Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SEO for Web Engineers

johnwdefeo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#11

Post by maroonblazer »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #2

A brisk but thorough checklist that fulfills the promise of the title. My only objection would be this bit (below). Specifically, "demands." How many engineers are in a positiin to demand anything? The truth is, for the most part, it's not engineers who are ruining the internet with bloat and privacy infringements. It's designers and marketing. They're more likely to forget the end user and opt for so nasty excess. >…

If a designer or marketer is forgetting the end user then they don't deserve the title "designer" or "marketer".

And to counter your point, I often see sites built by engineers that ignore the end user by not employing any of the best practices the UX/UI and marketing communities have uncovered over the years.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#12

Post by jypepin »

paulpauper wrote: post #7

The million dollar question is how to get good rankings for good keywords without having to spend too much money. This article does a good job describing how to keep a successful site optimized but actually getting the rankings is not covered much. Never, ever, let marketers send newsletters and promotional e-mails from the same IPs that the websites are hosted on. A rogue employee who violates the CAN-SPAM act may r…

That's what I was hoping what this link was about. I'd love to see a high level list of how to do keyword analytics and other things to have a better idea of what wording to use and try to rank better.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#13

Post by papaman »

papaman wrote: post #9

there is no such thing as "SEO". Also, everything on the list has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization. For example "SERVER STABILITY AND DOWNTIME". How come taking case of your server stability is SEO???

I'm writing a little more about that because it's sad to read an article like that that makes no sense.

SEO doesn't exist because the ONLY way to optimize your website is to write good content and get quality backlinks. To be precise, 99% of "SEO" is backlinks and 1% is your HTML quality (in-page SEO).

To give you an example, you can have the worst HTML, no internal linking, to Sitemap, no nothing, but have 10-20 quality backlinks and still be #1 in Google.

I'm doing internet marketing for more than 15 years now and the proof is out there. Quoting something else from the article:

"Google will try to follow relative paths inside of Javascript, even when they don't exist. This can result in polluted crawl error reports."

So he author claims that a relative path to a URL (inside a JS call) will effect your organic results. I wonder if anyone understands that this makes no sense and especially SEO-wise.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#14

Post by wolco »

maroonblazer wrote: post #11
chiefalchemist wrote: post #2

A brisk but thorough checklist that fulfills the promise of the title. My only objection would be this bit (below). Specifically, "demands." How many engineers are in a positiin to demand anything? The truth is, for the most part, it's not engineers who are ruining the internet with bloat and privacy infringements. It's designers and marketing. They're more likely to forget the end user and opt for so nasty excess. >…

If a designer or marketer is forgetting the end user then they don't deserve the title "designer" or "marketer". And to counter your point, I often see sites built by engineers that ignore the end user by not employing any of the best practices the UX/UI and marketing communities have uncovered over the years.

A designer or marketer's focus isn't ux/ui nor should it be.

A marketer is brand building. Could ux/ui be part of it sure but as long as feeling x is associated with product y they have done there job.

A design's job is to express that feeling through design.

UX/UI could be part of it depending on the group targeted. But it's like a red tie it could help but isn't required for that important business meeting.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#15

Post by wolco »

papaman wrote: post #13
papaman wrote: post #9

there is no such thing as "SEO". Also, everything on the list has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization. For example "SERVER STABILITY AND DOWNTIME". How come taking case of your server stability is SEO???

I'm writing a little more about that because it's sad to read an article like that that makes no sense. SEO doesn't exist because the ONLY way to optimize your website is to write good content and get quality backlinks. To be precise, 99% of "SEO" is backlinks and 1% is your HTML quality (in-page SEO). To give you an example, you can have the worst HTML, no internal linking, to Sitemap, no nothing, but have 10-20 qua…

The quality score could go down which can lower rankings with too many broken links.

Google has at least 50-100 variables it checks and assigns different weights to.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#16

Post by midef »

papaman wrote: post #13
papaman wrote: post #9

there is no such thing as "SEO". Also, everything on the list has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization. For example "SERVER STABILITY AND DOWNTIME". How come taking case of your server stability is SEO???

I'm writing a little more about that because it's sad to read an article like that that makes no sense. SEO doesn't exist because the ONLY way to optimize your website is to write good content and get quality backlinks. To be precise, 99% of "SEO" is backlinks and 1% is your HTML quality (in-page SEO). To give you an example, you can have the worst HTML, no internal linking, to Sitemap, no nothing, but have 10-20 qua…

Polluted crawl error reports won't effect organic rankings, but they will make it harder to discover a legitimate page that is broken, but shouldn't be.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#17

Post by midef »

sturgill wrote: post #6
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #3

The interesting one for me was measuring error rates (if your JS heavy web page calls the server 100 times, if two users try to load and one gets 500 that should be 50% error rate but it looks like So it feels like a piece of JS that says I have seen everything that should load load ok, then reports home with the page seems a good idea. Probably quite doable - can JS see the network load like web developer tools ?

There can’t be a generic solution to “am I done loading everything” (see the halting problem). And tightly coupling every request to a list feels awfully fragile. I think the real problem is making 100 api calls to load a page...

Amen to that. Too many pages are complex for no real reason.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#18

Post by XCSme »

Don't waste your time reading this article, it just mentions random points about how to have a functional web app, plus in a perfect world SEO should not exist, it's the Search Engine's job to find the content and show the user the content he is looking for, not the developers. I shouldn't have to add "hacks" in my code for the Google Crawler to understand my site the same way users already do.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#19

Post by cimmanom »

wolco wrote: post #14
maroonblazer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a designer or marketer is forgetting the end user then they don't deserve the title "designer" or "marketer". And to counter your point, I often see sites built by engineers that ignore the end user by not employing any of the best practices the UX/UI and marketing communities have uncovered over the years.

A designer or marketer's focus isn't ux/ui nor should it be. A marketer is brand building. Could ux/ui be part of it sure but as long as feeling x is associated with product y they have done there job. A design's job is to express that feeling through design. UX/UI could be part of it depending on the group targeted. But it's like a red tie it could help but isn't required for that important business meeting.

Depends on context. There are many different types of design. A branding or marketing designer needs to trigger emotions, yes. A product designer needs to make it easy for a user to accomplish a task.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#20

Post by CM30 »

Another one is 'use the correct status codes for page requests'. Seen far too many sites returna 200 OK status for a non existent page, which may cause havoc with search engines indexing 404 messages and what not.

Oh, and make sure you actually use heading tags properly. God, so many sites and apps seem to be designed with no thought put into heading structure, with random h2s and h3s strewn about at random. Especially don't forget the h1 tag, and try and make sure it (and the title tag for the page) are both unique on every page.

Basic I know, but come on. Too many SPAs seem to be built with no thought put into even the basics of HTML structure or on page SEO.

Post reply on HN