Introduction

No SEO is as good as all of them put together

When writing the prologue to this new book on SEO, our dear friend Manu Barrios could not have chosen a better quote than this one from the great Alfredo di Stefano: “no player is as good as all of them put together”. If teamwork is important in soccer, in the increasingly complex world of SEO it is not only important, it has become essential. There are so many overlapping and converging disciplines, so many aspects to take into account to achieve maximum visibility of a website in search engines, that it is impossible for a single person to cover them all. If we really want to go deeper, it is necessary to specialize in order to deepen our knowledge of a more specific area and achieve excellence in it.

The authors of the book you are now holding in your hands have more than forty years of professional dedication to SEO, and have participated in numerous SEO projects of all kinds over the last two decades. To this vast experience, they also add a deep didactic vocation, due to their work as teachers or lecturers in courses, masters and events of all kinds where they have had the opportunity to share their knowledge and discover the most effective way to transmit it.

With this objective in mind, we propose to the reader to delve into some areas of technical SEO that have become increasingly important in recent years: aspects related to strategy, information architecture, complex problems in crawling and indexing, improvement in download speed (WPO), international SEO or results monitoring. Regardless of the level of prior knowledge in SEO, we have made an effort to always be didactic and present realistic examples of different scenarios, so that it is easy to transfer this knowledge and apply it to other projects.

What you will find in this book

The book begins with three introductory chapters where we will delve into the keyword research process. We will use three different sources of information: the definition of the target and its purchase decision process(customer journey).); the analysis of the results pages themselves as first-hand information on what type of content Google identifies as the best response to a search and why; and finally, benchmarking as a way to discover content gaps to be filled or opportunities to improve our information architecture.

We will also delve into the concept that an SEO project requires more than checklists and decision trees. It is a strategy that must be aligned with the company’s objective and vision, which requires an internal and external analysis that allows us to identify the most effective SEO levers and to act them in the right order to achieve our visibility goals.

Although we had to shoehorn it in, when talking about strategy we did not want to leave aside the likely upcoming launch of Google SGE in Europe, with all that this may imply for the evolution of the search engine as a source of traffic and the impact that generative artificial intelligence will end up having on how we create content and manage information.

Finally, we will review the more technical aspects of the design and modification of the information architecture of a website, since it is one of the key aspects in the success of a project.

Chapters 4 through 8 delve into the more technical aspects of SEO to a level never addressed in previous literature. The more technical profiles will enjoy discovering new methodologies for the analysis and optimization of any website, both in aspects related to crawling and indexing, as well as those that impact its download speed and performance.

The different ways of controlling crawling and indexing on websites have been taken into account, as well as the new development technologies, the problems they can generate and how to solve them. Concepts such as crawl-budget and render-budget are also discussed, and advice is given on how to make the most efficient use of the resources that Google dedicates to crawling and indexing our site.

Chapter 5 is devoted entirely to structured data. It explains what this data model consists of, how to configure it correctly, what are the most common mistakes and how to avoid them when implementing it.

Chapter 6 serves as a knowledge base to master the concepts that the reader will need to handle to assimilate the optimization techniques explained in chapters 7 and 8, where all the aspects that can improve download speed, as well as the multiple interactions that must be taken into account when optimizing each of the Core Web Vitals indicators, including the most recent ones (FID and INP), are discussed in depth.

Chapter 7 focuses on the identification of critical and non-critical CSS to establish different download priorities and also addresses the optimization of images, videos and animations.

Chapter 8 closes this more technical block of the book by focusing on database query optimization techniques, server-side code optimization, leveraging caches and AMP page optimization.

Chapter 9 presents what’s new in international SEO, after Google removed the International Targeting functionality and has increased its level of stringency when adding new pages to its index. We will study in which scenarios it is interesting or not to deploy language or language and country specific versions, and how to make the best use of the crawl quota in order to avoid the most frequent errors while maintaining visibility for the most popular searches.

Chapter 10, finally, focuses on SEO reporting and explains how to select key performance indicators and present them in a user-friendly way with Google Looker Studio. We provide recommendations for analyzing, interpreting and presenting information more effectively in order to make the right decisions, always justified by the data.

The book concludes with a practical alphabetical index that will be very useful for locating where each of the most important concepts appear.

To whom it is addressed

This book is an excellent option for those who wish to deepen or update their knowledge on the more technical aspects of organic positioning.

Always with the aim of doing it in a simple and accessible way, we assume that the reader is already familiar with the basics of SEO, and we refer you to other titles in this same Social Media collection if you want an introductory text on the discipline, such as SEO – The essential keyspublished by Aleyda Solís in 2016, or SEO Avanzadopublished by Fernando Maciá in 2020, which will be extremely useful for those who are just starting to learn it.

These are the profiles we have had in mind when writing the following pages:

• Technical SEO consultants.
• SEO agencies.
• Website analysts, managers and designers.
• In-house SEO professionals.
• Digital marketing department managers.
• SEO trainers.
• Web Programmers.
• Webmasters.

We are confident that all of them will find new ideas and concepts, valuable contributions, useful tools and applicable recommendations to improve their websites.

As with our previous books, our main goal is to contribute our grain of sand to this generous SEO community in Spanish, and to share at least part of what we have had the opportunity to learn over the years. We hope and wish that it will be useful and contribute to improve the visibility and performance of numerous online projects.