 I'm not an SEO expert. I'm very tentative about anything SEO. SEO sells like hotcakes, and everyone has been promising for years that we are going to put your website on the first page on Google. And that is something that is an unachievable target in the way that you cannot control that target. You cannot say that that is a guaranteed outcome that can happen. Another thing to note is that there is no universal first page. In the sense that every user sees a different first page at any point, like if I am logged in as Sovik and Google has a little bit of my history and knows a little bit about me, it will show a different set of results to me than someone else. So even if you see yourself on the very first page on your search, you shouldn't be very happy about it because it doesn't mean much in the larger web context. Another interesting thing is that because of this reason for very unexplicable services, it's being sold as SEO for years. And if you search for Snake Oil, and if you search for SEO and Snake Oil, you'll get nearly like 22 lakh results on Google. So right back in 2009, a little before I started my own web design studio, there was an article that talked about this. So I could probably click on the link here. And here's the article that talks about this. Spammers, you will do opportunities. And how SEO is often sold like a Snake Oil salesman. You don't know how it works, but you still end up selling SEO as a service. And clients also don't understand how SEO itself has been working. So this session, in a way, we would try to discuss. And I try to talk about how is it that SEO works and how do people discover a website. And then I'll go on to the technical SEO part. So the second point over here, because of the disconnection, I'm running a little behind. So I'll just continue over here. And after the end of this, I'll probably take a little pause to ask if anyone has any questions. So how do people usually find a website? And if that is a question that you have to answer, the first way you can, one of the things that you can say is people search. People search on search engines like Google, like Bing, DuckDuckGo, any other tool they might be using. And they end up, and they also search. These days, search engines are also integrated inside many operating systems. So if you're searching on your phone, if often the search also gets conducted on the web. And if you have to optimize for people who are going to reach your website through search, that is usually a low-expense activity for a business or any organization if you have to optimize for people coming in from organic search. It's a moderate effort because you need to keep ensuring that you're maintaining a certain degree of quality, a certain rate of updating things and all. And it can give you a component ROI. So what I mean by a component ROI is that you won't see results immediately. It will start coming, say, some months down the line. And as more and more months pass, a few years pass, you can have a pretty good authority on certain search terms or certain search subjects. And lots of people are going to end up finding you. And at that point of time, your ongoing effort still continues to be a moderate effort, which is why I'm calling it a low-expense moderate effort route to make sure that people are able to discover your site through search. The next is, say, social networks. So that can be a place where people discover your website or simply stumbling upon your site on platforms where customers or users already are. And they just find your link. Now, being there on social media and all is like a medium-expense high-effort route. And why I'm saying that is because you have to constantly make sure that certain posts, links, offers, or updates about you is getting pushed on the social network. And anything that goes in the social network space it goes away within hours or days. And new fresh content keeps coming on. So you have to constantly do the effort of at a high rate keep pushing out these micro-consumable content on these social networks. And therefore, it also becomes a little bit more expensive. And the return on the social network can be spotty. People who are already aware of you might get bored of you after some time they might leave. Some of them will be interested. Some of them will be really interesting. They'll share further. You might suddenly see a spike of people coming in from social network. And then it will be spotty. It will be good sometimes. Sometimes it will be bad. It will keep changing. And ads is the third way in which people can come to your website and reach your website. And this is something that is obviously a high expense because you're paying platforms which hold a large number of eyeballs, whatever that platform might be. That could be the search. That could be social network, Facebook, Instagram, anything else. It's also a low to moderate effort because you do need to strategize what ad to put in, constantly publish those ads, produce them, publish them, and so on. But it will give you a very quick return. So very quickly, lots of people will see you and they'll land up on your website. If you have any thoughts around this point, how people come to your website, feel free to ask a question, raise your hand or something. And I can try to take those questions and take that as a discussion. But broadly, these are the three ways people come in and find a website. And I'm only excluding things like re-engagement strategies, like, for example, subscription newsletter and all. I'm keeping that out from there because over here, I'm mostly talking about discovery of your website rather than being updated of new things because then over there, also, there is a world of different things that you can do. But over here, I'm mostly talking about discovery of a new site. So I'll continue to my next section if anyone has any questions. Keep asking, raising hand and putting it on the comment or the Q&A tab so that I can see them. So the next point that I want to discuss is how a search engine actually works, which is that if you are focusing on this part search, although in reality, whenever we are talking about SEO, we really mean that we want to get more and more new people to our website, more and more new people to whatever we are publishing. So we don't necessarily, when I go later in