Last week I polled the twitterverse about their knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Given everything happening today, I’m genuinely wondering whether developers at large have a strong understanding of SEO. If you’re a dev, do you feel you understand it? Canonical-urls? Duplicate content? Backlinks?22:27 PM - 28 May 2019
With survey options of "yes", "no", and "some" the least common answer was yes! It seems that developers, for the most part, don't feel comfortable with the concepts at play in SEO.
Throughout the web, you'll find plenty of articles about how to handle SEO on your site. So instead, I wanted to talk about the way search engines work and what those SEO "rules" and recommendations are derived from.
Crawl, Index, Rank
The first thing to understand is that search engines crawl the internet looking for site pages. Once it finds something new, the search engine will index the page content so it can be a part of searches. Once content is indexed, it can be ranked compared to other searches for similar content.
The term SEO, or search engine optimization, is about getting content to rank higher for given search terms. You're focused on specific keywords that someone would use to find your site. The higher a rank, the more traffic a site is likely to see, which can be a source of marketing, growth, or even income.
Canonical_url
When creating content, you want it to be seen by the largest audience possible. That may mean posting the same content on different sites. By doing that you can hit multiple audiences.
But here is the snag. You want all that traffic to be added up together to rank that piece of content higher! This is where a canonical_url comes in. (This post is actually using one right now from my company blog Ten Mile Square)
If you look at analytics, you can still see the different sources of traffic. But for SEO purposes, there is a "home" that should continue to rank higher in search results. This is particularly relevant if your canonical_url is used on a high ranking domain that would otherwise outrank your home domain. I'll dive into this more below.
If you're looking for how to implement this on your site, check out the specific methods.
Backlinks
You may have heard of backlinks and how critical they are to improving your content ranking. It's awesome to have multiple things referencing your post! The more there are, the more search engines are inclined to rank this post higher.
This is considered a "vote of confidence" from another site. Backlinks can be especially valuable if the site they appear on is highly ranked. So having a "home" for your page means that all of that internet goodwill is being passed to a specific location, instead of splitting your content locations and competing with yourself.
To dive more into backlinks and see how to benefit from them on your own site, check out this resource.
Duplicate Content
Now we get into the trickiest part of this post. It's important to know that there are different rules for duplicate content within a domain versus across different domains. I'm going to focus on the latter issue.
As we mentioned above, just like pages can rank, domains can rank as well.
There are a lot of details about how domains rank higher including load times, working links, etc. That could be a whole other post.
The more often a particular domain satisfies user queries, the higher it will rank. This is really important if content exists on two different sites. If you don't have that canonical_url, the search engine may decide that the higher ranking domain is the original source of the information, and not even rank your version of the content!
This may seem unfair, but it does make sense. Search engines are trying to match your query with unique, valuable content. That means handling content that shows up multiple times. It's not relevant to show you three hits all with the same content.
Over the years the way this is handled has gotten pretty sophisticated. And there are domains that are full of only duplicate content. In those cases, the search engine may decide that all content on a site can be found elsewhere and that it's a waste to index it at all.
When people talk about "penalizing" duplicate content this is normally what they mean. Some will say search engines don't penalize duplicate content but rather reward unique content. It's all kind of semantics. But it is important to understand that search engines are looking for valuable, unique information.
For a real deep dive into the complexities of this issue, this is a great post.
SEO Can Change
Over time search engines get better at judging content. This is usually a net positive, but sometimes it can have unwanted side effects. If you're looking to improve your SEO, or even understand it better, keep track of the latest rules. In fact, they just changed yesterday!
Google SearchLiaison@searchliaison
Tomorrow, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the June 2019 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this tweet for more about that:
twitter.com/searchliaison/…20:00 PM - 02 Jun 2019Google SearchLiaison @searchliaisonHere’s an update about updates -- updates to our search algorithms. As explained before, each day, Google usually releases one or more changes designed to improve our results. Most have little noticeable change but help us continue to incrementally improve search….
Top comments (27)
Thanks for your article, Laurie!
I think I didn't get the point about
canonical_url. As you say, this post appears on two sites (tenmilesquare.com, the "origin" I guess and dev.to). Shouldn't thecanonical_urlof the post appearing on dev.to point to tenmilesquare.com?Ya, about that. It was meant to. I published there first. And then forgot to add it into the front matter here before I published 🙃. Only just realized yesterday. But my technology consultant post is done that way if you want an example!
