Hi there,
I’m kinda new to web dev but feel like I’m finally making some progress, I have had my first paid gig and produced my first real website ( a static 4 page website)
My client has now asked me about the next step which is for the page to actually start appearing in search engines, from my quick research the option was of course adding in some “SEO” optimization.
As a newbie this is quote overwhelming as I’m still learning HTML,CSS and JS to getter better…my question is pretty simple.
Is SEO something that can be learned quickly and easily implemented or is it best left for people who are experts in this field, from what little I understand it has nothing to do with actual; coding but placing certain keywords in the HTML doc ?..is that correct?
Sorry if this seems oversimplified but my head is swimming on how to go about this.
Thanks in advance for anyone who can point me in the right direction.
Thanks
That’s not quite right — any way of optimizing your app (for performance, UX, scalability, etc.) is affected by the code, and this includes SEO. With SEO, this is mostly to do with the markup (HTML), but that’s still “code” in the broad sense.
Simple SEO rules include making your markup semantic (proper heading levels, alt attributes on imgs, etc.), making sure your website copy includes keywords you’re hoping to rank in, avoiding repetition of content, and making sure your page load time is fast.
Actually, many of the rules for modern SEO are the same as general rules for creating good content. This wasn’t always the case — it used to be much easier to game the system using “black-hat SEO”, but Google’s ranking algorithms have now been improved to a point where most of those tricks no longer work.
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This isn’t SEO, you just need to submit the site to the search engines, and allow them to index it. Here for Google https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6259634?hl=en, first block of links. Bing have the same basic process (I assume they’re the only two needed nowadays?).
If conversation does get into SEO territory: add Google’s Lighthouse extension to Chrome, run it on the site, save results. Go to client and say you’ll fix those things. Do that.
Stuff like keywords etc: that part of SEO is looking for ways to manipulate results of a black box (Google’s algorithms) that change how they work every few months to prevent exactly the kind of gaming SEO attempts. Its not really your responsibility to deal with that, and most online advice beyond absolute basics is likely to be outdated and wrong.
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