SEO Day 1 - FYI i will not be posting all my learnings. Just following up that on day one back at work I am following through on my goals to spend 30 minutes on SEO or Analytics each day.
After spending some time digging into different courses, reading reddit, googling, and asking around I found that I am going to follow https://learningseo.io/.
I have seen good reviews around the web and they pull from a lot of different sources and provide you with the right links and resources to dig in.
Search
Engine
Optimization
I am starting out with Lesson 1. SEO Fundamentals. The first step is understanding how google search works. Lets break it down. If you want to read the full article you can here. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works
Lets break down the 3 steps google takes before the site/page can be found on google search. Before we start they point out that they do not move sites/pages higher in search or crawl them for payment. The direct quote about his from the website is. “If anyone tells you otherwise, they're wrong.” Also, google does not guarantee that all pages/sites will be crawled.
Crawling, Bots, Robots, URL discovery, or my favorite Spiders! Google downloads all the text, images, and videos and also renders it on a the most recent version of chrome similar to how we view pages on chrome. Sites/Pages are found via links or upload of site maps to google. Crawling cannot happen for pages that are behind a login or that are disallowed for crawling.
Indexing. Google takes all the crawled pages and decides what they are about. Most of this comes from what is on the page in text. Then based on the data decides if its a duplicate or if the page is canonical. If it is Canonical then it may be shown in the search results as it will be added to the google index along with billions of other sites/pages. The Canonical portion was al little confusing for me so I found this video to help a little. Link at the bottom.
- Serving Search Results. After the page/site is indexed it can be served on searches. Google matches the search with what they “think” is the best page for the search. What they “Think” should be shown is what is always change and what is hard to figure out each time they change their algorithms.
I sure hope that this little article helped in a small way. It was a simple breakdown on what I understood as I started to break it down. I already understood most of this at a high level but it was cool to break it down and see exactly what happens.
If I messed up in any way please share with me below. As I read this I kept thinking google is the big dog. In the end they make a lot of the decisions about what will be shown and what will not. You have to play their game to rank high. I hope to learn more about that in the next few weeks as I study.
video link