technical SEO, you would notice that it goes beyond the scope of search as well into the other parameters also to a certain extent. But let me start with how a search engine works and what are ranking signals and all. Okay, ranking signal is something that I discussed a little later, but anyways. So one is people search on search engine to find things that is something that I think everyone is well aware of. And if I have to compare it and take an analogy in the real world, I think one can compare it to any of the food delivery or aggregator services like Zomato, Swiggy, Uber Eats, any of these things that you may have used. And think of it how it happens in the real world. There are hundreds of restaurants out there. Zomato, Swiggy or any food delivery aggregator service wants to make sure that you as a customer connect with these restaurants through them. And therefore they'll send out people on the ground to go around collecting menu cards, addresses and data from each and every restaurant. That's how they started until they became very popular. Now restaurants might go to Zomato or go to Swiggy and submit their information, but earlier when they started, they would actually send people to each and every E-tree out there to collect their data and they aggregate that data on their website. And that process of going out, collecting the information and aggregating it is similar to what in the search space we call it scrolling. So what do search engines do is they are nothing but programs that crawl the web or they just crawl the internet. And it is in the interest of the food delivery aggregator to cover all restaurants that are around because if they can say that come to us and you will find every restaurant on your city, you won't miss any. And if you know one of your local restaurant that is close by, you will find on this platform. If that is a kind of assurity you can give then more and more people will trust them. And the same with Google, that is Google wants to make sure that they are able to have as many websites crawled and indexed on their service. The other thing is that all the food delivery aggregators have a very customer centric model, something like we want to make sure that you get the best food experience or you get the tastiest food, et cetera, et cetera. And the same thing is something that Google wants to do as well, very customer centric or very user centric to say that that is a search engine, their business is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful for everyone, essentially. So that's the idea of what Google wants to do. They want to connect every individual who are there online, searching for certain information to that information and at the highest quality website that can fulfill that information. So that's how a search engine works in a way. So search, the ranking signal bit I'll just cover in the next point. If anyone has any questions around this, feel free to ask. So I'll keep repeating that question at every section because I have reasonable amount of time to discuss each point in a greater detail if you're interested or else I'll keep moving on. The next is now what is search engine optimization, really, what we are trying to do? Search engine optimization is a thing wherein we are trying to make sure that the search engines, which is really your friend or your agent in a way, is able to do its job. That's all we are trying to do. What we want to do is if Google has a focus on something, then Google should be able to facilitate it. If I take back the food analogy, if I say that I want to make myself optimized for Zomato or a Swiggy or something like that, I would make sure that my menu cards are well-printed or they are well-structured. I have a board outside my restaurant so that a person who is going on a two-wheeler is able to spot my restaurant and quickly is able to reach my restaurant. You know that they are looking for you and you help them reach them faster. That's broadly what you're trying to do as a part of search engine optimization. Now, what this means is you have to understand what are their needs and motivations as a search engine. So I've basically boiled it down to two questions, like what does a crawler need, a search engine crawler? It is to be able to reach your pages, your web pages, website that is there. It should be able to read your pages. It should be able to understand your pages and just note that a crawler is a blind user, a deaf user, a fairly stupid user in the sense that doesn't possess, although the intelligence of these crawlers are increasing and increasing further, it would be hard to, or it would still be probably inaccurate to say they can match a human intelligence. At this point of time, maybe sometime decades down the line, they might become more intelligent than humans. But at this point of time, just note that these are software programs that are coming and trying to read your site. They're not able to see your site. They can't hear your site. They try to just get those text pieces, those images, absorb them and try to make sense of them. And therefore they need the code to be clean, the website to be accessible. That text is better than everything else for them to understand because text is probably the most accessible piece of information. Images can, all algorithms are improving slowly, but images can get hard to understand. JavaScript dependence is low. That is something that would be better. Although I would add that Google as a search engine have started saying that they are processing JavaScript these days, but that is not something that you can really rely on yet. It will take some time before JavaScript can be processed really well. And more importantly, Google isn't the only crawler that's out there just because it's one of the most abated by one of the largest organizations in the world or the richest organization in the world. It is probably ahead of the curve than many other crawlers that are out there. But for us to be able to make sure that we are crawler friendly, we should probably rely less on code execution at the crawler end. So these are the things that if we can make sure that these elements are there in our code and these are slightly technical in nature. It's like trying to understand how does a program or a software read your content as opposed to how a human perceives