Hungry Web Developer Podcast

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SEO 101 for Software Developers w/ Roy Jossfolk

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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Google, Bing, and other search engines need to answer questions from users and redirect them to the most relevant sites.

These search engines have an algorithm for ranking relevant content. SEO is the optimization for ranking your content high in your keyword category.

For instance, say someone is looking for recipe on how to cooki chili. Say you also wrote an article for your grandma's famous chili recipe on the web. Good SEO means your page is found on the first page on google if someone searches "chili recipe"


Three Types of SEO

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Three types of SEO combined is what allows your site to index on search engines:

On Page SEO.

On Page SEO is writing content for the web. That content could fall in a number of different categories:

  • How to articles
  • Reflection
  • Call to action blogs

How-to-articles tend to be fairly common in tech / web-development spaces.

Writing niche articles can help you identify as a leader in that field. But it won't be search as frequently as beginner level content

So it's a good idea to mix both in when going for ranking your blog for coding content in this case.

Off Page SEO

Off Page SEO is external linking from outside your site. These come in the form in backlinks:

Say for instance you have a cooking recipe on your blog. If food network were to create a reference to your site from their blog, that would be considered a high quality backlink.

But, if someone links from a spam comment on an unrelated content, this would not be a good quality backlink.

Other backlinks can occur through social media posts on instagram, linkedin, etc. Or say if you create an account on pinterest and it asks you to put your website name down in your profile.

Those are all backlinks that help build a profile of what google or any other search engine thinks your site is

Most times you don't have to worry about external backlinks. If you have great content, people will link to it.

One thing you want to do is internal-linking within your site, so the site-crawler knows how everything is inter-related to your site.

Technical Performance

Technical performance matters to a certain extent. If your site is slow, and sluggish, someone who is visiting your site might bounce and go to a different site instead.

Tools like Google Lighthouse can help audit your site for these benchmarks. Making images smaller, using static site generators, etc are also ways to improve page load speeds


Tips and Tricks

Google Search Console

Google has a tool called the Search Console. By using chrome search console, you can have google recrawl your site and check for common ways to improve your SEO.

Sometimes it could be as easy as fixing an H1 tag to the site. Or meta-title or meta-content for users to determine if your content is relevant to their search on google's listings.

You want a high "click through ratio", this is when a user organically searches through the listing on google.

Updating old content

Updating old content is a popular way to rank on your site. It doesn't take as much work as creating new content. You ccan restructure

Collect your research upfront before writing

Go through a checklist and collect everything you need before writing your content. This will help prevent writers block

Use the book method

A web article should be like a book.

When you think of a book, there's a title to it. There are chapters. And subchapters.

This same analogy can be applied to a webpage. For instance:

  • H1 is your blog post title
  • H2 is your chapters on the blog
  • H3 is subchapters within the H2 tags

Sentence structure

When you break your content into shorter sentences, it's more likely a user will stay longer on the page

Wall of texts is hard to read. Having seperate smaller sentences makes easier to consume information.

Especially if someone is on mobile.

Image Data

If you use images on your site, renaming your pictures to be semantically correct is important!

If you have a blog on "How to write a Javascript", you might have screenshots of code.

Naming that file "124125125.jpg" makes it confusing for Google. Naming it "javascript-hello-world-code.jpg" might be more relevant.

This principle also applies to file or PDF uploads too

Multimedia

If you use video or audio files, these have metadata associated with it that can be tagged to search engine crawlers

Long Load Times

If your page has a long load time, your entire site may not be indexed entirely. Google or search engines have crawl minutes assigned to it.

The longer it takes for it to search your site, the less frequently it gets crawled and therefore indxed.

Social Media

Download: seo.mp3