An SEO non-fan reads Google's SEO Docs
SEO is one of the topics that I’ve always procrastinated on delayed learning in favour of other topics because I personally find it to be quite a dry topic. But just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it isn’t important. In fact, it is one of the most important things contributing to a website’s success, since search engines are one of the most common ways potential users find a website, and poor performance and accessibility (which is part of SEO) can significantly degrade the user experience. And when you’re working on client websites and not just your hobby websites, well, that’s quite important.
Besides being forced assigned to read the Google SEO docs, one thing that helped me looked past the dryness of SEO is when Dom, one of the co-founders of Sanico Software, told me how learning SEO is “actually learning how to make the internet world a better place” since it helps me contribute to “an online world that is more optimised, performant[,] and accessible to all users online” (gotta add the Oxford comma lol). I personally have a pet-peeve with having everything properly labelled and organised in a semantic way, e.g. with having proper headings in websites and documents instead of having large text, and so this reasoning appeals to a part of me a lot. Indeed this is much more complicated than e.g. semantic HTML, however like the 80/20 rule says, you can probably get 80% of results from just learning 20% of the huge field of SEO.
In addition to the dryness of SEO, another thing I disliked about it was how back in the day it often forced people to use gimmicky tactics to land high spots in search results, such as keyword stuffing and making your content sound very marketing-oriented and superfluous. Perhaps that wasn’t entirely true and was just a stereotypical view of SEO I had in the past. However these days, I was relieved to learn that enabled by better technology, Google is now focussing more on ranking based on what is actually good content for people. The technical stuff is mostly for optimising stuff and helping machines understand your content. In fact, Google has several checklists on how to create “helpful, reliable, people-first content”.
What this blog series is about
Despite the contents of the Google SEO docs being useful, it can be quite technical, repetitive, and long, making it difficult to apply to real-life projects. Therefore, I’m writing this blog post series to summarise my learnings. Each blog post in the series would contain an insight or a collection of related insights from the docs and how they can be implemented practically, demonstrated through examples and real-world projects when available.
I hope this blog series would not only be useful for fellow developers but also the more general public, in particular business owners or anyone who is looking to hire someone to help do SEO for them. There are many scams in the SEO business, and knowing the basics of how SEO works and the reason why we do certain things can help prevent you from falling into these scams. For example, Dom mentions how “there are companies still out there right now that are trying to sell companies a lot of backlinks without mentioning credibility scores of those websites”, which is very likely to harm your website’s performance in search instead of improving it! Knowing SEO basics can also help you understand better its benefits which are often opaque to non-developers despite being very real; it is a big factor (though not the only one) in how successful a website is.
But that’s all from me for now; until next time with the first insight post!
This is post #0 of the “SEO For All” blog series.