your content. So if you are able to understand that, then you will be able to provide the basic need of what a search crawler requires. The next point is that what does a search company favor or what does a search company want? And so as I pointed out, the goal of Google or any other search company is to make sure that they are able to serve their users best. So if I'm a person who is searching, they want to know as much about me so that they can give me the best results so that I can have a continued reliance and trust on their service that I make sure that Google continues to be my default search engine and search continues to be my preferred way of browsing the internet or finding things on the internet. And then they come up with certain parameters that what will make sure that the users are served best. One is, of course, I just want to outrightly say that of course they want you to connect you to a content that is relevant, right? So that is better quality content, content that is interesting and relevant, that is something there. But they are also caring about whether your site is mobile friendly. Is it secure? Is it performant? How fast is it? Even language can be a barrier in the sense that if someone is searching in a particular local language, Google would want to make sure that sites that are there in those local languages, they are sent to such sites so that they are able to read and consume it. At the end of the day, search engines, what they want to do is they want to make a right match and prefer a good user experience. So all else being equal or I won't say all else being equal. I would rather say it's not a perfect world that two websites will have exactly the same quality of content. But provided that two websites pass the benchmark of content relevance and all, then the website experience becomes one of the most important factors that Google or other search engines consider to rank you high on their search results. So what does the experience experience mean? As I pointed out, mobile friendliness, security, performance, and many other things that are out there. These are all used in the ranking bid that I said that I'll cover in this part. All these factors and parameters convert into something called ranking signals and a service like Google has many, probably a couple of hundred ranking signals that are out there. They are not documented. They are like the Coke recipe or the Coke formula. That's their secret sauce. They will not tell you everything but they will tell you enough that they believe you should know so that you can optimize your own website to work well with Google. So they do outrightly specify some things that these are the things that you must do in order to make sure that Google is able to crawl your site and work with your site. And these factors act as ranking signals and these ranking signals inform their search algorithm about which page should be prioritized higher in their search results. So that's broadly how search engines itself work. So you have a certain set of parameters. If you optimize your website on those set of parameters, your content is relevant, Google is able to crawl you and Google is able to see that you are delivering a good high quality experience to your users, then Google will rank you higher. It just basically boils down to something like this. If there are any questions around this part, I can take that or I can just continue. I'll just carry on. But if anyone has any questions, feel free to drop that in this way. All right, so the next point is that I have is how SEO services are different from technical SEO and why do I believe, and I want to state this, I do believe that technical SEO is something that one should prioritize over the latter. I have just a few basic points over here and this is something that I expect more to be a discussion, but I'll just speak out my mind for a few minutes over here. So technical SEO is all about technical intervention. So what are the technical interventions you can do to make sure that your website is optimized for the search engine, search engines, essentially. Now, but then aside from the technical intervention, you need to do some strategic planning as well. Now, strategic planning, what should I be talking about? If I take a simple example like, say I'm a T-shirt company as an example and I want to sell T-shirts or it could also be that I'm a non-profit and I am talking about say the health sector as an example, we can take one or both the cases. For the T-shirt company, someone has to think about, okay, what are the latest fashion trends? What are the things that we are doing? What are the problems people might be facing with other T-shirts that are out there? And you would be constantly writing, talking, publishing about, oh, my stitching is great. My quality of the material is really good. Or you might be actually seeing relevance to different use cases. So a sport specific T-shirt or a comfort wear T-shirt or a home use T-shirt and things like that. You will think of which are the several places or ways in which people might be thinking or thinking about their clothing, thinking about their apparel and you will have to produce some interesting information around it. That's the strategy part that you need to talk. You need to know what are people thinking about? What are people talking about? What are people, what potentially people are searching about? And if you're running a T-shirt business, you most likely know that and that is how you come up with your product in the first place. Same with, as I said, the non-profit which is talking about health sector, you might be optimizing your website for two different use cases. One is you might be looking for more funding. So you might be talking about why this is a sector which requires, needs a lot of fun. What are the impact possibilities out there and also so that you can catch the eyeballs of a potential donor out there? And similarly, on the other hand, you might be actually trying to reach out to the end beneficiary or other partners out there in which case you might have to imagine and think about, okay, what are the different activities and collaborations I can do? What are the challenges that other partners might be facing which I can fulfill? Strategize your information, strategize your content, talk about it, write