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SEO for Web Engineers

johnwdefeo.com

31–40 of 57 posts

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#31
post #24

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…

The key to getting good rankings for good keywords is really the same as it's always been: writing stuff people actually want to read/find useful and getting it referenced by sites and services with a large audience and a decent reputation. That's why so many startups and agencies fail miserably with their blogs; because their content is third rate crap that no one really wants to read. They wonder why say, Moz or Si…

This. It's all about supply and demand, stuffing keywords to game the SERP is a short term tactic.

If you have content that people dig, Google will automatically send you more traffic.

If you have mediocre run of the mill startup content blog, you are shit out of luck because you are doing the same thing everyone else who failed is doing

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#32

> 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 result in the entire website being blacklisted. Can someone expand on that one? The blacklist would only apply to the IP address being sent from and not the domain?

Both a domain and an IP can get blacklisted, however it's typically IPs blacklists that you find yourself dealing with if you're sending emails from your webserver(s).

You can sidestep these issues by using something like Mailgun or Sendgrid as your delivery mechanism for server-generated emails (password resets, account registration confirmations, etc). And always set up your SPF records to include these services as permitted senders.

You can use the same services to send marketing emails or there are of course services like MailChimp / Constant Contact / Campaign Monitor / etc that provide all the UIs for marketers. Same thing applies though, you gotta set up SPF records.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#33
post #15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

quality score has nothing to do with organic results.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#35

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 ?

JS errors, page size, HTML errors, bad web design, CSS problems, SSL and broken layout has nothing to do with organic results or SEO and it is not proved that it affects your organic result position.

Even if it does, in-page problems doesn't affect your result not even by 1%. 99% is backlinks and their quality (or course).

Example: check techcrunch.com and debug/inspect their homepage. 15 JS errors, 6mb in size, no Description/Keywords, awful , bad HTML elements. Can you even remotely beat them in the keyword "startup news"? No way. No matter how hard you will try to "SEO" your website.

I will tell it again. "SEO" was always a gimmick marketing thing. It's crazy that even now ppl don't understand that the only thing that matters are quality backlinks, as a result of quality content.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#36
post #35

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 ?

JS errors, page size, HTML errors, bad web design, CSS problems, SSL and broken layout has nothing to do with organic results or SEO and it is not proved that it affects your organic result position. Even if it does, in-page problems doesn't affect your result not even by 1%. 99% is backlinks and their quality (or course). Example: check techcrunch.com and debug/inspect their homepage. 15 JS errors, 6mb in size, no D…

of course

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#37
post #13
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…

"SEO doesn't exist" yet Google hires SEOs to optimize their own sites AND they are not focused on getting backlinks. Go figure! https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/advertising-channels/search/...

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#38
post #32

> 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 result in the entire website being blacklisted. Can someone expand on that one? The blacklist would only apply to the IP address being sent from and not the domain?

Both a domain and an IP can get blacklisted, however it's typically IPs blacklists that you find yourself dealing with if you're sending emails from your webserver(s). You can sidestep these issues by using something like Mailgun or Sendgrid as your delivery mechanism for server-generated emails (password resets, account registration confirmations, etc). And always set up your SPF records to include these services as…

> it's typically IPs blacklists that you find yourself dealing with if you're sending emails from your webserver(s).

Why wouldn't they blacklist the domain if they know that IP is associated with your domain?

Would the domain blacklist only happen after you've had several IP addresses blacklisted?

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#39
post #29

Solid list overall. "Consider using the "304-Not Modified" response code on large websites with lots of pages that don't change very often." This is the only thing that, from an SEO perspective, I'd challenge. I can't even begin to see where the supposed benefit of this would be.

The spirit of the idea is that Google will see the 304 status and move onto the next page more quickly than if it received a 200 status and reconciled that version of the page with the version that was previously crawled.

Thanks for clarifying. I guess that makes sense from a crawl efficient/budget standpoint, and in helping preserve server resources.

For context, I've only come across a HTTP 304 status once in 9 years of SEO and crawling websites on a daily basis. I've no first hand experience of them being deployed in this way at scale on a live website and so haven't seen any server log analysis that demonstrates the efficacy of their usage etc. But it's an interesting idea nonetheless.

Re: SEO for Web Engineers

#40
post #31
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key to getting good rankings for good keywords is really the same as it's always been: writing stuff people actually want to read/find useful and getting it referenced by sites and services with a large audience and a decent reputation. That's why so many startups and agencies fail miserably with their blogs; because their content is third rate crap that no one really wants to read. They wonder why say, Moz or Si…

This. It's all about supply and demand, stuffing keywords to game the SERP is a short term tactic. If you have content that people dig, Google will automatically send you more traffic. If you have mediocre run of the mill startup content blog, you are shit out of luck because you are doing the same thing everyone else who failed is doing

Keyword stuffing - not any more :-)
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