MARTIN SPLITT: If you hear about SEO, what comes to your mind?
JUAN HERRERA: Oh, well keywords, getting the content right,
sometimes a good H1 title.
That's probably the first thing that comes to my mind.
MARTIN SPLITT: Those are my first things.
JUAN HERRERA: But also a lot of myths and things
I don't know about.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
People say a lot of things out there
about how to make your website stand in the top result.
But I don't really know how to achieve that, you know?
MARTIN SPLITT: Right.
Fair enough.
That's a really good question, how to achieve that.
And I think that's a perfect introduction into what we're
trying to do here.
We're trying to bust these myths.
What can I help you with?
What are the questions that come to your mind?
JUAN HERRERA: OK, so let's start with something simple.
What's a search engine?
MARTIN SPLITT: All right, so a search engine
is a platform or service or a program, whatever
you want to call it, that basically goes
through the internet content and tries to catalog it.
It works a little bit like in the library, right?
So you probably go to a library and ask the librarian,
where can I find a book on topic X, right?
That's what you do.
And then normally, it doesn't take
you to basically go through all the books in the library.
You just get the right books.
And that's what search engines do for you.
We find the right content for your purpose.
JUAN HERRERA: All right.
But when he's heard of search engines,
I also heard this word called crawling.
Is that a thing?
MARTIN SPLITT: That's a thing.
So the way that we are doing this--
or search engines do this--
is by first going through the entire internet.
And we have links from one page to the other.
So we are using that.
We start somewhere, with some URLs,
and then basically follow links from there on.
So we are basically crawling our way
through the internet one page by page, more or less.
And then once we have these pages, have found them,
have grabbed the content from the internet,
we need to understand it.
We need to figure out what is this content about
and what purpose does it serve?
So then that's the second stage, which is indexing.
So then we figure out, so this page is about ice cream.
This page is about ice cream in Miami.
This page is about marmalade, and stuff like that.
And then the last step is if you type something in,
you don't type in I want this particular thing here.
You just go like, I need ice cream.
Ice cream online Medillín, right?
JUAN HERRERA: Yes, you got it.
MARTIN SPLITT: So we then basically look into our index
and find the ones that are serving this purpose.
And then we try to figure out which
is the one that serves this purpose as perfectly or best.
And then we rank these higher than the others
and show you the examples that we found from the index.
JUAN HERRERA: So how do you know which
one is-- which results are more relevant to a given user?
MARTIN SPLITT: That's a really good question.
We have over 200 signals to do so.
So we look at things like the title, the meta description,
the actual content that you've got on your page, images,
links, all sorts of things.
It's a very complicated question to answer what ranks you best.
But yeah, we look at a bunch of signals.
JUAN HERRERA: Now, if you could give me,
like, top three things that I should consider,
what would that be?
MARTIN SPLITT: Right.
So us being developers originally,
you probably want me to say, oh yeah, use this framework
or use that framework.
JUAN HERRERA: Yeah.
MARTIN SPLITT: That's not how it works.
You have to have really good content.
And that means you have to have content that
serves a purpose for the user.
It's something that users need and/or want.
Optimally, they need it and want it, like ice cream.
So if your content says where you are, what you do,
how you help me with what I'm trying to accomplish,
that's fantastic.
If you just have a page that says,
we are a fantastic company and we
have plenty of products, that's not serving a purpose.
So you want to make sure to serve the purpose of the people
who you want to attract and who you want
to interact with your content.
And you want to make sure that you're using words
that I would be using.
If you use a very specific term for your ice cream,
let's say like smooth cream 5,000 or something like that,
I'm not going to search for that because I don't know about it.
I'm just going to go like, I need ice cream.
It's good to mention it somewhere so that I know,
if I look for that trademark, I find it as well.
But if I'm exploring ice cream around me,
I don't know what particular ice cream there is.
If there's a specific brand, fantastic.
But that's not what I'm looking for.
So speak the language that I'm using as a user.
JUAN HERRERA: So you're saying more like a pitch.
MARTIN SPLITT: It is like a pitch.
JUAN HERRERA: Like an elevator pitch.
MARTIN SPLITT: It's like an elevator pitch.
JUAN HERRERA: Right.
MARTIN SPLITT: Exactly.
You wouldn't-- when we two meet and you have a fantastic
product or I have a fantastic product,
I wouldn't go like yeah, the blurb master 5,000,
it's fantastic.
And you're like--
JUAN HERRERA: Yeah, it doesn't say anything.
MARTIN SPLITT: What does that do, right?
So do that.
Do an elevator pitch and help us put you in contact
with the right people.
JUAN HERRERA: OK, so content is number one priority.
Could you mention another two things
that are important for this, [INAUDIBLE]??
MARTIN SPLITT: Yes.
You're going to love them because they're technical.
