Focusing on these three pillars of SEO will increase opportunities for your content and will attract more organic traffic over time. The four pillars of SEO include technical SEO, content, on-site optimization and external SEO. The first pillar is technical SEO. Why? For search engines to show your web pages in search results, they first have to find, crawl and index them.
A robot, a txt file, tells search engines where not to go. Most of the time, you want to allow search engines to crawl all your web content. Sometimes, you'll use robots (txt files) to keep crawlers away from sections of your website that may have duplicated, reduced, or private content that you don't want to appear in search results. For now, all you need to know is that the robot's txt file tells the spiders: “No, don't go there.
Do not index these web pages. There are also metadirectives in the form of code snippets found in the header of every web page. These policies are not visible to website visitors. Instead, they provide search engines (bots) with page-by-page instructions on how to index the content of a page.
We include security, responsiveness (compatible with mobile devices) and speed in technical SEO. These three key technical factors affect usability. Technical SEO can seem overwhelming at first. However, if you break it down into these components and understand the reason for each one, it becomes digestible.
And it gets much easier to carry out the tactics that will improve technical SEO. With technical SEO implemented, search engines can find and index our web pages. What they find on each page is the content. Content has been the backbone of SEO since its inception.
Includes text, images, video, tables, PDFs and more. Search engines extract the meaning of each web page based on the content of the page. Now that you know the role that content plays in SEO, let's see how you can improve other elements of your website to attract more search engines and visitors. The H1 — H6 tags standardize the format of the headings and divide the content into parts that are easy to read.
Search engines recognize these tags as the heading of a page or a section of content. Structured data are pieces of code that provide search engines with accurate information about the content of a web page. It also allows them to easily place web pages in the right context in search results. Have you ever wondered how Google quickly shows recipes, movie schedules, or concert information directly in search results? Structured data a, k, a.
Optimizing your website to make it pleasant for both humans and robots is a complex task. The best way to approach it is to divide your efforts into the 4 pillars of SEO: technical SEO, on-page SEO, content and off-page SEO. Before delving into the details that define the 4 pillars of SEO, let's first establish how search engines work. This will make the importance and prestige of each element more evident and will allow us to put them in the right context.
In order to offer relevant content that matches the user's query, search engines use bots (also called spiders, crawlers and robots). Your task is to visit (crawl) all the pages that you can find on the Internet. Once they find a page, bots check its content (including text, images, video, audio, etc.). Information is added to an index.
This database is similar to the index of a library where all the headlines are listed, along with information about the author, content, etc. However, Google's index is a bit more complex. First, a user enters a query into the search engine. Then, the search algorithm (the program that connects the user's end point and the index database) tries to identify the pages that best fit their intention.
The most relevant results with better quality content are delivered as links on search engine results pages (SERPs). However, modern search engines don't just assess the quality and relevance of content. They also take into account the technical aspects of the website. This is because not only do they want to provide answers, but they also want to offer a great user experience.
Overall, by covering the 4 pillars of SEO, you make sure to consider three important factors. First, keep in mind that search robots can discover and understand your pages. In addition, they consider you competent enough in the subject matter to show your content to the user. Last but not least, don't forget that when a user comes to your website, they find exactly what they need.
That said, let's look at each of the 4 pillars of SEO: technical SEO, on-page SEO, content, and off-page SEO. Search engines care about the UX because they want users to be happy with the results they see in the SERPs. Make sure that your website meets the basic technical requirements and the 4 pillars of SEO in general. Otherwise, the algorithm may bypass your pages in favor of others that offer a better user experience.
Modern CMS systems, such as WordPress, automatically handle many of the issues related to technical SEO and have plugins that help you address the rest. However, if your website is large and has hundreds or thousands of pages, it sure needs additional optimization. These can be service pages, pages with little or low quality content, duplicates, private pages, etc. In addition, large websites with more than 10,000 pages may reach the limits of their crawl budget and should pay special attention to it.
Nowadays, most content is consumed on mobile devices, so search engines strive to provide users with pages that look good on screens of all shapes and sizes. Onpage SEO is the second of the 4 pillars of SEO. While technical SEO focuses primarily on the design and backend of your website, on-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) deals with the content of individual pages. Modern algorithms are much better at processing natural language than they used to be.
