Frequently Asked Questions or FAQs are a simple guide to helping you understand about Search Engine Optimization and it’s related subjects. Here at Spain SEO, we believe that the better informed you are, the more successful your business will be, because you will be making decisions based on good information.

Read on to find out the most frequently asked questions we get.

1. Why Doesn’t My Site Show Up in the Search Engines?

This is the most common FAQ we are asked.

There can be many reasons a web site doesn’t show up, or display well, in search engine results (For Google, MSN, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, or any of the other major search engines).

Any of the following can affect your web sites search engine positioning, and web traffic.

• You may not be using a website that is optimized for the search engines.

• Your site may not be readable by the search engine bots or crawlers.

• You may be missing information critical to properly index your webpage.

• Using certain scripts can prevent search engine spiders or bots from crawling your web site or reading its content.

• Your site may have been banned or penalized by the Search engines, for using Black Hat Techniques, knowingly or unknowingly.

• Your site has not been submitted properly and has not been indexed by the search engines.

Note – Repeated submissions to search engines will not help your website.
Never employ a service which automatically or manually submits your site to search engines more than once, this is unnecessary, and can be considered spam by some engines and major directories

2. What is SEO?
SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. Misleading, but it is not about optimizing search engines. It is about optimizing websites for search engines. The process uses specialized techniques to optimize web sites, to be Search engine friendly and increase your chances of being well placed in the search results.

Fundamentally, SEO is something that helps your site to rank better in the search engines. There are a various ways and methods that SEO is applied. Some of them are good, while others are considered as “Blackhat” techniques. Search engines don’t like Blackhat SEO and the effect of its usage can be disastrous for your website. It is for this reason that you need to be sure that you are using the right SEO techniques, otherwise you may find your website banned by Google.

Finally, without proper optimization, the chances of your website being highly placed in the Search engine results (SERPs) for the keywords important to your business, are extremely low.

3. Do I Really Need SEO?

Well, the answer is a resounding “Yes”

But, does SEO really help?  Again the answer is yes.

If you have a business that uses the Internet, or a website that promotes your products or services, then you need to make it visible to your prospective clients, otherwise it is money wasted. The sad fact is that, if you don’t use proper Search Engine Optimization on your website, then you are unlikely to appear near the top of any Search Engines results.

4. What is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO placement in search engine results (SERPs) means that the site naturally displays well in search results. This is achieved without paid inclusions, PPC advertising, or by any black hat SEO techniques.

A site with good organic placement is likely to be more stable in its long term search engine positions. It will also be less likely to change its position when Google, MSN and Yahoo etc apply new algorithms.

5. What is Black Hat SEO?

Good Search Engine Optimization, follows guidelines and accepted standards. This means that no tricks are used. This is referred to as “White Hat SEO” and usually results in stronger positioning, that is much longer lasting, and can withstand frequent changes made to the search engine algorithms.

On the other hand, Black Hat Optimization is the use of techniques which are deemed illegal by the search engines. The optimization strategies that are used can sometimes give faster results, but more often than not, are short lived. Some Black Hat strategies can result in the website being penalized, or even permanently banned by some major search engines and directories.

6. What are the Search Engines and How Do they Work?

Search engines as the way to find information on the web appeared in the middle of 90’s. The websites were crawled and then indexed in a database, showing the keywords associated with their content. Then when a Internet user queried the search engine, it would search its database and find which indexed pages, corresponded to that query.

The more keywords related to the search query a website had, the higher it was shown in the results that search.

Fundamentally, each search engine consists of 3 parts:

• The Crawler (or the spider). This is a simple robot that downloads pages of a website and crawls them for links. Then, it crawls (spiders) the links too. It will periodically visit the websites to record any changes in their content and then modify their rankings accordingly. The rate of crawling depends on the quality of the website and the frequency of its content updates. A high popularity news site could be crawled up to several times a day.

• The Indexer. This module stores all the pages crawled by the spider in a large database called the index. The index is updated every time the crawler finds a new page or re-crawls the ones already in the index. Since the index is very large, it often takes time to apply the changes into the database. So a website could have been crawled, but may not be indexed. Once the website with all its content is added to the index, the third part of the search engine begins to work.