So the second biggest thing is make sure
that you have meta tags that describe your contents
and have a meta description, because that gives you
the possibility to have a little snippet in the search results
that let people find out which of the many results
might be the ones that help them the best.
And have page titles that are specific to the page
that you are serving.
So don't have a title for everything.
The same title is bad.
If you have titles that change with the content you're
showing, that is fantastic.
And frameworks have ways of doing that,
so consult the documentation.
But there is definitely something
that helps with the content.
And the last bit is performance.
JUAN HERRERA: I've heard of it.
MARTIN SPLITT: Right?
JUAN HERRERA: Yeah.
MARTIN SPLITT: Performance is fantastic.
We are talking about it constantly.
But we are probably missing out on the fact
that it's also good for being discovered online.
JUAN HERRERA: So performance is not just
making my website faster, but it's also
making my website more visible to others?
MARTIN SPLITT: Correct.
Because we want to make sure that the people clicking
on your search result is like clicking on your page,
getting this content quickly.
So that's one thing that we want to make sure as well.
So that's one of the many signals that we are looking at.
But also, it just helps your users.
They get happier.
If I want ice cream really badly then I get the page quicker,
that's fantastic.
So if you want to look at performance,
I highly recommend looking into hybrid rendering and service
side rendering if you can, because that
gets the content quicker to the users usually, right?
Also, you might have bots that don't run JavaScript.
So Googlebot does that.
But not everyone else does it, necessarily.
So you want to make sure to probably figure out
something like dynamic rendering if you
don't want to make code changes, because I understand
we are all pressed for time.
We have lots of bugs and features
to fulfill and work through.
So if you can't change the code, dynamic rendering
might be something that gets you there if there's rendering
issues with your content.
But besides that, I would say definitely
look into performance optimization.
Get the content quicker.
Get the first contentful paint in there quicker.
Optimize your servers.
Optimize your caching strategies.
Make sure that your script doesn't
have to run for 60 seconds to fetch everything that you need.
JUAN HERRERA: Oh, no.
MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah, so those are things that you
should definitely look into.
And I guess performance is something
that pretty much everyone in the developer community
is looking into.
JUAN HERRERA: Certainly, yes.
Or they should, at least.
MARTIN SPLITT: They should.
I hope that they do.
JUAN HERRERA: OK, so we already discussed all these basics
around SEO and search engines and how to position my website
in the top search results.
Now the question is, why is it so important for companies
to rank in the top results?
MARTIN SPLITT: Right, so you're a web developer, right?
JUAN HERRERA: Yes.
MARTIN SPLITT: You have built stuff on the internet?
JUAN HERRERA: Yep.
MARTIN SPLITT: Do you want people to use it?
JUAN HERRERA: Certainly, yes.
MARTIN SPLITT: Certainly, right?
So in order to make sure that people can use it,
they have to know about it.
And unless you are probably one of the really big players,
you might not--
and even for the big players, if they launch something new,
you might not know about it.
And you're not looking specifically for products.
You're looking for something that serves a purpose for you.
I want to know how I built this thing with a framework.
I want to know where to find the best ice
cream in the place I am in.
I want to find the cutest dogs and puppers online.
So I have a purpose.
I don't know who serves this purpose, necessarily.
So if you built the best ice cream PWA ever in, let's say,
Medillín?
Is that how you pronounce that?
JUAN HERRERA: That's right.
Perfect.
MARTIN SPLITT: So if you built the best PWA to order ice cream
online in Medillín, then I don't know about that,
especially if I come as a tourist.
But if I type it into a search engine,
like order ice cream in Medillín,
and then it goes like, hey, this PWA does this trick,
you want to be the first or the first couple
of, because I'm not going to go to page 99 and go like oh yeah,
this might be the perfect thing, because Google and other search
engines are trying to figure out what is the best for this
purpose and then show me those up front.
And then I might pick from those because normally, they're
pretty good.
JUAN HERRERA: I think that covers
all the questions I have.
MARTIN SPLITT: Fantastic.
JUAN HERRERA: Perfect.
MARTIN SPLITT: So you feel ready to build stuff that is--
JUAN HERRERA: Oh, certainly.
MARTIN SPLITT: Excellent.
JUAN HERRERA: I can't wait.
MARTIN SPLITT: That is so cool.
Thank you so much for being here.
JUAN HERRERA: Martin, thank you.
MARTIN SPLITT: Thanks for being my guest.
And I hope that this helps other developers as well.
And developers and SEOs can be friends, I think.
JUAN HERRERA: I think so. yes.
MARTIN SPLITT: I think so.
Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Oh, are we still on?
Please stay tuned for another episode of "SEO Mythbusting."
Next time with Suz Hinton, we'll talk about what is Googlebot?
So come back again and watch what happens.