about it, post about it, publish conversations around it, speak out those things. So that strategic planning is required. And again, if you're running an organizational, if you're running a website, there's a very, very good chance that you know what people need, you know what people want and you need to put in the work to make sure that your information aligns to your end user or your target customer. But this strategic planning should not be SEO focused in the sense that if you are talking anything about the quality of clothes or the utility of clothes in sports space or in comfort wear or in casual home wear or anything like that, those are things that people are generally talking about. You could use those terms while you're pitching to an investor. You can use those terms while you're pitching to a customer. You can use those terms when you're pitching to a manufacturer or your vendors and things like that. And they are universally known words, universally understood language of communication. That's what you're using. You are not focusing on SEO. You're focusing on making sure you're able to communicate. So I'd rather say focus on communication rather than SEO. And there is no need to outsmart the system. There is nothing, there is no need to do something wherein you are going to feed certain things to the search engines that are out there, which would in turn show, make sure that your website would come up. Instead, focus on the users or the customers because that is what actually rewards and that is what actually matters even for the search engines at the end of the day. And keyword-based thinking, stuffing is dated. Many other strategies have now become dated because constantly the algorithms are improving and the great thing is Google and search and other search engines are writing about how they are improving their algorithm, how they are making any tricks to outsmart their own system redundant as time progresses. So what is again going back to the question, what is the difference between an SEO service and a technical SEO? Technical SEO focus all on the technical intervention. The SEO service tries to focus on a lot more including what are the strategies. Sometimes they go into strategies into black hat territory. Sometimes they remain in the white hat territory, black hat territory being tricks which will out try to outsmart the system and all. Under those cases where you are not able to strategize or you're not able to constantly do the hard work of making sure you're publishing high quality content or relevant information, sure enough you should probably have a SEO service or a SEO consultant help you out in it, help you understand these things, the same set of things that I am talking about right now in this session. But in case you feel fairly confident that you have a reasonable communication strategy in place which is not search specific, then what you really, really need to focus on is the technical SEO part because that's what most organizations fail to do and that's what Google and other search engines are trying to push, that please make sure that your website is crawlable, please make sure you're delivering a good experience and few other things. So that's broadly what I wanted to discuss and mention and if there are any other questions or thoughts I'm happy to take those as well. All right, so the next point that I have is let's take a brief look at the Moz SEO cheat sheet. In case you are a developer, this is the part that makes the, that has the depth of what are the technical interventions that you need to do in any website to make sure they are relevant or sorry, make sure they feature well on search, search crawlers are able to crawl the site and search engines after crawling the site, a field that your website is worthy of a high page rank. The SEO cheat sheet talks about several things but I want to not dive directly deep into this because if you're a developer and you go through this you will understand this much better but I want to just skim through this and make it much more simpler for if you're not a developer you are also able to understand why are some of these things required? So I'll take about five, 10 minutes just to go through each of these points to tell you what is the relevance of each of these points but they are all taken from the Moz SEO cheat sheet which is this one. They have a bunch of good practices mentioned in there so you should probably take a look at them. So what are the 10 points they have? The first one that one of the things that they start off with talking about something called the Webmaster tool. So Webmaster tool is a tool that all search engines most search engines or many search engines give in different formats that make sure that if you have a technical and if you have a technical background you're able to get your website audited using these tools so that they can make sure they point out that if there is something that is horribly wrong on your site or something that you're not doing well on your site the official search engine tools are going to point these things out to you. So that is the tool that you can really trust and in case you are not a developer I'll make this conversation more from a non-developer perspective. If you are a person who is owning a website you should ask your developer to make sure that they have set up the Webmaster tool and they're constantly monitoring it and reporting if there is any issue out there. Now the other thing that the next point that the Moz SEO cheat sheet talks about is make sure that important HTML elements are there. HTML is the language in which or most websites are written or most content is coded, the information is coded. When a search engine goes in and they pick up your website pages what they're actually doing is picking up HTML code and within HTML code there are certain key tags that enable a search engine to understand your the site itself, the meaning of the site what is the title of the page what is the title of the website lots of meta information are also out there as a part. This is something that is mentioned in the first the title tag, the meta description and so on and so forth. The other thing they talk about is hyperlink so making sure that all the links that you're putting out there you use a certain set of keywords to indicate that are they