This week on CodePen Radio, we dig into search engine optimization (SEO). Why it matters, what is specific to CodePen and what isn’t, how it relates to user generated content, moral obligations, best practices, different approaches to it, and more.
1:45 For us, SEO is important because people need to be able to find the great CodePens through search engines. Our own search is great, but people need to get to the site first.
3:08 The heart of SEO is find-ability. It’s helpful to everyone if the content from CodePen is findable on Google.
4:26 Having good SEO results -> good traffic -> good business.
5:34 How is SEO different for CodePen than for other sites? Most of the content on CodePen is user generated. We have a responsibility to the users and the overall online community to promote Pens and share solutions and examples that address very specific problems.
9:19 It’s important to “tend” to your content metadata to make sure you don’t accidentally claim ownership of your user’s content.
10:07 Common SEO best practices:
- Good page
<title>s, headers, semantic organization, etc. - Keep your page load times low
- Set up a title and description for your site for Google (logged out), and keep up with search term trends
15:50 How we chose the default CodePen view for the search engine results (in flux)
22:12 We offer Private Pens by “hiding” them from Google with a no-follow attribute.
23:50 “Elbow Grease SEO” tip: having a lot of great content is good SEO.
26:42 One SEO thing we should be doing differently: sub-domains. We use them for a variety of reasons, but Google has rules related to duplicate content that could potentially be harmful to our search rankings.
31:30 How we solved the inbound spam problem on CodePen: using no-follow attribute on outbound links.
36:05 The importance of creating a site map
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