SEO Secret Sauce | Hacking to the top of Google

optimisedu — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 11:51:35 +0000

Disclaimer - this was originally written for LinkedIn so I kept things short. I am more than happy to expand on any of the points which I have made and if this is popular I will go further in depth with some of the tricks I have learned in 13+ years experience in the SEO Sphere

For *SEO & UI * to 🔥𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝘁 🔥you really need some secret sauce (wow that's a cheesy) - I'm going to go into a bit of detail with mine. Guess it won't be so secret anymore but it might help you, my connections and hopefully as a result the wider web. If you have any simple hacks that you use please drop a comment at the bottom.

First, I will say that SEO is not about link building onsite or offsite. It is about organic networking and connections, and that often gets mixed up.

Networking & Mobile SEO

For a business of any size, local SEO is important. Even if you are purely online, having a maps presence will help - Alphabet/Google, for example, use their correlation between good maps presence and higher rankings to keep user experience metrics high, and as a result, often maps can be a way of hacking to the top listing for high traffic & high competition keywords.
But it goes far beyond this.

A lot less talked about is how Alphabet uses all the data that they collect when 73% of phone users set up their Android account beyond being sold. With such a massive chunk of an already huge market, Google has near-free rein to use data as they will. A lot of this goes to internal product improvement. Did you know that website bookmarks are a direct ranking factor (at least for Google News)?

Similar to liking a video, this is a democratic way of Alphabet letting users voice what they like and dislike. Particularly useful when blogging, if you only focus on having a reactive site, you are missing out on a huge number of visitors.

Conclusion

This is such a deep rabbit hole that, for brevity, I will just say that if you aren't using declarative HTML5 markup and have taken a user-first approach to your SEO and web design strategy, you are haemorrhaging money. If you want me to expand on anything or send references, just comment or drop me a message

Broke hand

optimisedu — Tue, 31 May 2022 10:01:17 +0000

I have a broken left hand. It is frustrating. I have gone to css art and drawings.

I was thinking learning tailwind inside out or lodash they suit my style. But I like animation. Pure css with my own jit purge is both sounding good.

I always done seo which I take extremely technically. Any advice for help staying sane with a broken hand probably focus on css animations I love css not such a tailwind lover. Might hack my own system together . Any advice staying sane greatly appreciated.

What do you think. Worth an ask thanks. Writing hurts but is a good way to get blood to the fingers.

Is the internet responsible for 20% of global energy use

optimisedu — Wed, 11 May 2022 05:04:06 +0000

Hi All, this is my first post and it is designed to create a talking point. I figured that is as good an intro as any. These are some very hard metrics to measure.

During this post I want to slowly lead you to the tangible cost of having a web presence, and what we can all do to improve the world wide web - the benefits of the web are undeniable. There is no going back, however we can reduce our carbon footprint and provide better services, be better devs.

I will start with Youtube - it is obviously a very heavy website, used by billions of people every day. Lets take a deep dive with a lighthouse test.

My desktop testing shows that they could save around a megabyte on every single page's first interaction. Please take a look for yourself, this image is just one of many scripts and styles they could minify. They make the rookie error of not purging all their their styles and scripts.

Javascript injection even when used for good is a dangerous toy which feels very much like a resurrection of flash - "blazingly fast" but not designed to make sites or be crawled by search engine bots. That doesn't stop bootcamps programming people with the how but not the why of React.

Here is where we hit the first bottleneck. People on 3g networks is really where the tangible cost of our gluttony comes in and worse programmers often ignore accessibility.

We have a so many frameworks to make apps, however a good website is lightweight, it uses as much HTML and CSS as possible. Ideally no scripting is required. It seems almost laughable having client side rendering - to use a heavy scripting language to say build this site each time you visit it to allow our virtual/heavily modified DOM to work. Client side hydration can and has been improved on.

As you get more advanced you learn about packaging and caching. Now this is where things start to get dangerous - Gulp is no longer a task manager looking over our shoulders, purging and minifying, then spitting out prebuilt sites ready for FTP upload at a massive reduction in size.

Webpack blew it out the water. Webpack is undeniably a friendly tool, it can be hard to use, and again it is a case of scale whether you actually need packaging or not. Then there is vite et al. That is another post, please let me know if this interests you.

Sizing the internet.

I am an SEO, and I like to say that means the payoff between accessibility and performance. With the right hardware severely disabled people can access sites if (the sites grant them access). SEO is not about linkspam, it is about delivering the best content you can, as quickly as you can to as many people as you can.

I decided to roughly calculate the size of the web. The average desktop page is 2mb, with many sites significantly higher than that. "There are around two billion websites [in 2022]".

That would make an average of 4bn kilobytes sat on active servers and on the cloud. It gets worse.

1.4.4bn of our YouTube videos are watched daily.

circa 3bn searches made on Google, people watch more video's than they make searches.
100bn+ emails are sent per day - think spam. [https://www.domo.com/learn/infographic/data-never-sleeps-5]**

For me the worst culprit is that "32 billion people are active on Facebook daily" - that's more than four times the actual population of the world, undeniably something is wrong.

Want the real kicker? :These stats are from 2017.

Facebook maintains React. It makes sense for a business with traffic like that to create reactive content. I feel it was a bit too successful, also we have Node vs Deno - another argument where we are starting to see the stress of success modern JS is having. The faker facade was a good example of an inherent problem with node while the first step people often take is npm init -y.

Exponential growth of popular package downloads is an inherant problem with node - these files, and all their requirements are included in your final build. This is such an obvious statement it seems laughable to even mention but in 2014 I can assure you we didn't expect such an explosion of packets and requirements:

Always consider - are you making an app or are you making a site? What does that mean for users, and what does that mean to peaceful web crawlers?

Frameworks and libraries have started to be written for the web dev rather than the end user. There is a war of frameworks and libraries going on which means convenience of use is paramount. React is winning because it has the highest user-base, not because it is the fastest, lightest weight, or best by any other metric.

What form of rendering do you use? How many times do requests ping back and forth from the server before your site loads? There are 4.2bn sites live today and double that amount of active servers.

The real cost of doing business

[In 2017 the guardian predicted that the internet would account for 20% of the worlds electricity in 2025.]

The real conclusion is how long is a piece of string, what is the internet, do we count all our devices how do we measure and does it matter.

What is paramount is your visitors with their 3g phones. Time to interaction is the secret to keeping happy visitors. If each page you have is 2mb then you have the body chugging away that is costing your user, not just in experience. You are slowly polluting the world and costing money in the form of data.

So why am I making this post - obviously there was a point where the internet overtook standard media, and this page costs far less carbon than a piece of paper. dev.to delivers the images I use minified from a central cache however each visitor I shamelessly push this post on has a small carbon footprint.

These stats are important to think about, accessibility and performance. Get people on your site and give them the best experience possible. Don't get lazy, learn your stack inside out so you know what you can hack away if you are bleeding data.

Please leave some comments on what you feel - obviously the title is clickbait but it is also the truth. If something uses an incalculable amount of energy, all optimisation is good optimsation.

Regards
Dave
Optimise-U