paid link, are they sponsored link or are they links that the search engine should consider as important links and which are also a ranking signal for search engines to rank other sites and similarly there are other sites that are linking to you. Then how they link to you makes a difference whether your site gets ranked high or not. Similarly, if you have multiple site pages which have the same content but slightly in a different format you might want to tell the search engine that look, I have these three pages which are in slightly different variants of the same content but effectively it's the same content just think of a tag page or a taxonomy page or which are filtered in different order or if you are putting out different marketing pages out there or different campaign pages, alternate campaign pages but there is one master campaign then you really, what you really want to do is to tell the search engine that look, this is my canonical page whatever information is there on this canonical page these five other URLs or these five other pages are only reusing the information from this master page make sure that my master page gets most of the SEO juice or most of the value in your eyes in the search engine size those are some of the things you can do and also you can make sure that if there are pages within your own site that you're linking through hyperlinks those pages are giving out the right HTTP status code HTTP status code is essentially a way in which your website tells whether this that particular page that is being accessed works or not. What search engines do is they rely a lot on links in order to even discover 10 different pages within your website or some other website they will try to follow the links that are there on your site to discover and rank those pages. So whenever you have links on your page making sure that those link quality is good they are all functional and they are all working and they are not links which are pointing to dead ends and they are not links that are constantly pointing to the same information multiple times over degrading the user experience in any way are those are certain things you need to take care of. The URL structures are also the next most another very important thing whenever you're making your website make sure that when you're reading the URL itself they don't, if you are especially a website that is trying to optimize in search they shouldn't read like this the URL that you see out there which is paper-to-draw-books.com slash doc slash, there's some gibberish or a random set of letters and numbers out there. You want to make sure that someone who's reading the website URL is able to make a sense of the entire URL itself and they communicate the meaning. Look at this particular URL of the search console itself so search.google.com slash search console slash about almost telling you that when you click on this link you're going to get into an about page of the search console or at least that's what it talks to me about and it's a clean readable URL that's what you want it to be. The other one is big.com slash toolbox slash webmaster. So make sure that your URLs are clean they are structured and that's something that the search engines are able to understand as well. So if you're owning a website and you see question mark node equal to this page ID equal to 17 and your respect that make sure that you're asking your developers to change that and improve that. The fifth point is there's a robots exclusion standard out there which can guide search engines to say that hey, do not crawl a certain part of my site do not index a certain part of my site or the other way around please index a certain part of the site. Make sure that those settings are done correctly so that your entire website or to the extent that you want it to be crawled they are all there and the search engine is indexing all of them whether search engine is able to find them or index them or not that is something that you can validate in the webmaster tool or the search console itself. The next point which is the point number six is site map. Site map essentially is a programmatic directory of all the pages that your website contains and that is something if you can give it to Google Google knows your site contains 1,000, 10,000, 20,000 or lakh pages and Google will go in and crawl them at a certain interval or at us and it'll give them a certain degree of priority as you mentioned in your site map. So site map is also something that can enable discovery of all pages of your website in the eyes of Google or in the eyes of a search engine. So make sure you have yours properly configured. The seventh point is the one that deviates away from search a little bit. So social media metadata is certain parameters that you add to your website so that when anyone takes your URL and puts it on Twitter or Facebook or some other place, even sometimes internal sharing like we use Slack a lot. If I share a URL on my Slack channel, you might have noticed that a very rich card gets created out of it where a featured image comes out the title of the page comes out who has written it, those things come out and so on and so forth. These are maintained and these are possible through social metadata tags and there are Twitter tags out there, Facebook open graph tags out there which you must ensure that your website carries so that your rate of discovery or spotting through social media increases a lot. Now, what gets shown as the featured card, what title comes out, et cetera, et cetera, there can be a very conscious strategy that can be created around it so that it does not create a huge extra additional workload on people who are really writing the content or typing out the content or publishing the content. There is a possibility one can reuse some parts of the site data itself or the page data itself. So for example, if you have a page title, the same title can be shared with the SEO as well or if you have a small or a long body, maybe first 20 characters of that body can be used as a description or a descriptor of that page itself, things like that. So you can come up with different strategies out there. It totally depends what you eventually come up with and how you strategize this information and how you populate the social media metadata but these are important ways in which new