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SEO: Search Engine Optimization

The goal of SEO is to create a strategy that will increase your rankings position in search engine results and get more traffic.

Three Pillars of Optimization​

  1. Technical: Optimize for web crawlers
  2. Creation: Content strategy to target specific keywords
  3. Popularity: Make search engines believe your site is a trusted source through backlinks, referenced from other websites.

Four Main Responsibilities​

  1. Crawling: going through the web and parse contents in all websites.
  2. Indexing: Store scraped data and index the data for quicker search time.
  3. Rendering: Some websites may render pages with JavaScript. Search Engine might not render the page to collect data, thus client-side rendering isn't good for SEO.
  4. Ranking: Query data based on user input. Rank the data returned for bettern user experience.

See Googlebot for how Goole crawls the web.

Rendering and Ranking​

URL Structure in Ranking​

  • Semantic: Use semantic URL, i.e. words instead of ids
  • Logical and Consistent Patterns
  • Keyword focused: Use keywords in url
  • Not Parameter Based: Not a good idea to build URLs with parameters, which are not semantic in most cases.

Metadata​

Metadata is the abstract of the website's content. Attach a title, description and an image.

Title​

One of the most important SEO elements, use keywords in title.

<title>Website Title</title>

Description​

<meta
  name="description"
  content="Check out iPhone 12 XR Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max. Visit your local store and for expert advice."
/>

Open Graph​

Can be used to display rich cards when sharing a URL. This doesn't offer any benefit to search engine rankings.

<meta property="og:title" content="Social Title for Cool Page" />
<meta
  property="og:description"
  content="And a social description for our cool page"
/>
<meta
  property="og:image"
  content="https://example.com/images/cool-page.jpg"
/>

Structured Data and JSON-LD​

Structured data facilitates the understanding of your pages to search engines.

On Page SEO​

Headings (h1, h2) indicate importance in the document and links connect the web together.

Google started this principle with the invention of the PageRank Algorithm.

The PageRank algorithm, at a high level, is an algorithm that goes through every link on a database and scores domains based on how many links they receive (quantity) and from which domains (quality).

Web Performance & Core Web Vitals​

Web Vitals is an initiative created by Google to provide unified guidance and metrics to measure end-user page experience on the web. Core Web Vitals is a subset of Web Vitals, and currently consists of three metrics that measure loading, interactivity, and visual stability. These metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric looks at the loading performance of your page. LCP measures the time it takes to get the largest element on the page visible within the viewport.

The First Input Delay (FID) metric is the perception of an end user’s experience while interacting with a web page.

The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metric is a measure of your site’s overall layout stability. A site that unexpectedly shifts layout as the page loads can lead to accidental user error and distraction.

Lighthouse (v6) Weights for Vitals​

The three metrics are not necessarily valued equally. In Lighthouse, different weights are assigned to each of the Core Web Vitals:

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 25%
  • Total Blocking Time*: 25%
  • First Contentful Paint: 15%
  • Speed Index: 15%
  • Time to Interactive: 15%
  • Cumulative Layout Shift: 5% *This is similar to First Input Delay.

Readings​

Reference​