What is SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the visibility of website pages on search engines in order to attract more relevant traffic.

From search engine view, SEO is also about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site.

SEO can also refer to a position (Search Engine Optimizer)

Google provide many reports and tools to help to improve website SEO. Check here to see HOW Google help you improve your webiste SEO.

How Google Search works

Crawling:

  • Google downloads text, images, and videos from pages it found on the internet with automated programs called crawlers.
  • Google constantly look for new and updated pages and add them to its list of known pages. This process is called “URL discovery”.
  • During the crawl, Google renders the page and runs any JavaScript it finds using a recent version of Chrome, similar to how your browser renders pages you visit.
  • Crawling depends on whether Google’s crawlers can access the site. For example, robots.txt rules preventing Googlebot’s access to the page.
  • Some JavaScript sites may use SPA where the initial HTML does not contain the actual content and Google needs to execute JavaScript before being able to see the actual page content that JavaScript generates. Googlebot queues all pages for rendering.

Indexing:

  • After a page is crawled, Google tries to understand what the page is about. This stage is called indexing and it includes processing and analyzing the textual content and key content tags and attributes, such as <title> elements and alt attributes, images, videos, and more. And stores the information in the Google index.
  • During the indexing process, Google determines if a page is a duplicate of another page on the internet or canonical.
  • Indexing also depends on the content of the page and its metadata.

Serving search results:

  • When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the highest quality and most relevant to the user’s query.
  • Search Console might tell you that a page is indexed, but you don’t see it in search results. Check it.

Google give guides to Maintain your website’s SEO

Control how Google crawls and indexes

  • Work around Canonical URL a canonical URL is the URL of a page that Google chose as the most representative from a set of duplicate pages.
  • Make sure your resource are accessible
  • Robots.txt
  • Use Sitemaps
  • Internationalized or multi-lingual sites
  • Follow crawling and indexing best practices
  • Help Google understand your site
  • Follow Google guidelines

Google Search Console

Search Console helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results

Search Console offers tools and reports for the following actions:

  • Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site.
  • Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
  • View Google Search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more.
  • Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.
  • Show you which sites link to your website.

Rich Results Test

Rich Results Test can Test your publicly accessible page to see which rich results can be generated by the structured data it contains.

What is structured data markup

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

Adding structured data can enable search results that are more engaging to users and might encourage them to interact more with your website, which are called rich results.

For example, here is a JSON-LD structured data snippet that might appear on a recipe page, describing the title of the recipe, the author of the recipe, and other details:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Party Coffee Cake</title>
    <script type="application/ld+json">
    {
      "@context": "https://schema.org/",
      "@type": "Recipe",
      "name": "Party Coffee Cake",
      "author": {
        "@type": "Person",
        "name": "Mary Stone"
      },
      "datePublished": "2018-03-10",
      "description": "This coffee cake is awesome and perfect for parties.",
      "prepTime": "PT20M"
    }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h2>Party coffee cake recipe</h2>
    <p>
      <i>by Mary Stone, 2018-03-10</i>
    </p>
    <p>
      This coffee cake is awesome and perfect for parties.
    </p>
    <p>
      Preparation time: 20 minutes
    </p>
  </body>
</html>

References