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The "SEO & Security" Lesson is part of the full, Getting a Software Engineering Job, v2 course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

Jerome shares a few SEO tips to elevate the visibility of a portfolio. Candidates should ensure their portfolio ranks as well as possible for relevant keywords and is free of security issues like insecure or spam-like content.

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Transcript from the "SEO & Security" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> SEO, how many of you have heard about SEO. Nice, you'd be amazed how many times I don't hear that, I'm in rooms like the younger youngins they don't know anything about SEO. They haven't heard about SEO, they don't know why they should care about SEO they're like shouldn't SEO go to someone else while there are whole companies to handle SEO.

[00:00:19]
SEO is very important because you want to be able to optimize your websites for search is much as possible and especially where search engine optimization is going to be a part of AI within this week, for Bing, right? So you need to make sure that your work is able to get to the top.

[00:00:42]
When you type your in, it shouldn't be, what's your name again?
>> Cocowong.
>> Cocowong, so it should be when they type Cocowong in, it should not be Cocowong from Little Rock or Cocowong from Chile or somewhere. It should be you, right? That's what you want. You know what?

[00:01:03]
This person's, prison,, record picture. They're like, wait, girl, she went to jail, nope. Like, because [LAUGH] I've seen it. I've seen, like, even it happened to me. Somebody from Ohio had their prison thing up. And I was, that's. I got to fix my SEOstat. So you have to think about that when you think about SEO, you got be first, like there's like four Jerome harder ways and I'm first and I'm sort of point where one Jerome harder way is now named as he has.

[00:01:39]
I chase all his stuff online or Jerome Ramon Hardaway because he's like people keep reaching out to me thinking I'm you. And I'm like it we're friends now we all started a podcast called drove and drove out of a joke like [LAUGH]. It would have been hilarious like, it's awesome.

[00:01:56]
That's how immature I am though.
>> What does SEO look like in practice?
>> SEO looks like in practice. So let's start from the most granular situation. You're a text editor, right? In your head, there should be a section where you're adding the words that you wanna be searched for when it comes to your text editor.

[00:02:19]
Or let's say, well, because you're doing the API, so yours is a little different, but let's say someone brought up next.JS. Next.js actually has an SEO like tag page that only focuses only on the SEO from that, right? So, when I'm thinking about SEO, like for instance, when I'm with Vets2Code, I'm looking at the SEO tag, Next.js component, I'm looking at those words that we have in there.

[00:02:45]
They're all about veterans, JavaScript, they're all about learning how to code. Software engineering, military spouses, things of that, these are the words, keywords that I want to be found for, when it comes to the Internet, right? So like that is what, SEO is at its core, right? We're using that or let's say I don't want my site like follow for SEO because it's not ready, right?

[00:03:09]
So now I'm on a robots.txt file and I'm putting a no follow and a robots.txt because I don't want the I don't want the Internet to index my site just yet, right. Things like that. That's what SEO is essentially. And there's also like a page, I think it's called Google Console.

[00:03:27]
Where you can put your LinkedIn and have them in a start indexing as well, search console.
>> So you can almost think of it as SEO for a website is kind of like making your resume ATS ready sort of.
>> Yes, so,
>> It's parsed by the machines correctly in the right way.

[00:03:44]
>> Or that is easier to find, right like and the more backlinks you have, the higher your SEO is, right. Like that's one thing that they don't they took. The larger the website is and not more of the back links have they have, the higher the SEO becomes, right.

[00:04:00]
That SEO that you see people chase back links like it's Pokémon. They're just got to catch them all. It's like okay that's cool like you're too going too hard. Let's back
>> Links like from somebody else linking, do you?
>> Yeah, someone else linking to them or another company linking to them, things of that nature, right?

[00:04:17]
You wanna try to stay within your brand, like your brand atmosphere or your brand ecosystem, and that's where. There's no SQL really, shines, right, like if everybody who found that Sukkot was looking for a veterinarian then we would have that's horrible SEO. Even though you know, people were looking for veterinarians who code I'm like, why do you need a coded veterinarian?

[00:04:40]
Are you talking about like the animal is going in? I don't understand. But like that is what we would have to. That's what we try to we avoid right with our SEO. Okay, web performance, utilizing web performance best practices. So lazy loading, i.e, having images load after paint and so they glow so they don't hold up the rest of the loading process.

[00:05:03]
Code splitting, caching, so we have, how many of us have had experience with caching a website, like the first load of pain. Frst time you pull up a website it moves a little bit slower but then the second time you pull it up as fast because it's already been cached, right, all that data is already there It just pulls it up, that was pretty snazzy, right?

[00:05:25]
So we need to practice and have those implemented as well. Those are good web performance, helps with the speed of the website, helps with you getting the data and tools and resources that you need out there faster. And it's gonna reduce, it reduces your load times. Helps your search ranking students so it goes hand in hand with SEO, remember speed helps SEO.

[00:05:50]
Security best practices, now this starts come into play when we started doing a lot of things for. Think of it like when started when our forms are just starting our databases. Start even with our light once we push to live to the web, this is when security starts coming to play, right, I just can't push live to the web and I have HTTPS, right?

[00:06:10]
And it's your site on safe, you're going to get there. So we're gonna go to your site and it's going to be, hey, this site is gonna save. What do you recommend that you want to continue? Or you just want to go back, right? Everybody's saying that pop up happened, right?

[00:06:22]
Well, that's because someone's SSL cert certificate is expired or they use HTTP protocol instead of HTTPS protocol, right, like these are all the things that you have to think of when you're starting to push to the web. Now when you're thinking of, if you're going to have a blog, you're going to need a database to store the information, i.e, the text and the images of your blog, right?

[00:06:48]
How do we have to secure that database with correct passwords and correct security procedures? If we're going to have login authentication forms. Like if we want anything that the human being has to interact with the information in, we're gonna wanna make sure that a, have Captcha to make sure it's a human, and b, make sure they can't do cross-site scripting or anything else of that nature in our forms.

[00:07:14]
And C, be able to like not you know send us spammy content like with a bot, right. So these are all things that we have to think about when we're you know building our websites once we start wanting people to interact with them and that's what we want.

[00:07:29]
We want our websites to be interacted with people, right? So just think about that when you're building your website, make sure you think of, you keep that in.

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