Voiceover: Search Engine Optimization
is a very hot topic.
That's because it's so incredibly important
that your website can be found by your users
using a search engine like Google.
This is, of course, still part of step five
of our seven step method.
And now, what is Search Engine Optimization?
Very simple, basically Search Engine Optimization
or CEO is a couple of techniques that improve
and promote a website to increase the number
of visitors the site receives from search engines.
There are many, many aspects to CEO,
and in this lecture we will just cover the very basics
in order to make our website search engine ready.
So first up, let's talk about the meta description tags.
This tag is a short description of a website
and is normally used to describe a website
on the search results page, just as we see here
on this Udemy example.
This text is not visible to visitors
of the webpage itself,
but it helps you to advertise for your site,
drawing users to your website from the search results.
It is, therefore, an extremely important part
of search marketing, so we should craft
compelling description using important keywords,
but with no more than 160 characters.
Let's now, of course, do that for our webpage.
All right, so nothing easier than that.
We just use here the meta tag and then say
name description,
and then we say our content.
Something about Omnifoot,
Omnifoot is a premium
foot delivery
service with the mission
to bring affordable
and healthy meals
to as many people as possible.
So something like this, all right?
Okay, and since we are talking about tags,
we should also include the content type tag.
Just like this, you can actually do it here.
So, meta,
and then charge that, and then udf8.
This is just used to declare the character encoding
of the website, but it doesn't include the ranking.
It has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization,
but it's something that we should include
in every website.
For the meta description, that's it.
Back here, next, we should always write valid HTML code,
and valid HTML code is code that follows
exactly the official HTML rules and has no bugs.
Valid HTML is preferred by Google,
it makes websites more likely to work
in browsers we haven't tested,
it looks more professional,
and it's better for accessibility,
making it easier for screen readers
to read websites to blind users, for instance.
There is an official tool for checking
if we have valid HTML code,
and we're gonna use it right now.
In order to do that, we just copy the entire code,
so Command or Control + A, and then copied it
and this is the website, so Validatorw3,
and be used options, so validate by direct input
and paste all our code here, and now we check it.
It takes it a little time.
We have eight errors here in our code, actually.
Let's see what those errors are all about.
All right, this has something to do with
these closing tags, I guess.
Let me go back here.
All right, so we actually forgot to close
this meta tag here.
Let's copy that again
and delete all of this.
Copy and re-validate the whole thing.
Now we only have three errors.
Much better, right?
Let's see what it is.
So an Img element must have an alt attribute.
OK, can see we have three errors,
and that's because we forgot to specify the alt attribute
for our three customary metas.
Okay, so I'm going to do that.
We have it, they're right here, see the alternative text.
I'll just say customer one photo.
And I'm going to copy it,
three and two.
So again, and I think that by now
we have a validated HTML code.
So let's see,
all right, very well, this document
was successfully checked as HTML5.
So, we have now a valid HTML document.
Great, right?
Now the next thing, content is king,
and that means that it's very important
that you have great content on your website.
Even if your website is on top of the search results,
if the content is not great,
and your users don't want to read it,
then it's worth nothing that you're so high ranked.
Also, keep providing new content if you can,
so your visitors want to keep coming back for more.
The next thing is that you need to place keywords
strategically in your content.
This is a key to perform well in search rankings,
because keywords are what users actually use to find you.
But be careful, don't overuse keywords,
since search engines consider that as keyword spamming
and might penalize you.
Use keywords in the title, in the meta description tag,
in your headings, and links.
And another important thing,
is to get other websites to link to you.
These links are called backlinks
and are like letters of recommendation for your website.
Search engines rank websites based partially
on the number and the quality
of links that point to the site.
This is a crucial factor to CEO and therefore,
you should have a strategy to increase
the quantity and quality of backlinks to your site.
There's actually so much more information
about CEO out there on the internet.
For a quick overview,
you can check out the link in a course eBook.
We changed some things in our project
in this section, so please download the final website
from the link in the description of this video.
And that's it with optimization.
So in the next lecture,
let's learn how to launch our website to the internet.