Ah right. Yeah this page has:
And I was thinking "Oh noes! Did the DEV editor put that in and overwrite her canonical link? How will I do this?". But, the DEV.to/laurieontech/technology-consultant post has this in its header:
Which is what we should probably all do, for our cross-posts on DEV.to, to link them back to the original on our own site.
So, I guess the question now is: when I cross-post to DEV.to (and I have a few that I'd like to), how do I set the canonical URL back to my original blog post?
Turns out: it's super easy: you press that "WRITE A POST" button in the top right corner there, and paste your Markdown. Then you press the ellipsis button (...) on the editor's top-right corner, and there's a field "Canonical URL" for you to put in your original URL!
Ah great, thanks for your answer! Just had a look at your technology consultant post. And I'm de-confused! =)
Oh good!
I’m an SEO professional working on transitioning to developer career and I can say this primer is right on the money. Thanks for writing it up for the devs who need it!
So glad to hear it! And best of luck with the transition. I'm sure you're gonna kill it.
Great thanks for sharing your SEO.
You can check the website vuaseo.net/ to see if it needs to be optimized.
Thank you very much
Even though I don't do the SEO for my business myself, I love reading articles like this, just to know what's going on in the field. I used to never be interested in this and left everything in the hands of a sketchy SEO company. Big mistake on my part. I paid a fair amount of money for absolutely nothing to happen. It wasn't until I reached out to some other SEO professionals that I learned the root of the problem and needless to say I was gone from that company. I've now been collaborating with firstpagedigital.sg/seo/ for the past couple of months and it's the first time I actually see the effects of SEO, which damn, are pretty impressive.
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Thanks for your article, Laurie!
Yes, there are a lot of factors for rank a website on google but If your site is engaging and users spend good time on your site then your site will be rank at the top position.
SEO is getting complicated or harder nowadays because of competition google focusing on quality content and user engagement.
voice Search Optimization: In 2021, people became more advance they will do voice search instead of text so optimized your site for voice search.
Infographic submission: or image submission will be booming in 2021 because people love infographic post. It saves time of people.
Website Speed: It is a very important thing when it comes to user engagement. Make sure your website load faster because your user will get not dropped. Slow Website loading speed increases your bounce rate & exit rate and this is not good for SEO
Mobile-Friendly Website: Everyone has a smartphone and people used to search anything from their mobile devices, so optimized your site mobile friendly you will get a lot of traffic from it. You can check speed on my website leading.vn/seo/.
Video content: Some people love videos instead of text, so make short videos of your content and upload them to your blogs it will increase your traffic and engagement ratio.
Yes, there are a lot of factors for rank a website on google but If your site is engaging and users spend good time on your site then your site will be rank at the top position.
Thanks for sharing this advice. I am currently optimizing my blog, and I do not know where to start. It seems like a great idea to use canonical_urls on all my dev.to posts, which I already have set up. I'd love to read more from you about the topic. Again, thanks for sharing.
The canonical url is a more advanced technique, but if you syndicate your blog (post it in multiple places) it’s important so your site doesn’t get dinged.
On page SEO is pretty simple and there are millions of articles on this.
The two key things to look at is Keywords (what people actually search for) and back links. Who links to you site/pages.
Google Webmasters just released this, too. Could be helpful: A video series on SEO myths for web developers -webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/06/...
Thank Laurie,
Your article is a useful document for me in the process of optimizing my website. I'm not a coding expert so I don't understand Canonical_url very well. Can you check it in the web ongcongnghiep.com.vn/? Thank you very much.
Very informative, thanks
Thanks for useful information about canonical url @laurieontech
That update timing though 👀
Great post - It was really great to have everything in a single location for once and not scattered across 16 different tabs.
Great post Laurie.
The hardest thing is knowing where to start and this is a great place to start.
Haha hey Ryan 😊
thank you for the post and what SEO do you use like Yoast and the lot?
Another Google core update May 2020
Deep Learn What is SEO?
very great. Thanks for sharing your seo techniques.
Can you help me get a backlink for this article vuaseo.net/mua-backlink/
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