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Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#11
post #4

I believe the best methods to remain the same that it has always been, create quality content by delivering value to your visitors and keep your webapp running without maing your page hang on clients as well as presenting a clean interface, that should be cross device.

That must explain why w3schools is always at the top of my search results.

/s

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#12
Yes it does, but a little goes a looooong way to Google.

I've also been starting to notice that having custom HTML / CSS is boosting things more than before for smaller sites.

Also, even if using JS for SPAs doesn't matter to Google there is a reasonable long tail of other web crawlers that may or may not be helpful to your ends and you'd be surprised at how many of them just use mechanize or nokogiri instead of something more robust. Basically it comes down to cost, last time I was in the custom crawler trade it was around 50x more expensive to do things with a virtual dom than it was to either straight parse the HTML or figure out the main API calls JS was making from the browser that actually had the data I needed and just run those.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#13

I've been doing SEO as a side gig for many smaller local websites. The amount of traffic you can generate from locally ranking higher than your competitors is astoundingly high. You can literally bring tens of thousands of dollars of extra business to companies i.e. electricians, vet doctors, dentists, gardeners... honestly it's worth every penny.

How do you do it on the side? Isn't it a very dynamic, very competitive field, so it requires a lot to get good results?

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#14
Depends on the market. Google's move to 'entities' over keywords means broad search seo is beyond the abilities of "2 guys with some adwords experience" type agencies that were popular circa 2011/12. Quality well thought out sites that (theoretically) align with intent fare better.

That said, if you're targeting a certain city, definitely still works. Most local sites are poorly optimized.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#15
post #8

The new SEO is really branding just over a long period of time. Expect SEO to take 6 months to 2 years.

If it takes you 6 months to 2 years to become prominent in local searches, something has gone very wrong. The answer to the original question is really one of "over how big a part of the internet?" first. Global SEO is a slow process, local SEO should be a matter of months at most, if the site you're optimizing for isn't "yet another one" in a saturated local market.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#16
post #11
post #4

I believe the best methods to remain the same that it has always been, create quality content by delivering value to your visitors and keep your webapp running without maing your page hang on clients as well as presenting a clean interface, that should be cross device.

That must explain why w3schools is always at the top of my search results. /s

What's wrong with w3schools?

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#18

Yes it does, but a little goes a looooong way to Google. I've also been starting to notice that having custom HTML / CSS is boosting things more than before for smaller sites. Also, even if using JS for SPAs doesn't matter to Google there is a reasonable long tail of other web crawlers that may or may not be helpful to your ends and you'd be surprised at how many of them just use mechanize or nokogiri instead of some…

Out of curiosity, what options beyond nokogiri, mechanize, etc. are you referring to? Something open source, commercial, or custom?
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