concepts used in search engine positioning. Otherwise, we recommend reading Positioning in Search Engines Ed. 2012, by Anaya Multimedia or some other basic book on search engine positioning first. The book you hold in your hands is mainly directed to the following professional profiles:

• SEO Consultants.
• SEO Agencies.
• Website analysts and designers.
• In-house SEO professionals.
• Online marketing managers.
• SEO trainers.
• Advanced students of SEO training programs.
• Community managers.
• Web programmers.
• Webmasters.

And, in general, to anyone who has been interested in search engine positioning for some time and wishes to go deeper into the more technical aspects of search engine marketing from a professional perspective.

Dedication and Acknowledgments

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my daughter Aurora.

Congratulations on everything you have already achieved.

Thanks for all we have shared.

Now you start your own path, but I will always be there to support you.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Gianluca Fiorelli, one of the most renowned international SEO experts, for his kind acceptance to foreword this book. It is an honor for me to have his endorsement. A million thanks to Eugenio Tuya and Natalia Acosta, from Anaya Multimedia, for their permanent and enthusiastic support for my editorial projects.

Finally, my thanks to the phenomenal human team of my consultancy Human Level Communications and to so many, many clients who for almost 15 years have entrusted us with their online projects and who have made me grow professionally. Thank you!