What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO • Hacker News Board

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#21

Post by toumhi » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 2:18 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #19

toumhi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not only. You can host software packages and tutorials on your product website. For example, patio11 of HN fame has an article about Rails SEO Tips on his product website http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/rails-seo-tips.htm Even though I'd say that he could have done a better job at integrating it on his website (it looks too much like an isolated page in my opinion - there should be a "Tips for developers…

That's sort of what I mean. For my work I build and run a number of websites which are almost completely unrelated to tech. These are service industry websites so there is no "product" to speak of. I am looking for ways to improve pagerank, so let's say I was to write a few pages about how I built some of the trickier parts of these websites and hosted these on the websites themselves but perhaps did not link these t…

Yeah, that's the idea. However personnally I would link from the home page ("Inside the business" chronicles). It doesn't have to be a big link, could be in the footer for example. I don't have metrics for that but I think pages that are not linked from anywhere on your website might look a bit shady in Google's eyes.

By getting links to your articles you'd improve overall authority of your site (also important to link back to your homepage and other important pages in order to drive PR back, as you point out).

By improving your website's authority you'll rank better for your main keywords as well.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#22

Post by DanielBMarkham » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 2:27 PM UTC

franze wrote: post #20

PLEASE DO NOT READ THAT ARTICLE - it is bad for you and your business. SEO is a bullshit industry. this means that 80% of everything that is written about SEO actually reduces your knowledge of SEO, that article is in no way different. just pick a few examples: > A web crawler has to crawl your site (and every other site on the web) > Indexes all the pages .. > Organizes the indexed collection and stores ... this one…

You just took five minutes of my time telling me how bad something was and not one second offering an alternative. For all the bad things your critique basically just boiled down to "not it's not" without offering proof or links.

Do you see something wrong with this picture? As a reader all I've got from your comment is angry guy doesn't like SEO and thinks all SEO blogging is for shit.

I apologize for being so blunt, but this is not a very useful comment. Perhaps the goal here is to establish how much you know, but even then it really fails to convince the reader. It'd been great if it had been a bit more constructive. Obviously you believe you know what you're talking about.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#23

Post by jerednel » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 2:34 PM UTC

franze wrote: post #20

PLEASE DO NOT READ THAT ARTICLE - it is bad for you and your business. SEO is a bullshit industry. this means that 80% of everything that is written about SEO actually reduces your knowledge of SEO, that article is in no way different. just pick a few examples: > A web crawler has to crawl your site (and every other site on the web) > Indexes all the pages .. > Organizes the indexed collection and stores ... this one…

Not sure why this article offended you so much. It was all rehashed info but it wasn't that bad.

Just because Google can somewhat crawl and parse certain JavaScript doesn't mean it's good for SEO. I think you would be doing a disservice to your company to act like you can just load your site with client-side loading content and act like Google is going to retain your content. I've countless anecdotal examples of content hidden behind JavaScript not being found by search engines. In fact, it's a celebration whenever Google announces they managed to crawl a common piece of JS (Disqus, FaceBook)

Internal links are not irrelevant...What on earth would make you think this? It's not hard to prove that internal anchor text passes the relevance to the linked-to page by using a made up word to link to an otherwise orphaned' page to rank.

Regarding 404's....Let's pretend I have a great piece of content that has amassed hundreds of links. Marketing has deemed that the content is no longer worthy of being present on the site and has removed the page without consulting you. You have the option of letting it sit there dead with hundreds of links pointing to it, or you can 301 redirect it somewhere to pass the amassed link equity. Yeah, you go ahead and keep your 404.

Finally, links are just something that agencies tell you to sell their services??? Are you suggesting that gaining good links will do nothing for your site's natural search traffic? Ok. Sure.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#24

Post by toumhi » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 2:37 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #22

franze wrote: post #20

PLEASE DO NOT READ THAT ARTICLE - it is bad for you and your business. SEO is a bullshit industry. this means that 80% of everything that is written about SEO actually reduces your knowledge of SEO, that article is in no way different. just pick a few examples: > A web crawler has to crawl your site (and every other site on the web) > Indexes all the pages .. > Organizes the indexed collection and stores ... this one…

You just took five minutes of my time telling me how bad something was and not one second offering an alternative. For all the bad things your critique basically just boiled down to "not it's not" without offering proof or links. Do you see something wrong with this picture? As a reader all I've got from your comment is angry guy doesn't like SEO and thinks all SEO blogging is for shit. I apologize for being so blunt…

I second that. Pointing out what a good SEO strategy is and how it opposes the points described in the article would have been helpful.

If somebody interested in improving their SEO skills should not read well-known SEO blogs then what does the OP suggest?

I personally follow SEOMOz and a few established SEO and link building blogs, but would be interested in hearing other suggestions.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#25

Post by programminggeek » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 2:44 PM UTC

Ok, you really don't need to know everything about SEO to do a non-terrible job of ranking. Do these things and you can get traffic with SEO.

1. Title tags that get clicks (not kw stuffing or plain exact match)

2. Write content that is unique and semi-frequent. (update once a week or so at least)

3. Acquire links.

#1 and #2 are the basics that you need to do to even have a shot to show up for a given query. #3 is what is going to get you on the first page.