• The Ranker (or search engine software). This is used when the user searches for something. The Ranker looks through the millions of indexed pages and provides the relevant results to the user, once it has sorted the pages by their relevance to the search query.

7. What are SERPs?
SERP means “Search Engine Result Page”. If a user types a keyword query, he is then given a Search Engine Results Page. He can then click on one of the search results and visit that particulart website.

Obviously, the results shown in the first positions get many more visitors than the ones from the second or third pages of results. This is the whole purpose of SEO, to make a website move higher in SERPs.

8. What is a Keyword?

One or more words describing the theme of a website or page. In fact, we should distinguish keyWORDS and keyPHRASES, but in SEO practice they are all called keywords. For instance, the keywords for this page are SEO, FAQ, etc.

9. What are Short-Tail and Long-Tail keywords?

Short-tail keywords are broad words or phrases like “insurance”, “credit card”, “personal loan” and so on. They tend to get many more searches than Long tail, but these searches can be very untargeted.

Long-tail keywords, however, usually tend to be much more specific, e.g.  ”buy Maclaren XYZ baby stroller”, “seo in spain”, “luxury villas for sale in the Costa Brava” etc.

The more precise a keyword is, the less popular it is likely to be. This means that less people type in this exact query when they are searching on the Internet. However, since the query is so specific, it means that the user knows exactly what he wants. If he finds what he is looking for, on your website, he is likely to become a customer. Long-tail keyword queries are not so searched for, but the conversion rate is much higher than for short-tail ones.

10. What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is probably the most important part of Optimization, because if you get it wrong, everything else you do will not work. If done properly it will have a huge effect on the amount of web traffic that will visit your site.

This keyword research involves finding exactly what the public search for, in your particular market and what search phrases they use. It also makes sure that there are a good number of searches for these search phrases. Then, if you optimize your site with these phrases and you appear high up in the search results, you will get a decent amount of traffic to your website.

For example, you are selling “Spanish made Widgets”. The keyword research shows that nobody searches using this keyword phrase. Then there is little point in optimizing your website for something nobody is looking for.

However, if you change that to “Widgets made in Spain” and the research shows that there are 90 searches a day, then with almost 3,000 searches a month, optimization becomes very worthwhile.

11. How do Search Engines “Rank” Your Pages for Certain Keywords?

Imagine walking into a Bookstore and saying, ‘Travel.’ Their reaction would likely be a blank expression. Well actually, they are going to ask you questions to better understand what you actually want.

For Search Engine, however, this doesn’t apply. They don’t have the ability to ask questions to focus such a search, like a human being can. They also can’t rely on judgment and past experience to rank a web page, like humans can.

So, if that’s the case, how do crawler-based search engines go about determining relevancy etc? Bear in mind that they are confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through. Basically, they follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm. This algorithm, for the many search engines, is a closely-kept trade secret.

That apart, the majority of search engines usually follow a set of general rules, within their algorithms, that are known about by the SEO community.

One of these rules involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Take the Bookstore example above? First they need to find books to match your request for “Travel,” so it makes sense that they first look at books with “Travel” in the title.

Search engines operate the same way. Pages with the search terms appearing in the title tag, of the page, are often assumed to be more relevant to the topic than others.

Search engines also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. This is because they assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the start.

Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency, within reason, are often deemed more relevant.

12. What is Indexing?

In the example of Google, it is set up with a crawler-type software, named Googlebot. This is a robot indexing Web pages. Its principle aim is simple (but not its implementation!). When it reads a web page, it then adds it to its list of pages to visit. It also adds any pages linked to the current page it is visiting, for a future visit.

In addition to this huge index of pages, Google also wants the index to be the most up to date. So it needs to visit pages on a regular basis, especially regularly updated pages. Moreover the frequency of visit of Googlebot to a Web page depends on its Page Rank. The higher the Page Rank (i.e. the more popular the page is), the more Googlebot will visit and re-index it. Googlebot will also detect when a page has been removed and give an error known as a “404″.

