What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or SEO – are names of the strategy and tactics designed to improve the positions of one or more pages of a website in the results of search engines.

SEO or search engine optimization is essential for any online strategy. If a website does not have prominent positions in the natural search results – in other words, if it does not have a good position for certain keywords – then we depend excessively on the payment strategy – SEM, that is, advertising on Google and other search engines -.

Search engine optimization is our specialty, particularly on Google, the market leader in search engines. We have more than a decade of successful experience in this discipline.

posicionamiento-seo

A good positioning in the search engines guarantees savings, because the SEM is expensive – and every day more so. In our experience, an investment of X in SEO, correctly carried out, means a saving of 2X, at least in advertising. In other words, all companies are interested in investing in SEO, but this investment is only effective if it is done well.

For this we must correctly define the SEO strategy, of search engine positioning, to ensure that the website appears in search engine search results – natural or organic positioning – for the keywords that interest us most.

Our SEO methodology is made up of the following phases:

  • SEO strategy design
  • SEO analysis
  • SEO optimization
  • Link building (link building)
  • SEO analytics
manual seo

What search engine positioning services do we offer you?

The search engine positioning services we offer include:

  • Positioning in national search engines. In other words, improve Google positions for the Spanish market.
  • Positioning in international search engines or international SEO. We work in numerous countries, in English, French or Portuguese.
  • Search engine optimization or local SEO. We are experts in managing local positioning.
  • Search engine optimization or image SEO.
  • Positioning in search engines such as YouTube or video SEO.
  • Search engine optimization or SEO for e-commerce and Amazon.
  • Positioning in news search engines.
  • Search engine optimization or reputational SEO. With the aim of improving the first page of results in Google for a brand or manager.

SEO tools

We have the best tools on the market, and also an unparalleled own tool, Digital 360.

Negative SEO and black SEO

We do not practice negative SEO, or black SEO practices – black hat SEO.

Over more than a decade we have achieved excellent results and we can prove it to you.

History of search engine optimization (SEO), its adaptation to search engines and its algorithmic updates

Positioning in search engines, as a professional activity, was born in the 90s, of the back of the first search engines.

The English term SEO -search engine optimization- has been used since, at least February 1997, when it was used by John Audette. Back then it was an innovative concept, still very directory-oriented.

google-posicionamiento-seo

But before that term was imposed universally, others were used in English, such as:

And of course, Search Engine Marketing or SEM, which is still used today, although in Spain it is normally used as a synonym for search engine advertising. In the USA this use predominates, although in its original definition it includes both advertising and search engine positioning.

Initially, since the first search engines ranked pages especially for the relevance of their content in relation to a keyword, search engine positioning focused on its internal dimension – onpage SEO.

Practices like the keyword stuffing today prohibited, were very effective practices to achieve results.

The first search engines were:

  • 1990: Archie, Archie, short for Archives – English files. It was created by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and Peter J. Deutsch in 1990, before the spread of the World Wide Web, while studying at McGill University in Montreal. This first search engine indexed file names, creating an open database that resulted in the search for files that matched the searched word. It continues to have accessible portals in Japan and Poland.
  • 1991: Veronica. In this year, the arrival of the Gopher protocol created by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota occurs, which led to the appearance of a new search engine, Veronica, which searches among the files hosted by Gopher.
  • 1992: The world wide web is spread, which we understand today as the network, and allows the first spider or tracking robot –web crawler- in English- to see the light in 1993- which records the entire web then exists processing the different pages Web. The Robot, dubbed the “Global Network Wanderer” – World Wide Web Wanderer – finished his job in 1995. It took him two years to track the entire Network. The index he produced was named Wandex. It was authored by Matthew Gray of MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • 1993: A new search engine, W3Catalog, was born at the University of Geneva. Aliweb, born in November of that same year. JumpStation, created a month later. This search engine already has the basic features of today’s search engines. In fact, despite the fact that, given its limited capacity, JumpStation processed only web page titles and their main titles to build its index; It did this using a robot to capture the information, offered selected results in keywords, and presented those results in lists of web addresses that matched the search word. In other words, Google was already found today. An index began on December 12, 1993. It was housed at the University of Stirling (Scotland, UK). Its author was Jonathon Fletcher. The project failed by dropping the University of Stirling to 1994 fines without having obtained funding even from the same university. By then, the search engine had already indexed more than 270,000 web pages.
  • 1994: Webcrawler, –Network Tracker in English- was born in 1994. With it the first full-text search engine was born, that is, it crawled and indexed all the words on a web page and not just the main ones. The Webcrawler page still exists. It no longer offers the original search engine, but rather a mix of results from today’s major search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing.  Lycos was another search engine born in 1994. The company grew until it was bought by Terra, a Telefónica subsidiary in the midst of the Internet bubble of 2000, for the not inconsiderable amount of 2 billion pesetas or $ 12.5 billion. Four years later, in 2004, it was sold – for a fraction of that amount. Shortly after the appearance of Webcrawer and Lycos, new search engines such as Magullan, Infoseek, Excite, Inktomi, Northern Light, AltaVista and Yahoo proliferated. By then its use was already becoming widespread in the United States.
  • 1998: launched by Microsoft in 1998, using Inktomi as a base. Six years later, Microsoft began the transition to its own search engine, which uses its own robot – msnbot -, re-launched in 2009 under the name of Bing.

