What does SEO mean?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s how you make your website show up higher in search results on Google and other search engines.

When someone searches for something on Google, Google’s algorithm decides which pages to show and in what order. The work you do to appear near the top of those results is SEO. That includes writing content that matches what people are searching for, making sure your pages load fast, having other reputable sites link to yours, and structuring your HTML so search engines can easily read it.

One of the biggest technical factors in SEO is how your pages are rendered. Search engine crawlers need to be able to read your content. Server-rendered pages send fully-formed HTML to the browser, which is easy for crawlers to index. SPAs that render entirely in JavaScript can be harder for crawlers to process, which is one of the reasons SSR frameworks like Next.js became popular.

SEO is part science, part art, and a bit of a moving target since Google updates its algorithm constantly. There’s a whole industry of specialists, tools, and strategies built around it.

I’ve been thinking about SEO for a long time as a web developer. It’s one of the main reasons Code Q&A is built with Rails, which is server-rendered and much better for SEO. Now that ChatGPT is mainstream and Google has AI mode, it will be interesting to see how SEO changes. If “Chat Optimization” becomes more important than traditional SEO, that’s a big shift for the whole industry.