people can discover your websites through social media. Then the next point is about rich snippets and structured data. Now, this is, if you search on Google, you would often find these rich cards that come up which tell you an organization name, organization details, a person name, a person details or things that can instantly catch eyeballs or instantly catch your attention and they look quite different from the main content of the page itself. Now, in order to generate those cards and generate those rich snippets, what you need to do is you need to make sure that certain additional information is embedded in your website. They are called as JSON-LD or structured data and structured data can be provided in many different formats and what you want to do is make sure that you have the applicable formats on your site also embedded because once you start looking for different things online, you will see that lots of Google is constantly rolling out these new features that can greatly increase the potential of your site being discussed. For example, you might have seen event searches, job searches and all. So one can go and start, I'm looking for a job here and Google will suddenly pop up a rich place or a rich snippet or a widget kind of a thing on inside the search results page wherein you can indicate that this is the role, this is the location and it will filter down job results or event results as well. Things like these are enabled through the structured data that is embedded on your site. So if you are talking about events, if you're talking about jobs and many, many, many other formats, you want them to be available as structured data also on your page. How they are generated as structured data, again, your developer can help you in making sure that those are embedded out there. Then the ninth point is targeting multiple languages. So if you are publishing in different languages other than English, you can indicate and tell Google that, look, my website is also there in this language. My content is also there in this language and therefore Google will optimize the findability of your site's content in those particular language. Many of these things, Google is like getting smarter slowly, it's getting smarter and it's able to detect those things by themselves as well. But if you can help Google, that will obviously give you an edge over Google's own capacity to intelligently figure these things out. And the last very big point, which is the 10 point, something that we have talked about a lot in the content web series is about performance. Performance has become one of the key things that search engines have started considering in order to make sure that your website ranks high on search results. There are multiple elements of performance that is out there. There is front-end performance, there is back-end performance. There are performance of how quickly the page can open up and this performance is a subject that is pretty wide in itself. But back in 2018 and from that point onwards, page speed has been a ranking signal or has been a ranking factor for all mobile searches that Google has been doing. And Google Offlate has also started doing mobile first searches. So what Google has started doing is if you have a website, then it's going to make sure or try to index what you show to a mobile user and use that as forming their database of content or database of indexes about your site. If you can make sure that your website is performing fast and quick and fast is a subjective term, it's good to always have a benchmark for performance and one of the best benchmark for performance is the Google page speed insights. So make sure that you are running your site on, I'll try to search for the page speed insights thing over here. So this is the Google page speed insight tool. If you run your own website through this, you would be able to come up and see what are the, what is the performance of the different sites that are out there for your own, for of your competitors of your own site and it will also give you a bunch of recommendations about, hey, these are the things you can improve about your site and that those are important bits that you can do in sync. So if you go on to this particular blog post itself of Google Webmaster central blog, which were in 2018, they have talked about what is the value of page speed and also if you go into the other link that I had in there which is talking about, going there, which is talking about the web vitals, which is a very recent, the core web vitals, which is a very recent set of benchmarks that Google has started. And in fact, in this blog, Google Webmaster central blog, they keep putting out clear updates saying that very soon we are going to make change in this. So they are going to talk about the timing straight away. They're saying that this is coming, we will provide at least six months notice before they are rolled out. There's no need to take immediate action, but this is something that you should start preparing for. And what are these, they're over here they have started focusing on few very core vital components, which are something that detects how mobile-friendly your site is, how quickly your website becomes interactive, how in how less a time can your first page load in how less or how less do things shift in your page. Like for example, if you look at this specific small video that is going on, if you click on something that there's a jump in these buttons, these jumps are something that is considered as a bad experience. So if Google starts detecting these parts also in your website, then it will start penalizing your site's ranking on Google. So these are things that you need to take care of from a technical point of view to make sure that your website has a good ranking out there. Make sure you're testing on Webmaster Tool. Make sure you validate your HTML, have clear, good quality links, clear structured URLs. The make sure your website is indexable, the site map is provided to Google, make sure you have social metadata tags, rich snippets and structured data to make sure that the site results that come out are using Google's rich snippets and those features. You are indicating to Google about the different languages that you have and focus on performance. And another big factor in performance is also how many images you're using