Optimize your site for search engines

S.E.O. is an English acronym, an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization, or `optimization for search engines`. It is a set of practices and strategies aimed at increasing the visibility of a website by improving its position in the search engine rankings, in non-paid results, which are defined as `organic`. These practices are multiple and concern different aspects of a site, ranging from the correct setting of the site structure to the calibration of the textual contents, from the monitoring of incoming links (i.e. which from other sites point to your site) to the management of incoming links. exit (which point from your site to others).

The contents of your pages are actually the most important part of this activity: advanced search engines, such as Google, are able to read the textual contents that appear in the HTML, `understanding their meaning` and assigning a quality and relevance score compared to the search words. It is therefore of great importance to know how to create quality content that is unique (not copied from other sites: Google notices when content is not original and drastically penalizes it in its results!), which includes the keywords with which you want to be found , but in such a way as not to be unnatural for the visitor (modern search engines use semantic text analysis systems that include synonymy and correlation between terms).

Links are the `roads` that the web world uses to move from one site to another. A site with many links pointing to it is like a busy intersection, and therefore very important. And the more important the site that generates the link is and similar to ours in content, the faster the road that leads to us will be. It is therefore easy to understand how useful it is to try to obtain a good number of links from sites that are as pertinent and relevant as possible.

All pages of websites are made up of HTML source code which is read and interpreted by browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc.) to present the site as we see it.
An important part of SEO concerns the optimization of the parts `invisible` to users, but which are still read and taken into consideration by search engines, in particular the so-called `meta-tags`, i.e. that part of the HTML that is not displayed in the front end of the site, but which are found in its structure and allow search engines to classify its content.
They are, essentially, the means of communication between the site and the search engine and it is therefore necessary that they are compiled following precise rules, so that the content can be indexed on the chosen keywords.

Meta Title
The Title tag – which can be visible at the top of the browser when we open a web page – is used to specify the main subject of a particular page.
It must make it clear to both users and robots what the page is about, so it must include the keywords we are targeting (the ones we think users will type to find us).
The recommended length is 55-60 characters and it is advisable to start with your main keywords.
It is also advisable to provide different `titles` for each page of the site, in order to optimize each page for a single specific topic.

Meta Description
The Description Tag does not directly affect search engine positioning but is extremely important for obtaining `click through rate` (the ratio between the number of views and the number of clicks) from search engine results pages.
We can consider it a `subtitle` which succinctly but effectively summarizes the page: what it contains, what it is for, why it is worth reading. It will have to attract the user's attention, in such a way as to transform him - with his click - into a visitor to your site.
Typically, search engines display the `description` in search results under the title tag.
Here too, the number of characters is important: the length visible on the main search engines is 160 characters, which is reduced to 130 for mobile search results.

Meta Keywords
The `keywords` tag includes not only single terms but also more or less complex text strings that correspond to the search criteria that users type when they start a search.
Recently, however, the abuse that has been made of this tag has meant that Google has gradually stopped using it to index content.
Using the Meta Tag Keywords correctly can still be useful because it offers the possibility of defining a set of keywords for a potential search. To do this effectively, the choice of keywords must be considered: yes to relevant keywords, no to excessive and redundant use of keywords.

Meta Robot and its attributes
The Robot Tag is a category of HTML tags placed in the “head” section of your web page that tells search engines whether and how they should crawl the pages of a website.
There are four values ​​that can be attributed to the tag and they are:

• “index”, which tells the robots to index the page;
• “noindex”, which tells robots not to index the page;
• “follow,” which tells robots to crawl links on the page;
• “nofollow,” which tells robots not to crawl links on the page

It is therefore possible to `hide` some specific pages from search engines using these settings.