13. What is Pagerank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents the importance of a page on the web. Google assumes that, when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. The importance of these votes is taken into account when PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google’s way of showing a page’s importance and is one of the factors that determine a page’s position in the search results. It isn’t the only factor for search position, but it is an important one.

14. What is On-Site Optimization?

Your web pages need to be accessible and readable by the search engine robots or crawlers. This is so that they may properly assess your content and place it in their index. If a search engine robot cannot decipher your site properly, web users will not be able to find you. Unfortunately, this is often the case for many small local businesses who are attempting to operate on the web and unaware of the optimization process.

On-site optimization allows your site to be fully crawled and indexed by search engines. It includes things such as, header titles, page coding and content, for proper optimization. This allows the search engines to better understand the topics of your pages and associate them with the search terms Internet Users are using to find you.

This is only the computer side of things. Don’t forget that your other visitors are human beings. They also need to understand what you are offering. So, to this end the website content must be well written and give clearly explained, worthwhile information to the reader.

The bottom line is that a well optimized site should present content that will rank well in search results. It will also deliver a message that converts the increased visitors into more customers.

15. What is Off-Site Optimization?

Off-site optimization pertains to everything that is done away from your website that goes towards optimizing your website.

It generally refers to building link popularity. Link popularity or Backlinking, is important and is like getting votes of varying strength. Search engines like Google use this link popularity to define how relevant your website is to your niche and to see which websites you are linked to within that niche. The more relevant and higher PageRank the website is, that links to your site, the more power your website will have within that niche.

There are two kinds of links you can have between websites. These are, one-way links and two-way reciprocal links. One-way links is where the other website is linking to your website only. Reciprocal or two-way links are when both websites are linked to each other. One-way links tend to carry more importance with the search engines.

In summary, the more relevant links you have coming back to your website, the higher you will appear in Google’s ranking process.

16. What are Backlinks or Inbound Links?

A Backlink or an Inbound Link (IBL) is when another site links to yours. It is like a vote of approval, from the website owner where the link is coming from. Backlinks play a major role in ranking a site in the search engines, specifically with Google and MSN.

Google puts a great deal of value on the quality of the linking website, anchor text, where the link is placed and if the site is in the same area of the market as yours. For example, a link on a content page, such as your home page, is valued much more by the search engines, than a link on a page solely dedicated to linking between other websites.

17. What is Anchor Text?

Below is an example of a link code you might place on high authority website, with the owners permission.

<a href="http://spainseo.net/faqs">SEO Spain FAQs<a>

The link on the high authority website would be look as follows:

SEO Spain FAQs

The anchor text, in this case is “SEO Spain FAQs” and this is the key parameter in a link building strategy. You should always make sure that the anchor text, of any links placed on other websites, contain one of the main keywords for the topic of the page it links back to.

For example, if your page is about dogs, do not use a link with an anchor text of “cats”. You will not be able to control every link that you place, but you need to ensure that as many as possible have relevant anchor texts.

You should also adopt the same structure for the internal links on your website, as this is also very important.

Finally, Anchor Text should be varied and you should not use the same anchor text for all your links. If you do this your overall link strength will be higher and you will rank for many more keyword phrases.

18. How Can I get My Website in the Top Ten Search Results?

To achieve top 10 search results your site should follow these general rules.

• Search engine friendly web design is a must (SEO).

• Remember that Flash web sites can’t be read by search engines.

• Java script navigation should be avoided or used as secondary navigation.

• Conduct extensive keyword research and then include it in your content.

• Build back links or inbound links, to your site, to help build Page Rank (PR) and improve search results.

• Relevance is so important. Strive to make your site relevant to the keywords you are targeting in the search engine indexes.

• Black hat should be avoided or treated with extreme caution. Never employ deceitful methods to fool search engines or visitors. Don’t risk losing all the hard work and money you have put in to your website design and optimization, just to get your site banned.

• Keep doing more of the “right things”. SEO is an ongoing process, it never stops. Remember, the search engine algorithms will always change. Techniques that may have worked before, may cease to produce the desired results. You need to enlist the help of a professional or at the very least, keep abreast of all the latest changes that will effect the ranking of your website.

For more information call Spain SEO on +34 647 044 889