Therefore, it's easier for them to establish connections between the content of your page and the user's intent. That's the idea of on-page SEO. The page must have a relevant title of up to 70 characters. Also, be sure to optimize it with the main keywords you're targeting.
If your title doesn't match the content of the page, the algorithm can generate a different one to display in the SERPs. If you don't provide a description yourself, the search engine will generate an automatic description. These are usually the first 155 characters of the page content. Breaking down the content of the page with H tags provides better structure and readability.
This makes it easier to understand not only for bots, but also for your visitors. Keywords allow you to better match your content with the user's query and intention. Alternative text is used to describe the content of images. In addition, it's no secret that links and anchor text help robots to “read pages better”.
This way, they understand what your content is about and discover new pages on your website. This minimizes the risk of bots misunderstanding the purpose of the page and the content of the page. Regardless of how well you optimize your pages and the technical aspects of your website, high-quality content is still the most essential part of your efforts. After all, the purpose of search engines is to provide users with the content they're looking for.
Over the years, Google's content criteria have evolved along with its algorithm. Nowadays, it can be safely said that if your page is of poor quality, sooner or later it will leave the SERPs. Google's page quality criteria documentation focuses mainly on three main aspects of high-quality content: experience, authority and reliability (EAT). In addition, the website where the content is published must provide transparent information about who is behind it (whether a person or a company) and have a positive online reputation.
The content must be relevant to the user's query. This means that when you optimize certain keywords, you must provide information that matches them and that is useful for users who search for them. As mentioned, the content must also be aligned with the title, otherwise it will be considered misleading. Therefore, when creating your content, you should explore the related subtopics.
This is so that you can include all the information that can help the user to better understand the topic. By mentioning related topics and subtopics, you also make it easier for search engines to understand what the content is about. Most of the time, the freshness of the content is related to its accuracy and credibility. This means that, even if you publish timeless content, from time to time you should review and update it with more recent information.
Pages that present diverse content, such as text, graphics, images, tables, videos, audio, etc. They are more attractive to users and, as a result, contribute to better SEO. However, make sure you don't overload the page. This may affect your loading speed.
All the multimedia content you add should be there because it adds value and can be useful to the visitor. We've already mentioned compatibility with mobile devices when we talk about technical SEO. However, optimizing page designs and making your content more mobile friendly aren't quite the same thing. In general, to be visually pleasing and easy to read on a small screen, your content should have enough white space, short sentences and paragraphs, lots of subtitles and bullet points, and a sufficiently simple vocabulary.
Last but not least, among the 4 pillars of SEO, is off-page SEO. Off-page SEO, or external SEO, refers to the external factors that affect your presence in the SERPs, that is,. Anything that isn't on your own website, but that's important to your search engine reputation. Why? They mean that a third party considers your content to be so valuable that they want their readers to see it.
The 4 pillars of SEO define a framework that allows companies to approach search engine optimization strategically and make the most of it. When optimizing your content, keep in mind that the ultimate goal of SEO is to ensure that search engines understand what your pages are about and can assess their quality. This way, they'll show them to the right type of users who are more likely to enjoy your content. As the name suggests, on-page SEO involves optimizing all of the content on your website.
Off-page SEO involves anything you do outside of your website to optimize your search presence. When it comes to off-page SEO, it's important to tell search engines what others think of your website, which is where backlinks come in. Backlinks are links to your website that are hosted on other websites. Sometimes, you can get backlinks without doing anything, but if you're a company with a smaller online presence, you'll often have to work hard to receive backlinks.
Technical SEO dictates how users and search robots move around your website. You should ensure that your website has a logical architecture and is easy to navigate for both users and web crawlers. Page speed is an important element of technical SEO, as it has a strong relationship with user experience. Nowadays, it has been discovered that if a user has to wait more than two seconds for a page to load, they are likely to abandon it.
If your business has a physical location, it's important to consider local SEO. Local SEO involves improving the visibility of your site in location-based search results. For example, let's say you own a bakery. When a customer from your area types “bakery near me” into Google, having good local SEO will ensure that your company appears at the top of their search results.
We believe that the four pillars of SEO are a framework that helps to anchor the elements of action under the umbrella of a holistic strategy. These pillars are just the tip of the SEO iceberg, but they capture some of the most fundamental elements of SEO. We've prepared a brief guide to the four pillars of tomorrow's SEO to help you improve your site's ranking on search engine results pages. .
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