SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

/ ˈes ˈi: əʊ /

Definition

If you have ever made a website and wondered how to make it appear in Google searches, then SEO is a buzzword you are probably familiar with. SEO is the process of making your website show up as close to, if not the first result in Google (or any other search engine). 

To optimize your website's ranking, every page of your website must be easy for Google to understand. Google has an automated software called Googlebot responsible for determining your website's ranking. Googlebot constantly works in two stages and repeats:

1. Downloading your website (crawling)

2. Analyzing your website (indexing)

Crawling involves downloading your website's HTML, going into each URL, and repeating the previous steps. For example, your home page can have a URL link to your contact page which can have a URL link to your login page, and so on. If your website is too difficult or slow to crawl, then Googlebot may have to revisit it in the next crawl which hurts your chances of ranking up. Because Googlebot needs to play fair and accommodate the 50 billion other websites, it only has a limited amount of time to spend on your website. Here are some tips to improve Googlebot's ability to crawl your website:

1. Make it fast. The time it takes to initially load and render your website (pictures, videos, text, etc.) should be blazing fast. This metric is known as First Contentful Paint.

2. Define a sitemap (a list of all URLs in your website) so that Googlebot does not have to discover and follow every link. Googlebot will know exactly which pages you tell it to crawl.

3. Run your website against Lighthouse. This will generate recommendations on how to improve your website.

Indexing is where Google tries to understand the purpose and impact of your website. Making sure your website contains high-quality and authentic content valuable to your users can ultimately boost your ranking. In some cases, it can compensate for a slow website. Googlebot's behaviors are similar to our behaviors when watching something online. If a video is interesting but terribly slow, we will likely continue to watch. However, if a video is incredibly boring but blazing fast, we will likely move on. In SEO terms, websites with high-quality content can carry your page to the top despite its performance.

Check out Google's SEO Starter Guide for more info!

Used in a sentence

Dev team trying to improve SEO with black-hat strategiesManager: Why don't we just put all the relevant keywords on the website and make them invisible? It's a win-win.Dev: Sounds good to me! That's what I do on my resume!SEO Expert: We could do that but our SEO might tank if Googlebot considers our website as spam...

Related terms

• Crawling

• Crawler

• Indexing

• Googlebot

• robots.txt

• Canonical

• Sitemap