Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to your website.

It means increasing your visibility in search engines such as Microsoft Bing and Google when people search for you, your website, or a product you sell.

Why is SEO Important?

Think about the following:

1. When you search for "dental hygiene", the first website that you will see is the Center for Disease Control Website.

2. When you search for "open jobs" you will get a list of open jobs, or a list of websites that are hiring.

3. When you search for "web developer" you will get the definition of a web developer, as well as websites that offer web development courses.

4. And when you search for "who is tsbsankara" you will get search results ranging from my personal website to my blog website and my YouTube channel.

What you notice about the above is that, you are not searching for a specific website, but for a broad term. However, the search results that you get seem to be specific to what you are looking for.

The reason that is possible is because of SEO.

Perhaps the CDC has a lot of topics about dental hygiene, and they have optimized their meta tags to the point where whenever you search for anything tooth-related, their website will always come up first. That is SEO.

In the topic about Meta Tags, we learned how to add optimizations in our HTML so that we can be ranked higher on search engines.

If you have a blog website, another way to improve SEO is to have many articles on your website. Having more content on your websites equals more visits by users, which makes the Google algorithm think that your website is worth visiting, and therefore ranks it higher so that it appears at one of the top - if not the top - when people are looking for blog articles.

This is the same logic that YouTube has used such that it is one of the top video websites.

I bet you never even use Vimeo, do you? Vimeo is pretty good, but whenever people think about watching videos, the first website that comes to mind is YouTube. See how biased you are? That is the same way that search engines are biased.

When you searched for the items above, I am 90% sure that you used Google to do so. I made sure to say "search for" and not "Google", but you still used Google. Why? Why didn't you use DuckDuckGo? Or Yandex? Or Yahoo? Or Bing?

"Because I prefer Google" or "Because Google is best" or "Because Google is better than the rest" is probably your answer. To which I will say, that is the same way that browsers behave when recommending your website. So you want to appear first? Better do you SEO well, friend.

Types of SEO

SEO is divided into 3 parts:

1. On-page SEO

This refers to SEO that you, as the web developer will do in order to improve search rankings. There are a couple of things you can do here, such as:

1. Optimize your meta tags with meaningful titles, descriptions, keywords, open graph tags and other social media cards.

2. Only ever have one h1 per page which will give web crawlers an idea about what your website is about. If you have more than one h1, it will confuse them and will hurt your overall ranking.

3. Only ever have one main element per page - that is if you're going to use a main element. This will give web crawlers an idea of what to present as the main content of your website.

4. Have meaningful titles and descriptions for your various pages as these are what will show up when users search for your website.

2. Off-page SEO

This refers to SEO that happens away from your website, but which links back to your website. That is why Instagramers have the "Check out the link in my bio" thing in their videos. When someone clicks this links, it improves your search results because search engines will now think, "This guy is also on Instagram, he must be popular with the reels".

These links are called backlinks because they link back to the original website.

3. Technical SEO

This is anything that will help the bots to crawl your website such as using semantic HTML elements, and using them properly, as well as having a sitemap for your website.

A sitemap is a file that shows all the available links or pages on your website and the relationship between them, so that a web crawler can just look at this file and know everything about your website.

There are sitemap generators available online. I will advise you to use them instead of typing out your entire sitemap.

Conclusion

That is how you improve your SEO.