User First SEO: A Non-contentious Guide to Building Pages Users Will Find and Love

SEP 14-18, 2020 DenverStartupWeek.org #DENStartupWeek 2020 TITLE SPONSORS

DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION & ACCESSIBILITY At Denver Startup Week we strive to make all of our sessions a space where attendees can connect, learn, and grow — regardless of gender identity, gender expression, race, ability, sexual orientation, and the combination of those identities. As you leave today and throughout the week, introduce yourself to someone who doesn’t look like you or who may identify differently than you. #DENStartupWeek

User First SEO: A Non-contentious Guide to Building Pages Users Will Find and Love Annie Wolff Marlena Baker 09/17/2020

Marlena Baker - Software Engineer at Quizlet since 2019 - Passionate about accessible, equitable, quality education - Co-organizer of the Denver Vue.js meetup - Member of Dvlp Dnvr’s Education and Content team #DENStartupWeek

Annie Wolff - Senior Software Engineer @ Quizlet since June 2019 - A recent convert to the awesome nerdiness of technical SEO - Middle School Chapter Leader with STEMBlazers - Mentor and member of the mentor committee at Turing School #DENStartupWeek

Identifying the Problem Building Usable Pages Choosing the Right Technologies Delivering your Content Quickly Making your Content Discoverable Taking the Next Steps #DENStartupWeek

You may have the most amazing content that is incredibly relevant to millions of searchers, but if Google can’t find it or understand it, users won’t be able to either. #DENStartupWeek

As a developer, you can rely on your knowledge of user experience to improve SEO. #DENStartupWeek

Identifying the Problem Building Usable Pages Choosing the Right Technologies Delivering your Content Quickly Making your Content Discoverable Taking the Next Steps #DENStartupWeek

How Googlebot explores the web Your Page’s URL Crawl Queue Index URLs Processing URL Linking HTML URL Content Crawler Render Queue #DENStartupWeek Rendered HTML Renderer URL

Helping Programs Read Your Page #DENStartupWeek

Semantic HTML

Semantic HTML <a aria-label=”Quiz 12” href=”https://quizlet.com/292548967/quiz-12-flash-cards/” title=”Quiz 12” > <h4>Mktg research FINAL quiz 12</h4> </a> #DENStartupWeek

Easy Access to Main Content Pop up advertisements Interstitials Image source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html #DENStartupWeek

Validation W3C Markup Validation Service https://validator.w3.org/ #DENStartupWeek

Lighthouse Best Practices Audit SEO Audit https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse #DENStartupWeek

Identifying the Problem Building Usable Pages Choosing the Right Technologies Delivering your Content Quickly Making your Content Discoverable Taking the Next Steps #DENStartupWeek

The Big “JS” Question Does the use of a JS framework like React or Vue negatively impact SEO? #DENStartupWeek

But… Server Side Rendering is Still Safest Whenever possible, it is better to return as much rendered HTML as possible on the first response from the server. #DENStartupWeek

How Can you Know What you Page Looks Like to Crawlers? Have you ever tested your product against different browsers and found that something wasn’t working the way that you thought? Testing for Googlebot is just same! https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/javascript-seo-basics #DENStartupWeek

Mobile First Indexing Because so much of today’s web browsing happens on phones, Google has moved to primarily use the mobile version of sites for indexing and ranking. https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing #DENStartupWeek

Tools to use Mobile Friendliness Tool https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly #DENStartupWeek

Tools to use Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automate-url-inspection-tool-python-javascript/301639/ #DENStartupWeek

Identifying the Problem Building Usable Pages Choosing the Right Technologies Delivering your Content Quickly Making your Content Discoverable Taking the Next Steps #DENStartupWeek

Google cares about Performance “Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.” Source :https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html #DENStartupWeek

Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint Read More… Image Sources: https://web.dev/lcp/ #DENStartupWeek Read More…

Core Web Vitals: First Input Delay Read More… Image Sources: https://web.dev/fid/ #DENStartupWeek Read More…

Core Web Vitals: Cumulative Layout Shift Do you want to continue? Do you want to continue? Confirmed! �� Yes Thank you! No Yes No Image Sources: https://web.dev/cls/ #DENStartupWeek

Lighthouse Performance Audit Image Sources: https://onesoftwaretester.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/running-application-audits-with-lighthouse/ #DENStartupWeek

PageSpeed Image Sources: https://kinsta.com/blog/google-pagespeed-insights/ #DENStartupWeek

Real User Metrics Image Sources: https://docs.datadoghq.com/real_user_monitoring/dashboards/ #DENStartupWeek

Identifying the Problem Building Usable Pages Choosing the Right Technologies Delivering your Content Quickly Making your Content Discoverable Taking the Next Steps #DENStartupWeek

Stepping back to the site level Now that we’ve got great pages, how can we make sure that they are found? #DENStartupWeek

Internal Linking #DENStartupWeek ?

Global Navigation Google uses the frequency and prominence of links to understand their importance. #DENStartupWeek

Information Architecture You can use breadcrumbs and subject pages to indicate the relationships between pages on your site. #DENStartupWeek

XML Sitemaps Image Source: https://searchengineland.com/managing-sitemap-xml-with-google-search-console-311790 #DENStartupWeek

Tools to understand your site’s link structure Google Search Console Internal Linking Report https://searchengineland.com/managing-sitemap-xml-with-google-search-console-311790 #DENStartupWeek

Identifying the Problem Building Usable Pages Choosing the Right Technologies Delivering your Content Quickly Making your Content Discoverable Taking the Next Steps #DENStartupWeek

Build with users in mind Test your technologies Deliver your site quickly Expose the right content #DENStartupWeek

References & Further Reading -https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/javascript-seo-basics -https://web.dev/vitals/ -https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link -https://web.dev/lighthouse-performance/ -https://web.dev/lighthouse-seo/ -https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ -https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element - #DENStartupWeek

Q&A #DENStartupWeek

Thank you! Slides: https://noti.st/marlenabaker/ Quizlet set: https://quizlet.com/520530164/user-first-seo-flash-cards/ annie-wolff #DENStartupWeek marlenabaker