--- title: "Roll Up Your Sleeves and Do SEO, Part 1 — Start Optimizing Your Website's SEO" description: "A hands-on intro to SEO: how search engines work, market share among them, and how to use robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and Google Search Console to get crawlers to index your site correctly." canonical_url: "https://blog.markkulab.net/en/post/seo-get-started" author: "Mark Ku" author_url: "https://blog.markkulab.net/en/author/mark-ku" site: "Mark Ku's Tech Notes" date_published: "2021-08-26 01:01:01 +0800" category: "SEO" tags: ["seo", "google", "robots.txt", "sitemap", "search console", "ranking"] language: "en" license: "CC BY 4.0" license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" attribution: "when reusing or quoting, credit the author and link back to the original" --- # Roll Up Your Sleeves and Do SEO, Part 1 — Start Optimizing Your Website's SEO ## SEO — Roll Up Your Sleeves and Optimize Your Site — Get Started Part 1 ## Why Bother with SEO SEO boosts your site's visibility on the open web and makes it friendlier to search engines, which in turn improves ranking. The result: more (organic) traffic without paying for ads, and a much better chance that potential users searching for relevant keywords actually find you. ## How SEO Works Behind every search engine sits a massive database holding an enormous number of keywords, with each keyword mapping to many URLs. Crawlers visit websites every day to gather keywords and links, hopping from one link to the next. The downloaded content is then analyzed and refined — duplicates and junk are removed, and the cleaned data is stored so users can search it. ## Search Engine Market Share ![Bar chart showing Google's 92.26% search engine market share](https://blog.markkulab.net/content/markku/posts/seo-get-started/images/OTc4avW.png) [Top 10 Search Engines In The World (2021 Update)](https://www.reliablesoft.net/top-10-search-engines-in-the-world/) ## Google publishes ranking signals every year. The site below covers the key factors that affect SEO. [Understanding page experience in Google Search results](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/experience/page-experience) ## So, suppose I've spun up a website. How do I make sure crawlers actually find it? 1. Provide a config file (robots.txt) that tells Google's crawler what it can and can't crawl on your site. [Example](https://blog.markkulab.net/robots.txt) 2. Build a sitemap.xml so the crawler has a clear index to follow. [Example](https://blog.markkulab.net/sitemap.xml) 3. Register the site with Google Search Console. 4. Google will then send its crawler to visit your site daily. The screenshot below is the Google Search Console backend. ![Google Search Console Coverage report showing 69 valid pages](https://blog.markkulab.net/content/markku/posts/seo-get-started/images/XFmtSPp.png) ## Results If your keywords are unique enough, ranking on the first page of Google search results isn't actually that hard. ![Google search results for mark ku blog showing blog links](https://blog.markkulab.net/content/markku/posts/seo-get-started/images/I7IN1LT.png) ## A solid article from a foreign SEO expert. Key Google ranking factors for 2022: Quality content, effective keywords, backlinks, user experience, uniqueness, user interaction, internal links, mobile experience and friendliness, page speed, and HTTPS — all of these tie directly into SEO ranking. [Related article](https://firstpagesage.com/seo-blog/the-google-algorithm-ranking-factors/?fbclid=IwAR0HFuLxp1nMRZ7qQKRs1CGoGfkwOZEG9wlQz3lMFcODPRHrbU8_7pMf0AQ) ## To be continued... The next chapter will cover topics like front-end pre-rendering and server-side rendering. --- ## About this article and its author Originally published on [Mark Ku's Tech Notes](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/post/seo-get-started) License: [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) — when reusing or quoting, credit the author and link back to the original ### About the author **[Mark Ku](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/author/mark-ku)** — Software Solution Provider - 10+ years senior software engineer, now an AI Builder - Focused on large-platform architecture — North-American e-commerce, AI SaaS subscription billing - Combining AI Agents and automation to build evolvable product foundations ### Free tools built by the author All of these are free to use: - [Free PDF Sign Tool](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/pdf-sign): Online PDF sign tool — draw, type, or upload a signature, then drag, resize, and download. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded. - [VS Code Refactory](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/refactory): Refactory is a VS Code refactoring extension: 34 actions plus a 37-rule code-smell inspection layer with a Code Health dashboard, across 18 languages, backed by 534 tests. It learns your repo's conventions: where interfaces live, where DI is registered, whether 'use client' belongs. It ranks files by git churn × complexity so you know what to fix first, and hands any smell to the Claude Code already on your machine. Free to use, and your source never leaves your computer. - [DB-Kit Database Manager](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/db-kit): DB-Kit is a lightweight, cross-platform database manager built with Tauri + Rust + React. Manage MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, SQLite, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch and RabbitMQ from one consistent interface: passwords encrypted in the OS keychain, SSH tunnels, full CRUD, a visual query builder, stacked multi-statement result sets, cross-connection data transfer and compare/sync, Excel / CSV import & export, visualized execution plans, ER diagrams, scheduled backups, SQL stress testing with p50–p99 latency percentiles, a 15-rule SQL review engine, Kafka message browsing with monitoring & alerts, a bilingual UI (Traditional Chinese / English), a built-in AI assistant (natural-language SQL, AI review and tuning advice) and the dbk CLI. Free and open source (MIT), with installers for Windows, macOS and Linux. - [VS Code Super Mermaid](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/super-mermaid): Super Mermaid is a VS Code extension for beautiful Mermaid diagrams out of the box: auto-colored live preview, mouse pan & zoom, high-res PNG / SVG export, 21 templates and multiple themes. Free and open source (MIT). - [React Super Mermaid](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/react-super-mermaid): react-super-mermaid is an open-source React component library: render beautiful Mermaid diagrams with a single , with built-in colorful / sketch themes, pan & zoom, in-diagram search, and high-res SVG / PNG export. Lightweight, SSR-safe, fully typed. Free and open source (MIT). - [Jira / Confluence Super Mermaid](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/jira-super-mermaid): An Atlassian Forge app: write Mermaid syntax directly inside a Jira issue or a Confluence page and get flowcharts, sequence diagrams, state machines and Gantt charts. 11 diagram types, SVG / PNG export, light and dark themes, full CJK support. Runs on Atlassian: your diagrams live in your own site and the app calls no third-party service. Free, coming soon to the Atlassian Marketplace. - [Mermaid Live Preview](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/mermaid-preview): Write Mermaid in your browser, see it render instantly, and share the whole diagram as a single link. No sign-up, nothing uploaded to a server, and mermaid.live share links work as-is. - [React Intl Phone Number](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/react-intl-phone-number): react-intl-phone-number is an open-source React component: framework-agnostic and antd-free, with E.164 in/out, a searchable flag / country-code dropdown, configurable validation levels (strict / mobile-strict / loose), themeable CSS, and i18n — phone logic powered by google-libphonenumber. Lightweight and fully typed. Free and open source (MIT). - [Uptime Kuma Cluster](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/uptime-kuma-cluster): Turn single-node Uptime Kuma into a highly available cluster: OpenResty + Lua smart load balancing, shared MariaDB state, health checks and automatic failover, plus cluster-management REST APIs. One Docker Compose command to start. Free and open source (MIT). - [Special Education](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/education): Learning materials crafted for special education students ### Daily podcasts - [Mark's Tech Insights — Daily AI News](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/category/tech-news): Daily curated AI and tech trends. 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