Takeaways form SEO for Devs Course

I’ve been taking SEO for Devs course by Monica Lent. And I pick up a lot of valuable stuff from it. It is a free email course.

I still have to cover the last two emails from it, but I thought of sharing the stuff I’ve learnt and implemented on my websites, Stackblocks and aravindballa.com .

I highly recommend the course if you have a blog or a website running.

Canonical URLs

These are like the source of truth for Google.

If you repost you blog articles to other websites like Dev.to or Hashnode, setting a canonical URL on it which contains the URL of your website let’s Google know that your website is the original one and it should prefer indexing that.

Your website’s ranking increases.

Meta data and Page structure

When google bots hit your page, it is really important that they find relevant information from the page and in the format that they understand .

There is a Chrome extension that helped me fix a lot of things on my personal website, as well as on Stackblocks’ landing and how-to pages - Detailed SEO .

It took some time to fix every error and warning, but it was worth it.

Indexing the right pages

First step here is to let Google know what all pages are in your website. Sitemap is the way to do it.

Adding a sitemap.xml file to your website does the job.

If you are using NextJS, you can use this package to generate one.

Next, we register ourselves on Google developer console and submit the URL to this sitemap. Then Google knows it should index these pages.

How to know if your pages are indexed?

You can search in google site:sitename.com and brings out all the pages that it knows.

There are more

These are few of the things that have directly helped me in improving my website’s performance.

I will write a Part 2 next week. Stay tuned for it.

And if you think your friend will find this useful, do them a favour and send this to them.

See you next Tuesday 👋