SEO Mythbusting 101

Key Takeaways

if you hear about SEO what comes to your mind oh well keywords getting the content right sometimes a good h1 title that's probably the first thing that comes to my mind but also a lot of meats and things I don't know about [Music] people say a lot of things out there about how to make your website it stand in the top result but I don't really know how to achieve that you know right fair enough that's a that's a really good question how to achieve that and I think that's a perfect introduction into what we're trying to do here we're trying to like bust these myths what can I help you with what are the questions that come to your mind okay so let's start with something simple what it's a search engine all right so a search engine is a platform of service or program whatever you want to call it that basically goes through the internet content and tries to catalog it it works a little bit like in the library right so you probably go to a library and ask the librarian where can I find a book on topic X right that's what you do and then normally it doesn't take you to basically go through all the books in the library you just ya get the right books and that's what search engines do for you we find the right content for your purpose all right but I went when he's heard of search engines I also heard this word called crawling is that a thing that's a thing so the way that we are doing this or search engines do this is by first going through the entire internet and we have links from one page to the other yeah so we are using that we start somewhere some URLs and then basically follow links from there on so we are basically crawling our way through the Internet one page by page more or less and then once we have these pages have found them have grabbed the content from the Internet we need to understand it we need to figure out what is this content about and what purpose does it serve so then that's the second stage which is indexing so then we figure out so this page is about ice cream this page is about ice cream in Miami this page is about marmalade and stuff like that and then the last step is if you type something in you don't type in I want this particular thing here you just go like I need ice cream ice cream online midian right yes you got it so we then basically look into our index and find the ones that are serving this purpose and then we try to figure out which is the one that serves these purposes perfectly or best and then we rank these higher than the others and show you the example the examples that we found from the index so how do you know which one is which results are more relevant to a given user that's a really good question we have over 200 signals to do so so we look at things like the title the Meta Description the actual content that you've got on your page images links all sorts of things well right it's a very complicated question to answer what ranks you best but yeah we look at the bunch of signals now if you could give me like you know like top three things that I should consider what would that be right so us being developers originally you probably want me to say oh I use this framework or use that framework yeah that's not how it works you have to have really good content and that means you have content have to have content that serves a purpose for the user it's something that users need and or one optimally they need it and want it okay like ice cream so if you're if your content says where you are what you do how you how you help me with what I'm trying to accomplish that's fantastic if you just have a page that says like we are a fantastic company and we have plenty of products that's not serving a purpose so you want to make sure to serve the purpose of the people who you want to attract and get who you want to interact with your content and you want to make sure that you're using words that I would be using if you use a very specific term for your ice cream let's say like smooth cream 5000 or something like that I'm not I'm not gonna search for that because I don't know about I'm just gonna go like I need ice cream it's good to mention it somewhere so that I know if I look for that trademark I find it as well okay but if I if I'm exploring ice cream around me I don't know what particular ice cream there is if there's like a specific brand fantastic but that's not what I'm looking for so speak the language that I'm using so you're you're saying more like a page it's like an exactly you wouldn't when when we to meet and you have a fantastic product or I have a fantastic four I wouldn't go like yeah blurp master 5000 it's fantastic and you're like yeah it doesn't say it does that do all right so do that do an elevator pitch and help us okay put you in contact with the right people so content is number one priority Oh could you mention another two things that are important for this yeah you're gonna love them because they are technical so the second biggest thing is make sure that you have meta tags that describe your content so I have a Meta Description okay because that gives you the possibility to have a little snippet in the search results that let people find out which of the many results might be the ones that help them the best and have page titles that are specific to the page that you are serving so don't have a title for everything the same title is bad if you have titles that change with the content you're showing that is fantastic and frameworks have ways of doing that so consult the documentation but there's definitely something something that helps with the content and the last bit is performance Herot right yeah performance is fantastic we're talking about it constantly but we're probably missing out on the fact that this is also good for being discovered online our so performance is not just making my website faster but it's also making my website more visible to others correct okay because we want to make sure that the people clicking on your search was like clicking on your page yeah getting this content quickly so that's one thing that we want to make sure as well so we're it's one of the many signals that we are looking at but also it just helps you use this right they get happier if I want ice cream really badly then I get the page quicker that's fantastic yeah so if you want to look at performance I highly recommend looking into hybrid rendering or server-side rendering again because that gets the content quicker to the users usually right also you might have BOTS that don't run JavaScript so Googlebot does that but not everyone else does it necessarily so you want to make sure to probably figure out something like dynamic rendering if you don't want to make code changes because I understand we're all pressed for time we have lots of bugs and and features too to fulfill and work through so if you can't change the code dynamic rendering might be something that gets you there okay if there's rendering shoes with your content but besides that I would say definitely look into performance optimization get the content quicker get the first content full paint in there quicker optimize your servers optimize your caching strategies make sure that your script doesn't have to run for like 60 seconds to fetch everything that you need I know yeah so those are things that you should definitely look into and I guess performance is something that pretty much everyone in the developer community is looking at certainly yes or they should at least they should I hope that they do okay so we already discussed like all these basics around SEO and search engines and how to position my my website in the top search results now the question is why is it so important for companies to rank like like in the top results right so you're you're a web developer right yes your build stuff on the internet yeah do you want people to use it certainly yes certainly right so in order to make sure that people can use that they have to know about it and unless you are probably one of the really big players might not and even for the big players if they launch something new you might not know about it and you're not looking specifically for products you're looking for something that serves a purpose for you okay I want to know how I built this thing with a framework I want to know where to find the best ice cream and the place I am in I want to find the cutest dogs and poppers online so like I have a purpose I don't know who serves this purpose necessarily so if you build the best ice cream PWA ever in let's say Medellin is that how you profess so if you build the best PWA to order ice cream online in midian then I don't I don't know about that especially if I come as a tourist but if I type that into a search engine like order ice cream in medicine and then it goes like hey this this PWA does this trick yeah you want to be the the first or the first couple of because I'm not gonna go to page 99 and go like oh yeah this might be the perfect thing because Google and other search engines are trying to like figure out what is the best for this purpose and then show me those up front and then I might pick from those because normally they're pretty good I think that covers have all the questions I have fantastic so you feel like ready to build that certainly excellent that is so cool thank you so much for being here thank you my guests and I hope that this this helps other developers as well and developers and se owes can be friends I think I think so yeah I think so thank you Oh are we still on please stay tuned for another episode of SEO myth busting next time with soos Hinton we'll talk about what is Googlebot so come back again and watch what happens