Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by LoSboccacc » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 7:44 PM UTC

gscott wrote: post #33

TheRealPomax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Local SEO can be very competitive depending upon what you are doing. Having a physical address is good and so signing up for a cheaper local listing manager (cheapest I have found is from Vistaprint https://www.vistaprint.com/digital-marketing/local-listings?... ) will get someone's website on 20-30 sites with authority immediately. Then having long articles and having keywords that focus on the local market. But dep…

Could one do that landing users on a facebook page instead of a real site? I got some question from a friend owning a local business but it’s quite outside my competency and was just looking around for info when this hn popped up

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

#92

Post by jwr » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 8:01 PM UTC

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #51

Yes, definitely. But not in the traditional "hacks" sense. I get a lot of search engine traffic to my blog, with the following strategy: Stage 1: Technical - Clean up your act. If you structure your site properly and make it accessible, search engines will crawl and index it properly. Make your content accessible from a technical standpoint. Clean up your HTML Make your URLs reflect your content, cleanly Build and su…

I could repeat everything that was written above. Exactly my experience. Just do the right thing and SEO will happen by itself.

As a side note, I noticed that simple quick-loading pages seem to have more of an advantage recently than people think.

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

#93

Post by wolfgang42 » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #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 some…

What do you mean by 'custom HTML / CSS'? Not using common WordPress templates or Bootstrap themes?

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

#94

Post by at-fates-hands » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 8:37 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #40

SEO works, and always will. However, trying to figure out the latest tricks is a losing game. Even if you do figure out how to make something work today, algorithms will change and you'll be punished for having gamed the system. Instead, write 'honest' content. Write it well. Write it for humans. If you find yourself adding content in hopes the search engine will pick it up, that is a short-term gain for long-term pa…

> Do all that, with clean markup

From my experience if you're using any number of JS frameworks, this is almost impossible. If you're building a static site, you're better off just writing flat HTML or using a well known framework like Bootstrap or Foundation.

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

#95

Post by at-fates-hands » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

I used to have about a dozen clients with the agency I ran with a friend a few years ago.

I found out a number of things when I was working closely with my clients. Most were doing ok in the SERPS and a few did really well because of the niche industries they were in.

Some things I found out:

1 - SEO helps, but is never the determining factor in hiring any of the companies I worked with. This means you can be #1, #1 in Google and still not get any business because of it.

2 - Tracking contacts is critical. We mandated all of our clients use an answering service. They would contact people within 24 hours of receiving a contact form. The owner would then follow up to set up appointments, consultations, etc. Once we did this, we saw a massive jump in sales conversions which had nothing to do with SEO.

3 - If your design sucks and people can't find what they're looking for quickly, they're going to leave your site no matter how high you're ranking. We found this out with several of our clients who didn't want to redesign their site for various reasons. They ranked high, but their traffic and conversions sucked. We redesigned their site(s) for easier navigation, and prioritized content and got rid of other content that clogged their site. Conversions jumped by 43% over a 6 month period.

SEO does matter, but even if with massive amounts of traffic because you're ranking well isn't a magic bullet for success. You also need a good design and content people can find quickly and easily.

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

#96

Post by JeremyMorgan » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:15 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #92

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #51

Yes, definitely. But not in the traditional "hacks" sense. I get a lot of search engine traffic to my blog, with the following strategy: Stage 1: Technical - Clean up your act. If you structure your site properly and make it accessible, search engines will crawl and index it properly. Make your content accessible from a technical standpoint. Clean up your HTML Make your URLs reflect your content, cleanly Build and su…

I could repeat everything that was written above. Exactly my experience. Just do the right thing and SEO will happen by itself. As a side note, I noticed that simple quick-loading pages seem to have more of an advantage recently than people think.

Yep, Google has been quite public about page loading speed being a factor in rankings. It's not a "make or break" and it won't instantly put you on page 1 for everything, but it makes a difference.

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

#97

Post by cookiecaper » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:32 PM UTC

dazc wrote: post #84

cookiecaper wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't run a web agency and make 0 dollars from selling SEO. This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade. On a past enterprise, I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" and paid a content writer for about 9 months. She posted lengthy original content about 3 times per week, all highly relevant to the search terms we cared about. I did the same about once a week. A competi…

'I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" ...and paid a content writer for about 9 months.' Is paying a content writer (who's area of expertise is, usually, being a content writer) a more noble attempt at gaming the system, I wonder?

So yeah, SEO has changed the definition of "content writer" to mean a spam artist. However, this was a real writer, the type who went to journalism school and wrote for dead-tree publications, and she just happened to put these writings into my Wordpress interface. Her credentials on the topic were impeccable and she was hired primarily for that. Maybe it's inappropriate to call her a "content writer" if the connotation is that content writers are unambiguously spammers.

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

#98

Post by chrischen » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:34 PM UTC

orliesaurus wrote: post #32

chrischen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mostly do content generation, link building, or on-site html optimization.

all of the above + hyperlocal seo

Between link building and content generation, which takes up more budget/time? Asking as I'm trying to decide which one to focus more on.

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

#99

Post by 3pt14159 » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 12:51 AM UTC

wolfgang42 wrote: post #93

3pt14159 wrote: post #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 some…

What do you mean by 'custom HTML / CSS'? Not using common WordPress templates or Bootstrap themes?

Well, I've generally found that the more "compressible" your site's HTML structure or CSS is with other websites the worse it does. I suspect its because Google is fighting Shopify / SquareSpace fly-by-night stores. Even if a store objectively looks worse, if it's all hand coded HTML and it's got an array of products, it's less likely to be a scam or shoddy material.

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

#100

Post by JoshMnem » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 1:04 AM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #40

SEO works, and always will. However, trying to figure out the latest tricks is a losing game. Even if you do figure out how to make something work today, algorithms will change and you'll be punished for having gamed the system. Instead, write 'honest' content. Write it well. Write it for humans. If you find yourself adding content in hopes the search engine will pick it up, that is a short-term gain for long-term pa…

In addition to clean markup, render the HTML on the server and don't try to be too clever with the frontend code.

Reading a lot about it and experimenting with many sites is the best way to learn. It requires more than just good content if the keywords are competitive.