Introduction

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>> I entered web development from the desktop programming world as sort of a general contractor, and I would step in as the tech co founder for entrepreneurs that maybe didn't know a developer. They didn't swim in those circles. And oftentimes I would be the person who would take their idea and implement the first version of their product for them.

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And SEO is incredibly important when you're just trying to sort of make your first, impression on people and I went from there to after a couple jobs working at Yahoo, where I was the UI architect for their ads and data division. And there I saw SEO from a different angle, the sort of the inorganic side of things, as I helped them build out their new ad platform.

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And, there, I got an inside view in terms of how these different ad platforms, slice up audiences so that they can help companies target exactly who they're after. So I'm gonna share some of those first insights I have from from the inside, about the ad world. And then today I am a full time developer trainer.

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I spend a lot of my time working with big tech companies, one of which is LinkedIn, where I am responsible for training all of their front end engineers of three or 400 of them at this point and ever growing. And and one of the areas that we're very focused on there is how do we make sure that when people share things, the the experience for people that see that shared URL is as rich as possible, right.

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So I'm sure that some of you realize that if you share links for some websites on Facebook or on LinkedIn or on Twitter or even on like Slack and iMessage now, sometimes you get a very vanilla experience, where it's just the URL. And sometimes you see some nice imagery and a title and a description pop up often in like a rich tile.

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So we're gonna talk about today the most current best practices for doing that kind of thing and making it so that when you do get seen and when you are shared, you are putting your best foot forward. So what I'm showing you today is recent as of this January, so just a few months ago.

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And it's gonna be the most. I've refreshed all my content just for this class. So it's gonna be the most up to date, SEO, crash course that I could possibly give you at this point in time. And with that, I will kick things off. So in terms of how the day is going to be structured, we're going to divide it into four topics.

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We'll begin with an overview of traditional SEO. So this will, sort of be the the, the softer side of SEO in terms of like it being the less technical stuff. We'll talk about finding keywords. What you can do if you sort of run to the equivalent of writer's block where you can't you might know what your business is all about but you can't be wanna find like 300 keywords and you just you blank out after a couple dozen.

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How do you expand that? What are the tools? How do you identify which are the good keywords that are that are valuable for your business to invest in versus others and we will cover in traditional SEO, the most basic metadata that you can put in your HTML. And I lump it into traditional SEO because this will cover the stuff that has been around for about 10 years or more.

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Then after that, we will move on to structured data And this is the kind of thing that enriches links when they're shared and enriches search results when they show up as something that's relevant. So not only do we have things like Facebook, Open Graph and Twitter cards, we're gonna touch on some Pinterest rich tile metadata.

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But Google is using schema.org structured data to enrich search results whenever they show up. So more than ever, we have control over how our search result is rendered in the search engine. And it's not just Google. All of the search engines are rallying around the same community approach to doing this and an investment and learning how to leverage this kind of data pays dividends in multiple ways.

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For example, even in HTML emails, you might notice that if you use Gmail, some certain buttons show up on the right side of those received emails that say, view this airline ticket or when you get a calendar invite you can RSVP, like right in the header of the email.

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This is all schema.org structured data. So mastering this and getting a handle on sort of what works and how far to go without spending all day building metadata. That is a great skill to have and it is a great way to stand out as a, as a high tech, sort of modern and polished company among your competitors, right.

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It's it's one of these things where you might be sending the first email or your customer gets this fancy new button. And they could assume this person has a special relationship with Google in order to get this enriched thing. So we'll go over metadata and in depth and we will actually end up taking sort of an optimized website.

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And deploying it. And we'll get some hands on experience using some tools that can help you identify like how your metadata is seen by the various people. You should care about Facebook, Twitter, Google, and so on. Then we'll move on to mobile optimizations. So being friendly to mobile devices having a web presence that is a good experience on a mobile device is increasingly important for two reasons.

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One is that mobile traffic has long ago eclipsed desktop, web traffic. But also now you get penalized in Google's mobile index if you offer a subpar mobile experience. So you'll actually get dinged if you don't at least adhere to the minimum level of an acceptable mobile experience. So it's not just.

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It's not just that, you could stand out, you can actually suffer and you could suppress your organic search, ranking by not following some of the best practices. So we'll make sure no one who watches this class falls into that category. And in fact, we'll do some things that might make you stand out amongst your competitors.

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In terms of being rated more highly for mobile friendliness. Finally we're going to round out the day doing some work with accelerated mobile pages or AMP pages. So this is a new open source technology that allows you to render articles In a way where search engines can offer a really fast loading experience.

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So if you have used Google recently, and you see news articles pop up at the very top of your feed, that's prime real estate right there. You can tap these articles and it will be a nearly instant experience as that article is loaded on your device. So we're gonna build one of these ourselves.

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There are some different rules we have to play by that are important in terms of how they're able to get these things to work so fast. But this is another way where if you offer an AMP page as part of your web presence, now you're eligible to be in that that Carousel of The content right at the top of the search results.

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Right? So, this is something that, even amongst organic SEO search results, you can stand out by being at the very, very top and being displayed as richly as possible, and as prominently as possible, which is what this is all about.