In parallel with these milestones, the search engine positioning industry developed. In 1997 Danny Sullivan launched Search Engine Watch (SEW), a website dedicated to search engine news and positioning advice. Later, in 2007, he left SEW to found another search engine publication, Search Engine Land.

The first search engine conference, Search Engine Strategies (SES), took place in 1999, continuing until its closure in 2016.

And in 1998 Google was born. In its beginnings, a research project by Larry Page y Sergio Brin, two PhD students from Universidad de Stanford (EEUU). It occurred to Larry Page to investigate the mathematical characteristics of the world network –www or world-wide web. To do this, he wanted to analyze and understand the structure of the links between the different web pages. His tutor, Ferry Winograd, had encouraged him to choose that topic. Page launched into researching which web pages link to another page, thinking that the number and nature of those links was very valuable information – regarding the linked page. He was thinking about the role of academic dating, of great importance in the university world. That initial project was called “BackRub“.

The tracker began browsing the Internet in March 1996. It was based on Page’s own Stanford University page. To crystallize the data the tracker collected about the links to each page, the founders developed the PageRank algorithm. When analyzing the results of BackRub – which consisted of a list of links to a specific page, classified by importance – they thought that a search engine that took these criteria into account would produce better search results than the existing search engines at that time – which only analyzed factors internal to a web page, such as the number of times a keyword was repeated.

Thus was created the seed of the new search engine, called Rankdex. The initial search engine used the Stanford website, with the domain google.stanford.edu. They registered the Google domain on September 15, 1997. The firm Google, Inc. was born on September 4, 1998 in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California.

historia-posicionamiento-seo

Andy Bechtolsheim –Andreas von Bechtolsheim-, a German-American entrepreneur who had co-founded the company Sun Microsystems a few years ago, in 1982, provided the initial “seed” of Google capital. His $ 100,000 check, issued in August 1998, would be the best investment of his life.

Subsequently, in June 1999, two venture capital firms invested in the company: Sequioa Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who made a capital contribution of $ 25 million.

At first, the two founders Brin and Page were opposed to placing advertising on their search engine. They would soon radically change their minds. Years later, under pressure from investors to make a profit, Google copied the system invented by Overture – a firm subsequently bought by Yahoo – of contextual advertising, based on the searched keywords, currently in force under the name of Adwords. Yahoo sued them for it and Google had to shell out a considerable amount – albeit undisclosed – of money for Yahoo to drop the court proceedings.

The name “Google” is an alteration of the word “googol”, which in English means the number represented by 1 raised to 100. Enid Blyton had already used the word decades ago, in the ninth chapter of his work The Magic Faraway Tree , titled Google Bun. At the end of 1998, Google had already indexed 60 million pages.

The company was established in March 1999 in Palo Alto, in the Silicon Valley – Silicon Valley. After moving twice more because of its rapid growth, Google rented offices at its current Mountain View headquarters – 1600 Amphitheater Parkway. They are still there – they bought the building from their landlords in 2006 for $ 319 million. Their offices are called Googleplex – Google Complex.

The motto of Google has been from its beginnings “do not be evil” which means “don’t be bad”, as opposed to Microsoft, a giant that had a reputation for being unscrupulous. However, we have already seen that also from its inception the firm began to deviate from faultless conduct in some matters that affected its profitability.

