SEO

Projected Time

30-45 minutes

10 minutes for video walkthrough of slides(Lesson)
20 minutes for Guided & Independent Practice
15 minutes for Check for Understanding

Prerequisites

HTML
VS Code

Motivation

Google is where ~80% of all user searches originate. If you want your users to find your website, using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in your content helps your site stand out to Google’s mysterious algorithms.

Why is Search Engine Optimization important?

The majority of search engines users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain visitors to your web site or customers to your online store, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions.
SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a web site.
Users trust search engines and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching, increases the web site’s trust.
SEO is good for the social promotion of your web site. People who find your web site by searching Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels.
SEO is important for the smooth running of a big web site. Web sites with more than one author can benefit from SEO in a direct and indirect way.Their direct benefit is increase in search engine traffic and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two web sites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized web site is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.(reliablesoft.net)

Objectives

Apprentices will be able to:

Define SEO, its purpose, and how it works
Learn a few tools (Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google My Business) to measure and experiment with SEO and site performance
Learn the basics of creating SEO-friendly content

Specific Things to Learn

What we know about Google search algorithms (what it prioritizes in ranking a site)
Technical details to improve local search results (backlinks, reviews, city, etc)
Generating SEO-friendly content (content length, titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, custom/secure URLs, etc) to optimize for search rankings
SEO and analytical tools to analyze site performance– for mobile-friendly use, understanding the keywords used to find your site, and speed suggestions for optimal user-friendliness

Lesson

Read through lesson slides SEO
Video walkthrough of lesson slides SEO (8 min)

Common Mistakes / Misconceptions

The overall goal is to make your site findable, but don’t forget about:

Positive user experience (site looks professional, easy to navigate, meets expectations)
Sustainable/maintainable strategy (SEO shouldn’t be so complicated you can’t keep up)
Ensuring you’re targeting and securing the right users

Guided Practice

Find and review a screenshot or actual dashboard for Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google My Business.
Browse and identify a few real examples of SEO-friendly content at work– from initial search to opening the page and examining its metadata. May be helpful to prepare some examples in advance, especially if Internet access is unreliable.

Independent Practice

Review/identify SEO-friendly principles in another example set of content you find yourself. Consider the page title, SEO title, meta description, content, how quickly it loads (try opening it on a mobile device, if possible). What might this site do differently to improve? Or what is it doing that’s likely working well?

Challenge

Review your own portfolio site, connect it to some of the tools learned in this lesson, and make more SEO-friendly updates to the content, metadata, tags, etc.

Check for Understanding

What do you mean by SEO?
What is SEO friendly URL?
Mention some steps which can be taken to make a SEO-friendly content.
What is Google Search Console?
What are the benefits of generating a SEO-friendly content?
What tools do you use for SEO?

SEO