Lets Get Technical
Guidance for people starting out in SEO
SEO isn’t rocket science. But it can seem like that at first. I remember when I first started out and not having the faintest idea of what it all meant and how it all worked. There's so much to cover! I was luck that I had a good mentor in my first agency job who thought me the basics. It was in this job I discovered that I had a knack for the more technical aspects of the role so decided to explore more on my own. 7 years later I am still exploring.
Here's some of the tips and tricks I've gathered over the years.
Subscribe to the Google Webmaster Blog (& friends)
It seems silly to say it but I cannot stress this enough. Google's Webmaster Blog is the essential read and has been at the forefront of white-hat (good SEO) SEO since the beginning.
It is the primary source of information and the simplest way to stay on top of the what Google needs from the community. If you want to keep current and you’ve never looked at a single bit of SEO news before this would be the ultimate starting point alongside the Google Webmaster Guidelines, the Google Webmaster Youtube channel and following Danny Sullivan and Gary Illyes on their socials. The blog often links off to various Google Web Development resources and calculators. These are essential reading for anyone looking to up their game from an SEO perspective.
The best thing about this blog is that when they can give you straight answer, they do. This helps dispel some annoying myths and irrelevant metrics that you will account. As a bonus tip also brush up on Boolean operators and modifiers in Google Search that will help you type advanced searches and filter information like a pro.
Learn about Structured Data
Titles, meta descriptions, alt text and content will only get you so far. There is much more to search than what lives on the pages of websites. Use Google's structured data testing tool and write your own code. Keep at it until you get it right and check out see how other sites are using it.
Search Engine Journal's Technical Guide to SEO
Another great starting point for learning about the nuts and bolts of technical SEO. They cover everything from HTTP status codes, canonicals, duplicate content, mobile indexing, speed optimisation, schema mark-up and all the usual suspects like sitemaps and robot.txt. The listed authors are: Benj Arriola, Aleh Barysevich, Andy Betts, Clark Boyd, Rachel Costello, Anna Crowe, Stoney G. de Geyter, Sergey Grybniak, Jenny Halasz, Brian Harnish, Natalie Hoben, Jeremy Knauff, Roger Montti, Vahan Petrosyan, Chuck Price, Jes Scholz, and Amelia Willson. Another bunch of people to add to your social feed.
Get Good Book on Information Retrieval
A little but of knowledge can be a dangerous thing so it’s important to not always rely on the abstract. We know that links work. We know that You may not grasp every concept of search and language processing. But there’s a lot to be said for a good book on information retrieval. I chose this one https://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/ but there are countless other resources out there that go in to exceptional detail on human computer interaction processes, algorithms and search engines. You might not use this information in the day to day but it's worth learning some basics.
Learn how to use the Chrome Developer Console
Learn how to examine code with the inspector, read reports, play with the HTML, CSS and JS, run a lighthouse audit and read errors. Some websites can look good on the surface. But just as with life, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. To access the console press command, shift and C together.
Get on RegExr to learn Regular Expressions
This is a skill that developers and SEOs alike tend to avoid or dislike, it’s confusing to wrap your head around but struggle through, it’s totally worth it. It’s incredibly useful and will help in a variety of marketing tools and development or scripting tasks.
When I got my first SEO job I was plonked in front of an excel file with some redirects and I had to map each URL one by one. Filters, column splits and some clever find and replace got the job done in excel but then one day there was a file that had 60,000 of these redirects. That was the moment I needed to explore whether there was a better way.
I was working on IIS6.0 on an ASP.NET website and used a helicon ISAPI plugin to allow Apache like redirection. I found RegExr, plugged spotted all the patterns and wrote about ten rules that could manage each redirect and URL rewrite. Once it clicks you’ll wonder how you ever got on without it.
Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Build a Website
I hold a firm belief that if you are going to give recommendations on websites you have to have at least built one. If you build one and it’s awful that’s ok. It doesn’t have to be good, it does even have to be online. This will give you an appreciation for the work that developers and system administrators do on a daily basis. Earlier in my career I found that it was hard to communicate the effectiveness or articulate what you needed, how you needed it to happen, why it needed to happen and the result. Once you’ve done it, the conversation flows much better because you have a frame of reference.
It you are serious about it you’ll need the following
- XAMPP (Windows) or MAMP (Mac) These are tools that set up local servers on your machine so you can build a website offline.
- A Bootstrap template (I use startbootstrap.com)
- An idea of the content you want to make
- A CMS, Wordpress is the obvious choice due to it's simplicity and incredible docs but there are many others.
I’d strongly encourage you to publish your site You can hide with with a noindex tag if you are concerned about your sites look and feel. Remember you’re not a designer or a developer, you’re an SEO, so don’t be too hard on yourself if it isn’t pixel perfect. If you want to get online and publish your work.
- An FTP client (This is old school but simpler than doing SSH and Git. repos. This type of setup is for people who are serious about development)
- A domain name for your site (davidls.net and davidls.com are owned by me)
- A shared hosting platform, there are some conditions here but an affordable flexible low cost hosting plan used for this site is from Site Ground but there are so many options out there as well. GoDaddy is another large provider.
If you are using WordPress, try and build a custom theme. Use a form, play around with the template, break things and generally just have fun. If you publish your site you can examine it with a variety of tools and try and learn how to implement that optimisations you recommend. Things like updating the headers, implementing new image formats or HTTP/2 pushes will be brought to life. You’ll be better placed to communicate with your technical colleagues and bridge the gaps between the technical and non-technical audience.
Get to know the language then simplify it
So let me list out some complex language for you right now:
- Canonical HREFs
- Link velocity
- Interlinking rate
- txt
- Feature Content Recalibration
- xml
- org
- Link acquisition
- FOIT
- GLSX
These are all SEO words and acronyms. Some of theme are older and unused, some of them are in common use, some of them were used frequently but we're nonsense to begin with and truthfully, I completely made up 3 of them.
Language in SEO can be complex but it doesn’t have to be. The only way to get to know the language is to constantly read up on it. Point 1 and 2 will help you with that.
Once you have a grasp on what the words actually mean, imagine explaining that to a boardroom full of directors of a consultant engineering firm (One of my ex clients, don't worry, they got it).
How would you explain what your work is, why it’s important and how you measure it in terms of its SEO value and overall business value? These are the important questions that you’ll need to be able to answer and they all (except the made up ones) have clear and concise answers that tie back to overall business goals. This takes time and experience but it will come to you.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, especially for people starting out but doing even a couple of the suggestions from above will help you reach your goals. If you have questions reach out to me. I'd love to help.