and are the images optimized because images become one of the biggest factors why your website becomes low and that is something. So if you look at the performance aspect over here, which is the last, it is the Moz recommendation also talks about the page speed, talks about JavaScript, how low is your JavaScript on your page so that the website or the browser does not spend a lot of time processing the code itself and are you doing image optimization? There's just some of the basics that are there but you can also test your page speed with not just Lighthouse or page speed in size, the tool that I just opened over there but GT metrics, web page test test, so many other tools that are out there that you can use. All right, so coming to the close of things, if there are any questions I'm happy to take but I just want to focus on this one last point that I have, who should be responsible for all this or who should be responsible for the SEO of your website? I think there are largely two points that you need to consider. One is the content should be fresh, adequate, good quality and strategic and therefore you should invest in content, invest in making sure that the information is covering, is casting a wide net but while you're casting a wide net, you are always relevant to your core business or your core value proposition that's out there. So, and the second bit is if you engage with informed expert developers who are taking care of all these bits, they are the most useful or the most important bits that Google and other search engines suggest that you should do in order to make sure that you fare well on Google's own search result page. The roles and responsibility of SEO consultants and other people out there is there. I won't completely write them off but if they are having to come in, there's a very good chance they'll go back to these two points only. They're going to start tweaking your content to make them better or they are going to make sure that this technical SEO bit is being taken care of and if there is anything else they're doing, I don't know, I would love to discuss those bits as well and understand those things further because these are the bits that the search engines directly recommend that you should be doing. Here are a bunch of links out there and also my contact details just in case you want to discuss a little bit more. There is a beginner's guide to SEO. You can read this bit. The cheat sheet, the summary points that I just laid out are from the same as cheat sheet. Google has a starter guide as well for search engine optimization. Google webmaster, this is a complete portal which also has the webmaster blog linked through it which keeps giving new updates about what you need to look for and what are the changes that might be happening in Google's algorithms. Web.dev gives you some of the best practices that you should be following for your website. Google search console is something wherein you can validate and whether your website is being crawled properly or not, whether it is, whether any URLs are generating errors, are they acting up, is there anything suspicious going on? Are there any security concerns in your page? All these things, Google search engine search console and now more recently, the web vitals audit also is something that a search console has started reporting. And lastly, you must use the Google page speed insights in order to audit the performance of your website and follow the best practices because these are things that our Google is clearly laying out as either some of them have already been incorporated as their ranking signal or soon more of these bits are going to get incorporated in their ranking system. So if there are any questions, I would be happy to take that, it's six. We have 10 minutes in case people want to discuss anything, have any questions, otherwise it's an early evening for me. This is the first time we are doing this conversation. Yeah, Chitra has raised her hand. Okay, so give me a second. I have to make sure that I can... Hi, Chitra. Hi, Chitra. Chitra, you can speak and ask your question if you... Okay, I'll just continue. So this is the first time we have done the conversation in the evening. We have usually been doing our conversations at 11 on every Saturday. And I usually have different guests talking about different subject areas and we discuss on different topics. One very interesting session happened last Saturday where we discussed AMP with Naina, who had joined us from San Francisco and she was from the AMP team, Google AMP. And one more very... Okay, Chitra has asked, can you please take an example and do a walkthrough? Okay, do a walkthrough of what in this which bit you want to take an example of. I need a little bit more clarity in the question. So if you can come up, are you talking about the page speed and sites audit? Chitra, so I'm having a hard time in connecting with Chitra. Okay, so as I was saying, last week we had AMP session with Naina who is from the AMP team and she joined in very late in the night her time from San Francisco. Next week, we are planning to do a session on voice search, which would probably take this conversation even further wherein Gaurav from region would be joining in from New York. And we'll be talking about what should our content strategy itself be for optimizing our websites for voice search, which are the LXRs and the OKGoogles and so many other ways in which we feed in voice search queries into all the different search engines. So that would be a very interesting conversation and the week after we are going to talk more in details about AMP and many other things that we are trying to line up. There's another question out there, which is how about off page factors like authority, backlinks, et cetera, these days? How important are they? Now, none of official guidelines from search engines talk about these things anymore. In fact, this is one of the biggest shifts that has started happening over the last decade, I would say, wherein lots of SEO organizations would try to, like at the end of the day, if you're trying to put in backlinks towards on your own website, because back in the day, one of the factors that search engines used to use to rank your site was, how many other websites are referring to you? If they have a link to your website, then there is a very