You can do #3 by having great content and doing social promotion, using email newsletters to blast your content out to people so they can share it, or if you're in a boring industry and nobody likes you, you can buy or build links via the numerous link building services out there that can hit any number of link sources.

At the end of the day, natural links are viewed as better, but paid links can get the job done in some cases.

Given a certain bar of content quality, the quantity and volume of links is still the most important ranking factor on Google and Bing as far as I can tell.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#26

Post by franze » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 3:09 PM UTC

jerednel wrote: post #23

franze wrote: post #20

PLEASE DO NOT READ THAT ARTICLE - it is bad for you and your business. SEO is a bullshit industry. this means that 80% of everything that is written about SEO actually reduces your knowledge of SEO, that article is in no way different. just pick a few examples: > A web crawler has to crawl your site (and every other site on the web) > Indexes all the pages .. > Organizes the indexed collection and stores ... this one…

Not sure why this article offended you so much. It was all rehashed info but it wasn't that bad. Just because Google can somewhat crawl and parse certain JavaScript doesn't mean it's good for SEO. I think you would be doing a disservice to your company to act like you can just load your site with client-side loading content and act like Google is going to retain your content. I've countless anecdotal examples of cont…

ad ">Just because Google can somewhat crawl" see my response above "this tip is good, but leads to the false conclusion that google does not parse/render/"see" JS."

for the other points: i have a very special niche, i deal with companies that go through 1,2,3,...x SEO consultant, agencies, companies that spend an unbelievable amount of resources, dev time, money just to get SEO right - and their traffic still sucks. they have the most optimized internal link anchor text you can imagine, tens of thousands hardcoded redirects (no joke, i have seen the .htaccess) to "funnel that linkjuice to the most valuable page" and spend a huge monthly budget for linkbuilding and the most "sophisticated SEO tools" you can imagine. their URLs were just "keyword optimized" and now they are working with a company "to keyword optimize our content". after five sentences with their CEO he starts talking about PageRank.

i have to cut through all of that bullshit and establish a manageable, scaleable site that consists of

  * a startpage
  * sitemap.xml
  * (interlinked) landingpages

and sadly from a SEO point of view: yes, you need links - but not the links SEO agencies tell you you need, and not with the methods SEO blogs recommend.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#27

Post by franze » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 3:12 PM UTC

toumhi wrote: post #24

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just took five minutes of my time telling me how bad something was and not one second offering an alternative. For all the bad things your critique basically just boiled down to "not it's not" without offering proof or links. Do you see something wrong with this picture? As a reader all I've got from your comment is angry guy doesn't like SEO and thinks all SEO blogging is for shit. I apologize for being so blunt…

I second that. Pointing out what a good SEO strategy is and how it opposes the points described in the article would have been helpful. If somebody interested in improving their SEO skills should not read well-known SEO blogs then what does the OP suggest? I personally follow SEOMOz and a few established SEO and link building blogs, but would be interested in hearing other suggestions.

i'm telling you the same thing i told the CEO of an international publishing house: read a book instead!

Search Engine Marketing Incorporated

http://www.amazon.com/Search-Engine-Marketing-Inc-Companys/d... [not an affiliate link]

sadly, nobody ever does.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#28

Post by kateroth » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 3:54 PM UTC

nhebb wrote: post #3

" Typical link building [...] can be through deals, partnerships, PR pitches, link exchanges – even paying for links. " A few of these techniques - link exchanges and buying links - sound like really bad advice, especially given that she is a former SEOmoz employee. She also omits the most straightforward way for startups to get backlinks => create content on your site worth linking to.

That is a great point - and I definitely wasn't encouraging buying links. I updated the post with your advice.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#29

Post by paulhauggis » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 4:07 PM UTC

franze wrote: post #27

toumhi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second that. Pointing out what a good SEO strategy is and how it opposes the points described in the article would have been helpful. If somebody interested in improving their SEO skills should not read well-known SEO blogs then what does the OP suggest? I personally follow SEOMOz and a few established SEO and link building blogs, but would be interested in hearing other suggestions.

i'm telling you the same thing i told the CEO of an international publishing house: read a book instead! Search Engine Marketing Incorporated http://www.amazon.com/Search-Engine-Marketing-Inc-Companys/d... [not an affiliate link] sadly, nobody ever does.

You're telling us to read a 4 year old book on technology that changes on a monthly basis?

Lots of SEO involves guess work. Google changes its algorithm constantly.

That's the reason nobody reads books on SEO. It's the same for web development.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#30

Post by paulhauggis » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 4:12 PM UTC

franze wrote: post #20

PLEASE DO NOT READ THAT ARTICLE - it is bad for you and your business. SEO is a bullshit industry. this means that 80% of everything that is written about SEO actually reduces your knowledge of SEO, that article is in no way different. just pick a few examples: > A web crawler has to crawl your site (and every other site on the web) > Indexes all the pages .. > Organizes the indexed collection and stores ... this one…

"SEOmoz"

I don't think you read SEOmoz with statements like that.

"disclaimer: i work as an SEO - i hate SEOs. my biggest success is 62 M visitors a month. i don't read SEO blogs."

Blogs are a great resource (especially for SEO). I would also be interested to see what your spending budget is (with enough money, it doesn't take that much skill to bring lots of users to your site) and how you are getting traffic to your sites.

If it's all organic (IE: not paid), then I will be impressed.