Google, the internet’s most used online search engine has a very important responsibility, show the user the most relevant content in every search they make.

It is estimated that 3.5 billion Google searches are made everyday all around the world.

You may wonder, what criteria does Google bases the hierarchy of the results of a search? The answer is simple, each website must follow certain established guidelines to be listed. This is, in few words, the Search Engine Optimization, SEO.

There are two ways to position your website in the search engine’s results: On-page SEO & Off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is about the content of your website and how it is structured. It must be updated constantly to get Google’s attention. A very common technique is the implementation of “blogs”. A new blog entry every week is a periodical update in the website’s content that can boost your optimization. Also, the code of your website and its capability to display it in desktop, laptops and mobile devices are some of the things that Google is looking for.

The following, are the most important things to consider so your website can position itself in an organic fashion:

• Responsive Design: Since 2015, Google started to penalize websites that were not mobile compatible, dropping them from the first places of any given search.
• Great User Experience: Make your visitor want to come back to your site through fast loading times and top quality content.
• Create descriptive and flashy titles: Short headlines that perfectly describe a website’s content in a few keywords are of great aid.

On the other hand, there is Off-page SEO. This is about you content’s popularity and relevance. If your visitors share your website through social media o if you start to receive a massive amount of daily visits because the content went viral take for granted that Google will position you in the first results of any search relevant to your site and the topics you talk about.

There are several ways to obtain a spot at the top of the search results without having to modify the structure of your website. The first one is PR and the second one is to have appealing, interesting and exciting content.

• Convince popular websites to share your content and to link it directly to your website.
• Share your content on social networks. A Fan Page and a Twitter profile are an excellent option to obtain visits from people that might be interested in your business. But, there’s a catch… To obtain the very top spot at Google you must include Google+ in your social media strategy, thus it is important to open a business account in the platform.

As you can see, the steps you need to take to optimize your website can be cumbersome. The next question is: Does your competition have their website optimized? That's where SEO ends and Search Engine Marketing, better known as SEM starts. A completely new battlefield where creativity and knowing your target are the two of the most powerful weapons to really place your business in the first place of Google’s Search Results ... but that's a topic for another time.

To learn more about SEO and how we can improve the organic positioning of your website go here