SEO and Web Positioning? SEO + Linux

SEO, acronym in English that mean positioning of a website in web search engines. It is also called SEOHowever, this term is not exactly correct, since this term covers more than just search engines, when in reality SEO is related only to web positioning in search engines.

Nowadays who controls or commands regarding SEO and SEO is Google, appearing first in Google is very important, things like AlexaRank and PageRank are treated on a regular basis among webmasters and web developers, so much so that there are companies that are dedicated to the study of SEO, they have even developed a whole business model related to this (example, EstudioSeo.com, among others).

Is it important to appear in Google search results?

DesdeLinux (the blog specifically) is currently receiving more than 40.000 visits every day, every 24 hours between 30.000 and 41.000 page views of our blog, do you know where most of the visitors come from? For example, many visits come from Twitter and Facebook since we have thousands of followers there, but it is precisely from Google that many more people visit us:

As you can see in the image, on February 26 only from the Google search engine we had more than 23.000 accesses, that is, more than 23.000 people accessed the site that specific day ONLY from Google, not counting those who open the site directly in the browser, not counting those accessed from Twitter or Facebook, RSS, etc.

More than 23.000 visits in people who came only from Google, I already have your attention on how important SEO is right? : )

In a simple way, how do I improve my SEO?

To achieve something like this you must have very good SEO, this basically translates into:

1. Have a good PageRank
2. Quality articles and above all, originality
3. A good AlexaRank is also useful
4. Know how to give the proper format to the text of the articles

Explaining this more in detail. He PageRank It is that ranking that Google gives to sites, it is a value between 0 and 10, with 0 being the lowest (and worst) and 10 being the highest (and best). Very few sites have a PageRank of 10, as this means that that site has reached the peak of popularity and is a very relevant, useful, interesting and important site for the network. The higher the PageRank your site has, the more useful it is, right? Well, based on this, Google in its search results offers pages/posts from sites with high PageRank in the first results. DesdeLinux It has a PageRank of 5, not inconsiderable if we take into account that we have been online for just over 2 years 😀

"Content is king." Phrase that we can read on many internet sites, basically it means that «quality prevails over quantity«. It is extremely important that what you post on your site is original, useful and very interesting. A site that has 100 unprofessional articles, nothing serious, with inconsistencies or serious writing errors, design errors etc ... it does not matter that it has 100 articles, because compared to another site that only has 10 articles, but those 10 are excellent contributions and it has almost no errors, this second site will have a more privileged site before the eyes of Google. I already told you a little about copy / paste and originality in a previous article.

If I told you about PageRank before, this is the time to talk about AlexaRank. The AlexaRank is another Google ranking but more unique or personal. DesdeLinux It has an AlexaRank of 29.xxx, that is, twenty-nine thousand and something more. This means that there are just over 28.000 sites that are currently 'better' (or more popular) than DesdeLinux. This is what refers to the global AlexaRank, since there is also one for each country. For example DesdeLinux It is the 2500th most popular/important site in Spain, 1400th in Argentina, etc. (we still need to improve in other countries, improve our SEO in Uruguay, Panama and other countries in the region). Basically, the lower your site's AlexaRank, the fewer sites that are more popular than yours. And, for Google, if a site is extremely popular, it is because it has something of interest to many, right? Well, let's include articles in the search results
from that site.

It is useless to write many interesting articles, if they do not have the proper format. Know what Formatting the text is very important. For example, be clear that the H1 is used for titles, almost always for the most important title of the page, the name of the site or logo. That H2, H3 and the following are also used for titles. For example in DesdeLinux We use H1 for the title of the site if I remember correctly (because with the change-change of theme I'm already lost), H2 for the titles of the posts and H3 for other less relevant ones. The use of bold is also important, because in addition to helping the (human) reader read the paragraphs and quickly understand what the thing is about, bots (robots) rely heavily on bold to classify the content, type of site, etc. We must make life easier for the human reader, but also for web bots (Google and others), since they are the ones who classify our content and then show it to the reader in their
search results.

What things negatively affect my SEO?

As I said before, having messy texts is not a very positive thing. In addition to this, if our site is a link farm, that is, if we have hundreds and thousands of links on our site to other sites, this affects our SEO.

Programming and design is very important too. If you use iframes or frames, flash, similar things that bots cannot read (for them it is a large blank space), this affects your SEO, as they prevent bots from being able to correctly analyze / classify the content of your site.

The loading time of the site must still be taken into account, because Google will not offer among the first results to sites that take several minutes to open, remember that for Google speed is the most important (that is why they have always kept the search engine with a simple design), if your site due to excess plugins, non-optimized code or because your hosting sucks has an excessive load time, Google will not give you its blessing 🙂

Another important detail is the dead links. For example, in an article 8 months ago we put a link to a site or a download link for X file, today that link no longer works, either because the site no longer exists or because the file has been removed from the FTP server. , that is a dead link, and this negatively influences our SEO.

How to check existing errors on my site?

Elav already told you a little about this in the article SEO tools on Linux, where he mentioned us to KLinkStatus:

This application helps us to check dead links, broken links, it is a Qt application and as you can see, the GUI is quite simple, intuitive.

To install it look for the package called klinkstatus in your distro repository.

If you want something much more powerful we have available to LinkAssistant:

As you can see, here we do have many more options. It allows us to know the date of registration of the domain, dead links, SEO analysis, etc.

To install it you can download it for Linux, visit their website for more information.

These are just some of the available ones. In fact, to check a site for dead links, just wget and the appropriate parameters are enough:

wget --spider -o ~/wget.log -e robots=off -w 1 -r -p http://www.web.com

Then using grep we filter the log:

cat ~/wget.log | grep 404

And we will get the dead links on our screen.

The end!

SEO is something important without a doubt, however it cannot be a reason to drive us crazy. No matter how many tricks or tips we use trying to improve the SEO of our site, the most important thing is the content, how good is what is published on our site, how original, how useful and interesting it is. This is the most important thing without a doubt.

I hope this has been of interest to you, I know that many will appreciate this information 🙂