 If you hear about SEO, what comes to your mind? Oh, well, keywords, getting the content right sometimes, a good H1 title, that's probably the first thing that comes to my mind. But also a lot of myths and things I don't know about. 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? 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 like bust these myths. What can I help you with? What are the questions that come to your mind? Okay, so let's start with something simple. What is a search engine? All right, so a search engine is a platform or service or program, whatever you want to call it, that basically goes to 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. All right, but when he's heard of search engines, I also heard this word called crawling, is that a thing? 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 Medellin, right? Yes, you got it. 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 these purposes perfectly or best. And then we rank these higher than the others and show you the examples that we found from the index. So how do you know which results are more relevant to a given user? 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. Now, if you could give me like, you know, like top three things that I should consider, what would that be? Right. So us being developers originally, you probably want me to say, oh, yeah, use this framework or use that framework. That's not how it works. You have to have really good content. And that means you have content, 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 if your content says where you are, what you do, how you how you help me with what I'm trying to accomplish, that's fantastic. If you just have a page that says like, 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, five thousand or something like that, I'm not going to search for that because I don't know about it. I 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. OK. But if I if I'm exploring ice cream around me, I don't know what particular ice cream there is. If there's like a specific brand, fantastic. But that's not what I'm looking for. So speak the language that I'm using. So you're you're saying more like a pitch. It is like an elevator pitch. It's like an elevator pitch. Exactly. You wouldn't when 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 five thousand is fantastic. And you're like, yeah, that's insane. Does that do? Right. So do that. Do an elevator pitch and help us. OK. Put you in contact with the right people. So content is number one priority. Could you mention other two things that are important for the SEO? You're going to love them because they are technical. So the second biggest thing is make sure that you have meta tags that describe your content. So I 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're serving. So don't have a title for everything. The same title is bad. If you have titles that change through the content you're showing, that is fantastic. And frameworks have ways of doing that. So to consult the documentation, but there's definitely something something that helps with the content. And the last bit is performance. Hervet. Right. Yeah. Performance is fantastic. We're talking about it constantly, but we're probably missing out on the fact that it's also good for being discovered online. So performance is not just making my website faster, but it's also making my website more visible to others. Correct. OK. Because we want to make sure that the people clicking on your search results, clicking on your page, getting this content quickly. So that's one thing that we want to make sure as well. It's one of the many signals that we are looking at. But also it just helps your users, right? They get happier if I want ice cream really badly, then I get the page quicker. That's fantastic. Yeah. So if you want to look at performance, I highly recommend looking into hybrid rendering or server-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. OK. 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 their quicker optimizer servers, optimizer caching strategies. Make sure that your script doesn't have to run for like 60 seconds to fetch everything that you need. I know. 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. Certainly, yes. Or they should do it at least. They should. I hope that they do. 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? Right. So you're a web developer, right? Yes. You're built stuff on the Internet. Yeah. Do you want people to use it? Certainly, yes. 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. OK. 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 poppers 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, Medellin? Is that how you pronounce that? Perfect. So if you built the best PWA to order ice cream online in Medellin, then I don't know about that, especially if I come as a tourist. But if I type that into a search engine, like, order ice cream in Medellin, 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 upfront. And then I might pick from those, because normally they're pretty good. I think that covers all the questions I have. Fantastic. So you feel like ready to build stuff that is so cool. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being my guest. And I hope that this helps other developers as well. And developers and SEOs can be friends, I think. I think so, yes. I think so. Thank you. Oh, are we still on? Please stay tuned for another episode of SEO Mythbusting. Next time with Suze Hinton, we'll talk about what is Googlebot. So come back again and watch what happens.