Internet Garden

Learning SEO

Written by Minami

This April, I spent a day learning SEO. What fascinated me most was how accelerating with SEO feels like a competition—almost like a game. To rank #1, you must know the rules, master the strategies, and outplay your opponents!

For those who are new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimisation—how to rank higher in Google Search results. When your website appears higher in search results, it gains more visibility, clicks, and visitors.

With Internet Garden, we use Ahrefs to do SEO research and monitor our websites, but this time, I used materials from Google to learn SEO. They have the free tools below for website owners to monitor, maintain, and improve their site's visibility in Google Search results.

What you need to know

You must know some essential concepts and measurements to use Google Search Console.

Key concepts:

  • Crawling - Google's web crawlers follow links and sitemaps to discover your content
  • Indexing - Google analyses the content and meaning of each page
  • Canonical URLs - If you host the same content at different URLs, you should indicate which version is the "official" one
  • robots.txt - A file that tells Google crawlers which pages it can access
  • Sitemap - A list of pages on your site that Google uses as starting locations when crawling your website

Key metrics:

  • Impressions - How many people saw a link to your website in Google Search
  • Clicks - How many people clicked a link to your website from Google Search
  • Average CTR (Click-Through Rate) - Clicks divided by impressions. A high CTR indicates that your content matches what users are searching for
  • Average Position - Where your links typically appear in search results
  • Query - The search terms people use to find your content

What you need to do

Google recommends you to do the following.

Check these reports on the Search Console:

  • Dashboard - Check for critical issues, such as security problems
  • Performance Report - See how you're performing on Google across web search

Monitoring schedule:

  • Daily: Watch for emails from Google regarding unusual events with your website
  • Monthly: Review your Search Console dashboard for a quick health check, noting any errors or unusual dips in click counts

There are so many materials out there if you are interested in learning further, including the ones from Google.

My biggest takeaway this time was that you shouldn't expect all URLs on a large site to be indexed. The goal is to index all your "critical" pages and ensure Google recognises your pages' canonical (official) versions. I always thought we needed to index all the pages, but that was wrong! We also often get the "Duplicate pages without canonical" error, so it's important to tell Google which pages are important and should be indexed.

SEO is also a lot about your website's performance. When your website is slow to load, visitors can click away, which affects visitor experience and, ultimately, your ranking in the Search results. We often get the "Image file size too large" error, so I learned image optimisation further. I used Squoosh to compress and resize images on our Internet Garden website.

You can never truly "finish" learning SEO-it covers extensive topics and constantly changes, so you need to keep learning. It feels like a marathon. If you continue learning and applying what you learned, I believe it is not a dream to rank #1 on Google!