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SEO web basics with Google Search Console

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Let's say you have a friend with a small online business with a website, but their products are not appearing in google search. How would you help them troubleshoot it? You'd probably start by going to the site, understand the products and pages and then run google searches for those products. Does you see results? even if you scroll down lots of results pages? Is there a robots.txt for the site? what rules are specified? are there any exclusions? Check also for any robots meta tag in the html. Is a sitemap.xml provided? What urls are in it? You might also examine the html for the product pages. Are the basics present? title tag, meta tag for description which match the content on the page. Sensible use of h1 etc tags on the page. Useful and accurate content about each product page. Urls which are search friendly. You might run Chrome Lighthouse checking SEO, Performance and Accessibility scores to see if any red flags exist. So you find that your "friends" website pr

How to communicate technical & cognitive complexity?

"An idea is more cognitively complex if it causes you to hold more concepts in mind and think about how they relate to each other. A simple example of this is the number of moves and countermoves available in Checkers vs. Chess." It's a measure of how hard something is to understand. Not recognizing complexity up front is one of the biggest frustrations for teams. I've seen teams think a problem is simpler than it is and/or not want to dig into the details which led to large overruns and significant stress on teams. It can make or break a team. It's not an exact science but there are strategies. First, how do you recognize? some data points  how many concepts are involved?  e.g. building a responsive multi form layout for a user profile to be used in multiple different apps each of which wants to highlight slightly different data/functionality has more concepts involved than a single use table view. e.g. supporting different billing address rules by 16 locale/regi