How I got internet famous, you can too.

#seo #marketing #webdev #productivity

"If I search your name and you're not on Google, then you're not successful yet — only famous people appear on Google search" This is what I always thought while growing up.
This changed when I published an article about myself on a blogging site at just 15 years old. I remember searching my name and it would bring up that article on the search results and I would use this to brag to my friends in school.

I first heard about SEO few years ago then I realized why i appeared whenever I searched for my name years back. I had just gotten a domain for my portfolio, but whenever I searched my name, it still wouldn't appear. I didn't know why this happened so I went to meet one of my mentors. He explained the concept of SEO and how to do it for my portfolio. Since then, I've helped several people rank their websites on Google, Microsoft and other search engines.

Over the years, I realized that SEO isn't magic—it's about speaking the search engine's language. Here are the 5 core pillars I use to help my clients rank as a website developer.

1 Prioritize Semantic HTML over "Div-itis":
Stop wrapping everything in <div> tags. Semantic HTML tells search engines what your content actually is. Using <main>, <article>, and <section> acts as a map for crawlers, helping them distinguish your core message from sidebars or ads.

2 The title tag: While the content of the title tag might just be like the text on top of your web page, it also helps with SEO. Whenever google scrapes your web pages, it uses your title tag to categorise your content telling the algorithm what your content is about. A very good title tag can steal clicks from position #1.

3 Meta descriptions: while those meta descriptions might seem like they do not affect your site in any way, they actually help a lot with SEO. They tell search engine what your page is about.
The meta description is that 1-2 sentence summary that appears under your summary in the search results.

<meta name="description" content="This is where your the summaryof the web page us written.">

While Google claims that meta descriptions do not directly affect how your website is ranked, it serves as an ad. An enticing meta description will increase your Click-Through Rate which tells Google that your page is valuable thereby boosting your ranking.

4 Robots.txt file: Search engine bots have a "crawl budget"—they won't stay on your site forever. This file (usually found in the root folder) tells search engine bots where they can crawl and where they aren't allowed to visit. By using a robots.txt file, you can tell bots to ignore unimportant folders like /admin/ or /cart/, forcing them to spend their "budget" on high value content. Heavy crawling cam also slow down your server.

5 Alt attributes for images: As a beginner, you might think Alt attributes only come in handy under poor network conditions or for screen readers. The actually also help with SEO. Alt attribute helps with accessibility, User experience and SEO.
While modern AIs are getting good at analysing images, search engine still rely heavily on the texts in the alt tags to index your content correctly.
To achieve a perfect alt text, it must be descriptive, concise and natural.
Instead of:

<img src="shoes.png" alt="shoes">

Use this instead

<img src="shoes.png" alt="Men's waterproof leather hiking boots in dark brown">

This improve image search, whenever a user searches a query relating to your alt image, your image is shown in the image search.

When writing an alt text, you should also avoid starting with "Image of..." as the search engine already knows it's an image, so just jump straight into the description.
If the image is serving as a background, leave the alt attribute empty. This tells the screen readers to skip it, saving users time.

It is also important to know that google rewards sites that are accessible, in summary, the more accessible your site is, the more your site would be ranked.