good chance your website is a popular site and it must be a good site. That's why so many people are linking back to you. But very soon, as developers and other specialists started realizing this, people started trying to gain this bit as well, which is to say that, okay, let us start putting in our links at different places, embed it all across the web. And the more number of place, and you started seeing spans and many other things because everyone is trying to innovate on how this is one insight I have from Google, how can I make the most of it? Even though Google is not saying that this is something that you should be doing. And therefore, once people did that enough, including, like for example, the meta description tag, wherein people started stuffing in a lot of keywords and all, once people started doing that enough, Google started withdrawing and they started realizing that this is not leading to a good search experience. What this implies is that people are trying to game the system and not focusing on giving a good high quality information to users, but they are trying to increase the density of these backlinks or density of these keywords and all. And that is not what a human would want to read about, see or consume. And they're not going to be happy about it. So those factors are things that slowly and surely over the last 10 years or so, Google has, I would say that Google has very often very clearly said that we don't want you to do these things or think of these things. And they have also penalized organizations and websites for trying to game their system. But off late search engines have become or the crawlers have become really smart and the algorithms have become really smart. And they are not a part of good guidelines that Google is giving to any website owner that this is something that you should be doing. Authority is something that is still considered as is a thing, but that's not something that even controlled really. What you can do is just take it outside the context of SEO. You want to be a person who has an authority on a subject so that people will find, when they look for that subject they find you and they reach out to you. So if I am able to put out myself as an authority on answer SEO, which I am not, I started off with, I'm not an SEO expert. So I clearly did a bad job at that. But if I put out myself as, oh, if you want anything SEO, then I am the person who knows about it. Then people would try to look for software and come to me, send out an email to me when they have a question and all. And I will be found in that case. But that is because I have reached a position of influence and a position of authority. So those are things that you don't actively try to do in SEO, but you try to do to build that kind of a brand positioning for your brand in general. It's not an SEO specific thing. It's a brand positioning specific thing. And therefore I would generally say that if you're focusing on your brand or you're focusing on your website, authority backlinks and all are not the things that you should directly optimize for in a way, but instead on the other hand, you should optimize for the experience you're giving. The information that you're giving is that useful and not, and wait for your authority to be organically getting established essentially. That's where I would put this as because no search engine is asking you to do these things or lay much emphasis on it. All right, if there are any other question, I'm happy to take those as well. So I'll go back to the thing that I was otherwise sharing, which is the next week, we have a session on a voice search which I think will be interesting. There are also other sessions being planned on the content web series, wherein there'll be things around newsletters, there'll be things which a friend of mine, Abhishek, is also trying to organize. Every conversation that we do on content web is of a different nature. They are mostly free-wheeling chats. If there were more people at this hour who would be interested in discussing this, you could have a longer conversation as well. And some of the other sessions are where there's a very clear 20-minute presentation followed by a detailed Q&A as well. And sometimes I am trying to do the moderating or someone else is trying to do the moderating so that it becomes useful for everyone. If you have any topics that you would want to learn about, know about content in the space of websites, in the space of content web, please drop in up either a proposal or a request on hasgeek.com slash content web because that's where we are collecting proposals. If you want to share anything that you have an insight or a knowledge around various subject, whether it's in the content practice, which is around content strategy, content writing, how should online content be written, any insights around that, you would love to hear about that. If you are a designer who has some knowledge or an experience acquired around website interface designs, graphic design or art direction on the web, please reach out to us. We would like to have a chat with you on content web. And if you are a developer and you would want to bring in any other expertise or any other subjects of conversation around HTML, CSS, backend, server setups, performance, privacy, there can be legal directions also that one could take, which is like things like GDPR and all. If you're someone who has experience with AMP, we would love to have you on a session that is two weeks from now when we are doing a much more deeper conversation on AMP, whether AMP is something that is really practical or not for developers to follow and adopt. And is it something that we believe is a good thing for the web in the long run or not? So these are some of the subjects that we are talking about and discussing. If you have any thoughts, any proposals or any requests for a subject areas of any of the subject of discussion, please drop in a comment on hasgeek.com slash content web. Right, I'll stop sharing my screen now. Zainab, we have any message from Chitra now? Chitra just says thank you for taking time on off. Okay, yeah, thanks a lot. We just wanted to make sure that we are doing, because every Saturday we are having a session, it's tough to bring in a guest on an independence day. So I thought I'll give you all freedom from SEO spammers.