Ask HN: What's your references to learn SEO?

Any suggestions are welcome (websites, books, etc).

For now, I know only the very basics, e.g. having one h1 per page.

Thanks for the link! They have a PDF for those of us that like reading off-line

http://d2eeipcrcdle6.cloudfront.net/guides/Moz-The-Beginners...

For content writing, installing Yoast on a WP site does wonders for the whole "what search engines look for when writing content" part. You can score your content as you write and it'll give you actionable numbers — "you should have 3 more outbound links" or "this keyword was only found on this page once, try adding it some more".

I'd consider installing it and using it to test my content against, even if you're not using WP as a part of your stack.

I mean long story short the Google guide is common sense — write high-quality original content for people, make it easy to crawl, expose as much structured data as you can, use clean URLs, etc. I don't feel like there are any real secrets to be found (maybe that's a good thing).

I find running PageSpeed and Webmaster Tools periodically and looking at Analytics regularly is all you really need to do. Maybe I've just been doing this too long and what feels intuitive to me isn't the same way for everyone.

Well, OP asked for references to learn SEO and I answered with resources to get him/her started. I view them as guidelines to keep in mind while I do things. A bearing of sort.

But I think this is the very essence of SEO. Optimizing without overfitting. Learning is continuous. A few years back, living in an underbanked country, I got a MasterCard after searching for quite a long time, contacting banks, and digging through contradictory information.

I wanted to get a MasterCard because I wanted to try trading stocks, and to buy stuff online. I was a student working part time and our postal service wasn't trustworthy, so I set a budget I was okay to burn for testing. Again, the most visible brokers in the U.S. didn't want anything to do with me (I called a bunch of them) until I found one that was willing to open an account for people in my region, they mailed me the forms, etc.

When I was done, I created a blog and wrote an article detailing how to get it, where to get it, how much it costs, which documents to get, how long it takes. I even included a custom made form the bank requires but doesn't ask for until you're there (so a wasted trip).

Around 400,000 people read the article. If it takes one month of search out, that's a lot of time saved. In my calculation, I lost T time looking for all that information and it was unacceptable that this would become NxT (N being the number of people who also want to get that item) so I set to minimize it.

I learned a lot of very cool stuff tinkering with the blog. The number of visitors increased dramatically when I hosted it on its own domain as opposed to wordpress.com. Not much, but around 300 readers daily for one blog post. It outranked the bank in question for the very search terms, including their name + card. It became sort of the reference that people on forums would exchange the link for (I check refer[r]ers). When someone would share it on a blog, I'd chime in and offer support and info. So much that many people who knew me would be looking to get a card, stumble on the article on their first search and then go "Wait a minute, I know that guy!" and then call me/text me to ask me about it. I'd read search terms and change the article to account for that. Still answering questions in the comments (700+) three years later. But that's all optimizing not to duplicate the time wasted.

A few years later it was a rarity, and now it's very common to have a card. The Prime Minister, however, wants to forbid people from using these cards to pay for ads on Facebook or Google. We still have a long way to go. Yaks here are quite hairy and shaving them is a lifelong effort, apparently.