In this article I will talk about search engines and how the use of SEO techniques influences to position a web page well. To do this, I will talk about several fundamental variables so that your page is in the highest positions of a search in a search engine such as Google, Bing, Baidu or Yandex. It is important to keep in mind that to get positioned in Google or any other search engine it is important that the algorithm can index your content and that content is relevant.
Search engines
One of the routines we now do when we wake up is to access the internet. In the world there are many search engines, however, the vast majority of people use a single search engine. The most popular search engine is Google, which has a reported market share of over 90% globally. We can find global information in statcounter that can be seen in Fig. 1. Statcounter is a website that analyzes traffic, and its data is provided by web pages that have integrated the Statcounter tracking code.
The other search engines are Bing (United States), Yahoo (United States), Baidu (Chinese), Yandex (Russian), duckduck (United States). Percentages vary from country to country. For example, in the United States today about 6% of people use Bing as their primary search engine. In addition, 4% of U.S. search engines use Yahoo. This means that it is worth investigating what search engine our clients or target visitors use since if you live in the United States, we must focus our work on that search engine having the website indexed.
In Russia, for example, Yandex leads the group with 50% market share as can be seen in Fig. 3. This value has increased following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In addition, the market leader in China is Baidu, which accounts for 65% of the market share there.
There are other privacy-oriented browsers, such as Duckduckgo and Startpage, but they have a market share of less than 1%. However, some people will only use these because of their views on personal data. So, it’s good to know they exist.
Finally, it is interesting to mention Ecosia. This search engine spends its profits planting trees for the benefit of the environment and the local economy. Today this search engine has helped plant more than 150 million trees.
The importance of limits
One of the principles of computer science is that there is always a limit. When you buy a computer it has x Gb of storage or memory. Right now you have a mobile phone with a data rate that has a limit of x Gb. Or your own website has a capacity limit the server and if you exceed it it becomes saturated or stops working.
SEO is also influenced by limits. If you make an article with few words, the search engine algorithm can mark your content as irrelevant. Similarly, if you write a lot of words it can also be counterproductive. Search engines use criteria that define ranges of values for most of them, therefore, it is always a good idea to create content considering those limits.
The limits are defined within the algorithm and examples of those limits are the following variables that you must always review:
- The length of the meta description. The meta description is a summary of an article that Google displays on the results page. Between 120 and 150 characters is usually appropriate.
- Title width. For SEO it is essential that the title of the article is not excessively long. Remember also that the slug, what we see in the URL, the best thing is that it is short.
- Use images that are optimized and with a description. If the image has a description, it may appear in Google Images and people reach your page through them.
- Unique key phrase. The límite here is one. Do not repeat the same key phrase. Adapt the content to create a new key phrase that allows your publication to reach more people.
- The key phrase must appear based on the length of the text. Again, if you use a key phrase it is because you understand that it is the most important thing. It is a good idea to appear in the text several times in relation to the size of the article.
Content is the most important thing for search engines
There is nothing more important to SEO than content. If we think that there may be more than 200 variables that intervene in the positioning of a page, the first, the variable with more weight is undoubtedly the content. It has to be original, relevant, interesting for those who read it, direct, and above all viral.
Trends on the internet vary every day. Depending on the website you have, it may be interesting to include an article about something that is now a global trend. In social networks such as Twitter, what is most repeated usually becomes a trend, although it is precisely the same one who creates that tendency when talking about a controversial issue. The more people interact with that topic, the more likely it is that more people will interact and go viral. The content therefore has to be oriented to be shared on social networks and if possible that it is a trend.
Search engine robots add content to an index. Depending on the strategies we have made, our article can be placed more or less above that index. But remember that there are factors that affect the positioning after publication and indexing, and the one that has the most weight is the engagement, the commitment to your content of other people who share it and interact with it in networks.
Summary
Search engines are one of the cornerstones of the internet. It allows us to get where we want in a few clicks. The relevance of an article is evaluated by search engines and the position in an index serves to attract visitors or customers to our website.
Therefore, if we are creating a web page our first task is to focus our goal on attracting the attention of the Google search engine because it is the largest, the best known, and has the largest number of users worldwide.
Computing is a limit, and we must beespecially careful to always use thresholds, ranges of values that allow our content to reach as many people as possible. Content engines use variables to measure many factors, and we must check that what we write is in the significant tolerance limits of search engines.
