[LMG S13] Issue 169: Search engine optimisation
Previously: A search engine uses bots to build up a database of URLs and their contents. The search engine uses various algorithms to determine the most relevant results for a search request.
Let’s get to it: why are search results so bad so often?
PageRank
While PageRank is no longer the only or even the dominant algorithm for ranking search results, it is probably the most familiar one to most people and is easy to understand.
PageRank ranks your page higher if there are many other pages (on other domains) linking to it, so one way to raise its rankings is to make other websites with links that point to your page.
tags
Every HTML page, if you check the page source, has a section that looks like <head>...</head>
. This section is not displayed in the webpage, and usually contains metadata: information about the page. This is what many site-crawling bots use to gather information about the page, instead of trying to parse the entire page’s content.
By putting appropriate keywords or descriptions, you can make the page appear higher in search rankings. This is a well known way to increase discoverability so search engines are savvy at downranking pages that simply spam keywords. But many subtle hacks also exist for pushing a page higher in search results for specific keywords, whether that page deserves to appear higher or not.
As more and more page categorisation is automated, pages increasingly have to be bot-savvy to be correctly categorised and indexed for appearing in search results.
Advertising
Naturally, Google runs an online advertising business and it puts advertised results first, so this obviously skews the rankings.
Issue summary: By better understanding how search bots categorise pages, a website owner can use keywords and other techniques to optimise the ranking of their page for specific search terms.
Not very detailed, because I am not an SEO master! This issue is probably the least helpful for more savvy readers, but everyone finds out about page keywords at some point and I hope this issue is that first time for some readers :)
What I’ll be covering next
I am … done! With the main part of Layman’s Guide to Computing at least.
Going even slower
What this means is I still have bits of content to post, but they are no longer substantial enough to form seasons of 13 issues. Instead, I’m going to be posting in dribs and drabs, guided by current affairs and any new technologies that have gone mainstream. This also means my posting frequency is going to be going way down; expect 1–2 issues a month, instead of the current 4–5. And I’m going to be taking the next 2 weekends off for a little celebration of my own, plus some thinking and reflecting.
Better archives
I also realised that Buttondown’s archive page no longer provides a browseable listing of all issues. I am looking into setting up my own issue index instead through Github Pages, on https://ngjunsiang.github.io/laymansguide/. Fortunately I have been using Github to archive past issues, so now it’s simply a matter of editing links for past issues and providing some kind of navigation. More updates on this when I make some kind of progress.
Refactoring
Code refactoring is when developers reorganise and rewrite their code in a way that makes it easier for them moving forward.
You might have noticed how often I am linking to past issues, because so many concepts in computing build on each other. I knew this was going to be a problem when trying to explain computing to anyone, and I had initially envisioned some kind of wiki where pages will link to each other so you can theoretically start exploring from any topic and unpack technical terms as you go.
The main bottleneck for this had been content: it’s rather overwhelming to think about where and even how to start. And that was how this newsletter was born. Thanks to Layman’s Guide, I now have a steady base of content for publishing Layman’s Wiki, and work on it has been slow but progressing. I’ll put up a link through this newsletter once it is ready for more eyes :)
As always, thank you for reading!