learn-seo

:mag: Learn search engine optimisation :sparkles:

Why should I care about Search Engine Optimisation?

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a website isn't on the first page of a google search, does how good it is even matter? :thinking:

The majority of traffic for sites still comes from organic searches (this means people searching using normal search queries).

There is an increase in traffic coming from social media and people sharing things, but the majority is still coming from search engines. So you want to make sure your site shows up for the relevant queries, so that it gets optimum traffic, and all of the benefits that come with it.

You can make the best website in the world, but if no one can find it, then it doesn't matter!

And being high up in searches matters! A study indicated that the first result from a google search recieves 32.5% of clicks, where the second receives only 17.6%, that's almost half the traffic, due to only being one position lower! source

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation is an effort to increase the traffic to a website by trying to make sure it appears as high in the search results as possible for searches related to certain queries.

Before looking into SEO too much it is useful to have a little understanding of the way searches on the web work, for which we really recommend this short video on how google searches work. .

By understanding the way that searches work, we can try to make sure that our website has as high of a chance as possible to be a high result in searches relevant to our topic. It's still important to remember to keep User Experience at the heart of all of our decisions, and make sure we are not compromising UX for the sake of SEO just as google themselves advocate:

Search engine optimization is about putting your site's best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.

From google's own guide to SEO

How do I do it?

A lot of SEO is making a clear site with good quality content that users will engage with, but there are some basic tips that can help to make sure that search engines show your site in relevant searches.

Titles

<title>Learn Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - dwyl</title>

First and foremost your titles should be useful and readable, not just a collection of keywords. They should also be unique for each page (this helps with search engines knowing that it's a different page).

The title tag should be contained within the <head> tag of the HTML document, it is what will be displayed in the tab on your browser when the page is open, and what the title of the entry in the search results will be.

Search engines generally only display the first 65-75 characters of the <title> so it's best to make sure your title is within that limit. If you really need to have it longer to get an accurate title it may be worthwhile, but at least make sure the first 65-75 characters give a good idea of the page, so when the user sees the search result they get the idea of what the page is. Depending on what you are trying to rank for, it sometimes makes sense to place your brand at the beginning.

For best SEO, keywords should go close to the front, for example "Web development agency" as opposed to "Fun creative agency specialising in web development".

URLs

URLs play an important role in both user experience and search engine optimisation. Luckily search engines are engineered to like the same types of url as humans, so if you concentrate on keeping urls short and descriptive, it should translate into great SEO.

Guidelines for a great URL

Be descriptive: If you can't easily tell the purpose of a page from the URL, you're probably doing something wrong.

Use human-readable urls: Try to keep numbers, weird symbols and nonsensical text to a minimum. Again, if the url isn't easy to interpret, something is wrong.

Use keywords, but don't overuse them: If you're targeting a specific set of keywords, including them in the url can help to improve search rankings. On the flipside, if the url is just a series of keywords with no relation to page content, then search engines will sometimes tag the site as spam and ranking will take a hit.

Keep it short: Shorter URLs mean nicer links for emailing and inclusion on other sites. They also allow the whole url to be displayed with search results.

Use hyphens to separate words: Underscores and other separators can be intepreted incorrectly by search engines. Hyphens (-) are the standard.

Each page should have one URL: Repeating content with different URLs will lead the search engine to consider them as two competing pages rather than categorizing them as the same page, linked to multiple times. If you want to have a different link for some reason you can use a 301 status code and redirect the user to the already existing page, or you can put a <link> tag with rel="canonical" in the head of the duplicate page. This will lead the search engine to treat the page as a copy of the linked page. Like so:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://dwyl.com/super-awesome-page"/>

Images

Search engine crawlers can't see images unless they come with alt (alternative) text :eyes:

Although it can sometimes be useful for SEO to include keywords in the alt text of images, as with urls this should only be done if the words fit with the image. First and foremost alt text should be a description of the image:

This:
<img src="https://github.com/dwyl/learn-seo/raw/master/happy-squirrel.jpg" alt="A joyous squirrel eating an acorn." />

Not this:
<img src="https://github.com/dwyl/learn-seo/raw/master/happy-squirrel.jpg" alt="Super cheap acorns sold here! Buy ten get one free" />

What not to do

We've given a bit of advise of thing you should be doing in order to increase your site's traffic from search engines, but there are also a few things you should avoid doing.

Don't bury text inside rich media. If you put your search engine relevant content inside of things like flash and javascript the search engine robots won't see them.
Make sure you're using the appropriate spelling for your target audience. If you are mostly looking to be found in the UK, spell "colour" with a u, if you're aiming for USA then leave the u out.
Don't use search forms as the main form of navigation. Search engine robots don't fill out forms, so if you want the robots to see it, you need to have a proper link to it! Make sure the search feature is supplementary rather than the only form of navigation.
Don't hide content behind a login. Again, search engine robots don't go through forms, so if all of your search relevant content is hidden behind a log in, then it will never get crawled!
Don't use unclear link text. The body of your links should be clear and semantic. click here is unhelpful to users, and unclear to search engines. A clear, semantic link such as: this video about Search Engines on youtube is much better for UX, accessibility and SEO.