Google first went public on August 19, 2004. The transaction was a great success and the nearly twenty million shares were up twenty percent on the same day. The starting price was $ 85 a share. Within hours they were worth more than a hundred dollars. Today they are worth twenty times more. The firm is part of the NASDAQ index of technological securities, and the S&P index, with the symbol for Herzegovina.

Google’s success in the search engine market, as we have already indicated, has been spectacular. Its simple interface (which resembles that of Altavista at the beginning), together with the quality of its search results, explain market rates of between 66% to 98% in all countries with western culture. That quality is based on its refined algorithm, which surpasses all others to date. We can talk about that Google at the time launched the second version of the search engines, now imitated by the main competitors of Google. Innovation consists in taking into account external factors, the environment of a web page –especially the number and quality of the links to it- and not only internal factors as others did until then.

Today the verb Google is incorporated into English. Since 2006 it has been included in the Oxford English dictionary, the equivalent of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language.

The Google brand is worth more than $ 160 billion today, according to Forbes magazine. Google billed more than $ 136 billion in 2018. And it has just over 103,000 employees. That is, each of them invoices more than a million dollars each – exactly 1,320,000 dollars. This places Google among the ten technology companies that generate the most revenue per employee.

These incredible figures can only be understood if we analyze another fundamental fact that has not received enough interest from the media, and which explains how Google can bill more than a million dollars per employee and earn more than four times the average of large companies with each of them: Google has many more computers than employees. In other words, it is an automatic process company fundamentally managed by robots – computers duly improved by the company’s engineers. It is curious to note also that Google does not clearly publish the number of computers it owns, but the estimates range between 300,000 and six million. In any case, we are talking about a huge number of computers – robots. They are, to a large extent, the strength of Google, and explain their success.

When Google consolidates, it causes a turn in the search engine positioning industry, and the birth of a new activity: the generation of links or linkbuilding in English (link to linkbuilding page).

In 2000, Google launched its bar (Google Toolbar) that can be used in the Internet Explorer browser, then predominant. Here professionals could see what the PageRank of each page was.

That same year, a group of computer experts in the field meets in a London pub to share information about search engine positioning. Pubcon is born, a conference that continues to live today.

In 2003, the changes introduced in the algorithm called Florida penalized the filling of keywords in the text and tags of a web page, complicating the lives of SEOs who must from then on adapt your positioning techniques to avoid these penalties.

In 2003, Google bought Blogger.com and launched AdSense, its intermediation platform between advertisers and website owners. Inadvertently, he promoted the creation of numerous poor-quality pages whose sole purpose was to capture revenue-generating traffic using Adsense.

That year Google.es was born, for the Spanish market, something also important for the practice of SEO in Spain

In 2004, Google and other search engines began tailoring search results to the location of the person you are looking for. Then custom SEO is born. In 2006 Google launched Google Maps. Local SEO is born (link to local SEO page).

Also that year Google and other search engines began to process user navigation data to personalize the results.

In 2005, Google created nofollow tags to combat spam.

SEO professionals begin to use these tags to “sculpt the Pagerank”, a technique called PageRank sculpting.

Google then released a series of important updates to its algorithm:

Jagger, who began to reduce the amount of link exchanges, and took away the importance and weight of anchor texts, anchor text in English, easily manipulated.

Big Daddy (named after Jeff Manson of RealGeeks), helped Google better understand the real value of links between different pages.

Google then bought YouTube, which would eventually become the second most used website in the world. The positioning of videos gains importance.

Also in 2006, Google launched Google Analytics, Google Webmasters Tools, today called the Google Search Console.

In 2007 came universal search, which mixes the results of the first page of Google. They are no longer just web pages, but also include news, videos, images or inserts from Google My Business (GMB), when these elements – which come from different “baskets”, with different algorithms – are sufficiently relevant. This represents a considerable change for positioning in Google, since from then on the possibility of optimizing images, videos, news and Google My Business (GMB) files on the first page opens. Specialized branches of SEO are born: image SEO, video SEO -especially YouTube-, news SEO focused on Google News and Local SEO for GMB files.

In 2008, the Vince update gave a boost to big brands, reinforcing the TrustRank element in the algorithm.

For its part, Caffeine improved indexing speed – as early as 2010, Google announced that speed was a positioning factor. We know that this positioning factor is increasingly important.

In 2009, Microsoft relaunched its search engine under the name Bing and partnered with Yahoo to show it in their searches.

