What is SEO useful for? Google answers

SEO admin 19 February 2020 Reading time : 3 minutes

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Beginners all over the Web world generally look at the SEO like a series of off-limits strategies with which try and deceive search engines, probably confusing old practices or black hat SEO techniques as regular activity. Actually, the activity of optimization of site visibility on search engines is crucial, and is Google itself to remind us of that and explain it in a very simple way.

Google explains what SEO is

The new episode of the series Search for beginners on YouTube,with its focus on the basics of the world of Web and Research (especially for eCommerce owners), exactly starts from two questions: what is the SEO and what is it for? The video wants to precisely define the activities of Search Engine Optimization and to explain how to use such strategies in order to bring new customers to the site, with indication of methods and best practices so to increase the visibility and chance to find the site in the search system.

“Your website needs to attract new potential customers,” starts the voice of the Google’s video, adding that “appearing in search results” is one way to achieve this goal. The methods to bring up the site “when people look for what you sell, such as children’s clothes, are called SEO, or optimization for search engines”.

SEO is like a shop window display

And here comes the first explanation: according to Google, “SEO is like a shop window display”, which we have to “make interesting and captivating”, consists in “using the right words and providing relevant information to potential customers on your websites” and can be done in various ways.

First step involves our website itself: we must ensure that it “contains useful information such as inventory, selection, prices, location and opening hours”. The video also lists the best practices to follow so to achieve potentially attractive sites for both users and search engines, like:

Creating short and meaningful titles for pages.
Using headings communicating the page’s topic.
Including a detailed “About Us” section, entering our contact details, a description of the activity, possibly the Countries of activity and, if relevant, the location and opening hours of the shops.

The work of image optimization

Moreover, if the website includes and contains images and videos, it is necessary to “describe them with alt text tags and other attributes”, useful to make Google better understand the content and to also give a chance of comprehension to users with disabilities, as we were saying in recent days talking about the best practices for Google Images.

In the case of eCommerce, the use of images is even more important given the fact that it allows you to illustrate what the site actually sells and to “describe items by using keywords such as brands, colors and descriptions”. The SEO images optimization work also covers the accuracy of images, the writing of descriptions and the relevance of page titles.

Verificare la presenza del sito su Google

Obviously, it is also important to “be aware of the actual presence of the site in the search results for business related queries and when people look for the products you offer, using techniques to check if the site appears on Google” shown in a previous episode.

Avoid tactics of black hat SEO

Toward the end, there is an obvious hint to unrecommended tactics: “we talked about positive methods to increase the visibility of your site, but there also are not so positive methods”, says Google. Among these black strategies “there are things like adding invisible text to induce people to display content”, but also “other subtle techniques designed to trick the indexing algorithms“, which “must be avoided”.

The video highlights how Google has “many ways to detect techniques that intend to manipulate search rankings“, which are a guarantee to “ensure that search results are relevant and accurate for users”. In practical terms, then, “most of these black hat techniques, by themselves, do not work and, in the long run, even cause a great waste of time and money“.

Google tools to perform SEO

Last thing they remind us of from Mountain View is that “Google provides tools to help you manage SEO”, such as the Search Console, the free tool that helps you manage your site and monitor its performance, which “even sends you an email if there is a problem, so that you can focus on business only”.