When I joined Babbar, despite almost 10 years of developing websites and mobile applications, web SEO remained very mysterious. A kind of black box that only people in the SEO industry understand.
A striking example in my eyes is the recent Google update in January 2025, which sent most SEO tools worldwide into panic mode for several days. Enough to make headlines in the tech world. And yet, most of my developer friends had not heard about this event AT ALL. The few who had heard about it didn’t really understand why it was such a big deal.
Over time in the SEO field, I understood the simple mechanisms that help bring traffic to a website and satisfy visitors. You’re in luck, I’m going to share this with you, and together we will demystify this obscure domain.
Warning: This article reflects my point of view as a developer discovering the world of SEO!
What is SEO?
Behind this title, which could come from my grandma’s mouth or be the introductory paragraph of any beginner’s SEO article, let’s start by understanding why we do this.
As its acronym suggests, Search Engine Optimization aims to optimize one’s presence in a search engine (99% of the time, it’s Google). The goal is to appear first in search results, so that people see your web page—whether it’s to sell a product, spread an idea, or simply share content.
For each query in the search engine, Google estimates the search intent—that is, what Google thinks people are looking for when typing this query.
Search intent—another new term you don’t know? Don’t worry, there will be a recap at the end of the article.
Let’s take the keyword “hat” as an example because I want to sell hats.
What are people searching for when they type “hat” into Google?
- Information about what a hat is?
- Buying a hat?
For other keywords, it could be a precise brand search.
And Google tries to analyze and define this search intent. How to identify it? Simply type the keyword into Google, or if you’re lazy, ask ChatGPT.
For the word “hat”, you quickly realize that users want to buy a hat.
How to rank your website on Google?
As a developer, I somewhat understood what SEO was. The question I couldn’t answer, however, was: how do I make my website appear in these results?
Let’s get this straight—getting to the top of search results doesn’t happen with the wave of a magic wand. But making it into the top 10 already guarantees traffic to your page.
I often didn’t understand how to attract more visitors, more traffic to my site. Was there a special strategy to follow?
Short answer: WRITE A BLOG
I only realized this much later, convinced that placing the best keywords in the meta tag of the pages I wanted to boost on Google would magically work…
Every reputable website has a blog, sometimes hidden and not visible in the menu.
So if I want to sell my hats, I need to create articles about hats. A good twenty would be a great start to position my site and my pages well on Google.
This is the semantic approach: for Google to understand that our site is relevant (and, incidentally, for visitors too), my site needs to talk about hats and related keywords.
What kind of articles should I write?
It can be very diverse:
- “The guide to choosing a good hat”
- “Where to buy a quality hat”
- “Hat comparison”
- “Hats in cinema”
If you lack inspiration, either ask ChatGPT for a list of articles on your topic, or subscribe to YourTextGuru and use the Digital Brainstormer tool, which will suggest a series of articles to write on your chosen theme (as shown below).
SEO optimization tools
Once the content is written, it should ideally be optimized for SEO.
By this, I mean respecting the presence of about twenty key terms to varying degrees. This presence calculation is based on analyzing the top 10 sites in the SERP (the 10 best results on Google).
That’s why in YourTextGuru, when you create what’s called a “guide” (essentially an article), you are given a list of words with an optimal frequency to follow as closely as possible. Your guide will then receive a SOSEO score (Search Optimization Score).
The other pillars of SEO
Actually, I haven’t told you everything. There are two other pillars in SEO. We often talk about the three SEO pillars: semantics, authority, and technical SEO.
I won’t dwell on them too much because, in my opinion, when starting out, the other two aspects are not the easiest to implement.
Authority comes through what we call backlinks. It’s a link that comes either from your own site (outgoing backlink) or from another site (incoming backlink).
Think of it like popularity. If you look great (semantics) but no one talks about you (authority), you won’t be the most popular person in high school (let’s assume you’re under 30…).
So having backlinks (links leading to your site) helps boost your authority and signals to Google that your site is important enough to pay attention to.
That’s why a well-known site like Le Monde will immediately rank at the top of search results for a new article—because it has strong authority.
If you have other websites or friends who do, consider link exchanges (one link to their site in exchange for a link to yours).
If I open a hat shop and a local newspaper writes about it, it’s super important to ask them to add a link to my site. Besides advertising, it boosts my website’s authority.
If I go back to the high school popularity analogy, technical SEO is like having holes in your socks. You don’t notice them at first, but if you take off your shoes, it’s a disaster.
Technical SEO covers a lot of things, and it quickly becomes complex. Some examples:
- You may have error pages (404s) that Google knows about.
- Your site may be too slow.
- It may not be mobile-friendly.
For beginners, semantic SEO and backlinks are the easiest to implement—technical SEO can be left for later.
Key takeaways from SEO
Web SEO may seem like an obscure science at first, with its own jargon. But in reality, it’s easy to activate simple levers like semantic SEO.
There are many strategies to boost your site’s visibility (social media, marketing, SEO, Ads, etc.). However, simply writing content on topics related to your website can naturally improve its ranking and traffic, without needing expertise in SEO techniques or authority building.
And who knows? By getting into it just a little, you might even discover a new passion.
The best advice I can give you?
Just try.
Glossary
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The process of improving a website’s ranking in Google.
- Search Intent: What a user expects to find when they search for something on Google. Most often, the intent is commercial (e-commerce site) or informational (blog article).
- SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The list of results displayed after a Google search.
- Guide: Commonly used in SEO to refer to an article or web content.
- SOSEO: Search Optimization Score—a score that evaluates how optimized a text is for SEO (specific to YourTextGuru).
- Backlink: A link between two distinct websites, which is important for SEO authority.