Google Zoo: Panda & Penguin

The two “animal” updates to the algorithm had a major impact on the positioning industry.

In 2011, Google launched Panda, which reinforced the weight of a page’s content quality in the algorithm and weakened poor-quality pages and websites, such as so-called content farms, content farms. It was something that the positioning experts had been generating for years. In 2016, Panda is finally integrated into the algorithm.

When the websites were recovering from Panda, Google launched an algorithm to punish over-optimization, with the intention of eliminating spam practices. This is the Penguin.

The Penguin punishes link schemes, that is, websites created exclusively to generate optimized links, with hardly any quality content. In 2016, Penguin joined the algorithm.

These changes improve the results and diminish the importance of the SEO practice of generating hyperlinks, without real content. But they nevertheless have an unintended side effect. They provoke the birth of negative SEO (link to the optimized page), that is, when Google penalizes toxic links to a web page, it causes the development of a black SEO practice -blackhat SEO- which consists of generating links from the competition to the competition Toxic websites, often from Russia or China that penalize the page that receives them. This reinforces the importance of managing that Google does not take these links into account.

In May 2012, Google launched its Knowledge Graph, designed to understand the meaning and intention of searches.

In Google’s words:

“The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about – landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more – and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do. ”

In other words, Google “understands” when a user searches for something specific such as celebrities, events, places, and adapts its results to this intention.

In September 2013 Google launched Hummingbird, a new algorithm designed to respond to natural language searches, especially for searches from mobile devices.

Social networks

In 2010, Google recognized the growing importance of social media, and announced that it takes them into account as ranking “signs” in its results. On February 24, 2011, the update called Panda confirmed that this is the case. Social networks therefore have a double impact on Google’s results, as links and as signs of, among other things, the “freshness” of a page, a characteristic especially relevant for some searches, to which Google includes a component called QDF – “query deserves freshness ”in English, which can be translated in Spanish as“ the search deserves freshness ”. These are searches that are newsworthy or have many changes – a famous person, a sports result, etc.

influencia-redes-sociales-posicionamiento-seo

Several rigorous studies such as the Cognitive SEO study or the Searchmetrics report confirm that there is currently a positive correlation between social media presence and Google position.

This means, once again, a change in the search engine optimization sector, since SEO experts who want to be successful must take this into account

Redirection towards mobiles

Since 2005, experts have been wondering when it would be time to recognize the importance of mobiles. It happened in 2015, when searches by mobile device were already more important than from desktop computers in the United States.

It was then when Google updated its algorithm to recognize how friendly a website is for mobile phones.

In line with this, Google launches Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in 2016.

AMPs are designed to speed up the loading of web pages on mobiles.

Recently, in 2019, Google announced that the mobile version already has priority over the desktop version. In fact, it officially announces that new pages are automatically indexed with the mobile version, whenever available. It is what Google calls “Mobile First Indexing”, that is, mobile-focused indexing. A major change, to which positioning experts must adapt.

Artificial intelligence is coming

Gradually, Google has incorporated artificial intelligence into all its products, including the search engine.

Since 2015, the so-called Google RankBrain is gaining importance. Mainly to interpret new searches that Google had not processed before.

Subsequently, Rankbrain, user experience and browsing factors are incorporated into all searches. It is especially relevant to determine, after a time, how the first positions in the search results are adjusted. In other words, it especially concerns the fight between the first results, something that makes it important, because as we already know, the difference between being in first or fourth position is great.

And what does the future of SEO hold for us?

Clearly, voice searches, as well as visual searches, are gaining importance.

In summary, we have seen how positioning techniques must adapt to changes in search engines.

Since it was born as a profession, many doomsayers have predicted the death of SEO.

In reality, the algorithms of Google and other search engines have changed less than they want us to believe. Internal and external factors such as links are still very important. Furthermore, the changes have reinforced the importance of good SEO management, and have added complexity and nuances to it.

So don’t worry, SEO is not dead, on the contrary it is alive and kicking. But it is necessary that companies choose who they trust, because bad practices are counterproductive.

In addition, you can discover more information about SEO in the book Succeeding in Google 2020. It is a book that will tell you the key to success in everything related to Internet positioning. If you wonder what you have to do to be the first on Google, this practical manual will give you all the answers.

How can we help?

If you want more information or request a personalized quote, please contact us.

Contact