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

What every Web Developer should know about SEO

polemicdigital.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#31

Post by roneesh »

alphadevx wrote: post #9

I'm coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd. Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they w…

If you're in the app/startup world, it can seem that way. However I'm a web developer on Sears's e-commerce team. We focus a lot on SEO still, as the other options is paying money for search placement and traffic, and those payments are no joke. We have major business goals around minimizing the amounts we pay for traffic, so optimizing SEO is big for us.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#32

Post by BrainInAJar »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #4

This is all basic stuff, but won't affect your rankings that much. Yes, everyone should have it in place, but doesn't represent the state of SEO. What you should know about SEO, is that it's all about getting organic links to your content, and having content that has a semantic connection to the keywords being searched for.

but then where will the "SEO expert" scumbags make money?

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#33

Post by tosbourn »

bsimpson wrote: post #26

I'm surprised he didn't mention using kebab-case vs snake_case in his URLs section. Google recommends kebab-case and will afford a small SEO bump accordingly.

Author here: Good point, you are indeed correct. I will add it to my list of additions/corrections.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#34

Post by tosbourn »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #4

This is all basic stuff, but won't affect your rankings that much. Yes, everyone should have it in place, but doesn't represent the state of SEO. What you should know about SEO, is that it's all about getting organic links to your content, and having content that has a semantic connection to the keywords being searched for.

That is outside of a typical developers remit though, I wrote this for developers on a team who don't think they need to worry about SEO.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#35

Post by mbesto »

Does anyone have any real evidence to support higher rankings for an increase in speed? Like, if I increased my speed from 5s to 4s page loading, I saw X amount of increase on traffic.

Reason being - all too often I see SEO developers use this as a hook to sell their services to clients to be able to get into their codebase.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#36

Post by Polemicist »

mbesto wrote: post #35

Does anyone have any real evidence to support higher rankings for an increase in speed? Like, if I increased my speed from 5s to 4s page loading, I saw X amount of increase on traffic. Reason being - all too often I see SEO developers use this as a hook to sell their services to clients to be able to get into their codebase.

It's very hard to isolate any single ranking factor and attribute specific traffic increases to it, but overall what we know about load speed and Google rankings strongly implies a correlation there.

Moreover, Google has come out and said it's a factor. Not that we can always trust everything Google says, but in this case it aligns well with their efforts to optimise crawl efficiency. Faster loading websites means more efficient crawling, which helps Google.

And if Google recommends something it benefits from itself, it's a safe bet to assume it actually benefits your website's visibility in Google's search results as well. Google is, after all, very adept at the carrot & stick approach to making webmasters do what it wants them to.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#37

Post by Polemicist »

alphadevx wrote: post #19
ssharp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you, but I certainly would like to know your reasoning behind this. Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads. People go to Google for the organic results and sometimes the paid ads are useful for those people. It's still in Google's best interest to provide the most relevant organic results as possible. Most businesses I've worked with still get more revenue from organ…

> Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads. Most people will just click on the first few "results", even if they are in fact ads. They can hardly tell the difference. That's why businesses are paying so much to be on top of certain lucrative search key terms: if they we not getting a return on their advertising spend, then they would not be spending it. My main point is, even if your…

> Most people will just click on the first few "results", even if they are in fact ads.

Incorrect. Specific percentages vary from study to study, but on average no more than 30% of clicks on a search results page are on ads, leaving 70%+ for organic results.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#38

Post by Polemicist »

thejosh wrote: post #21
alphadevx wrote: post #9

I'm coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd. Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they w…

"SEO" is starting to lose it's term. People should be focusing on building sites right, not relying on dirty hacks to get their sites indexed of using Javascript etc. You can actually rank quite well and get respectable clicks if you just build your site well and create a good action plan to actually optimise your site over a set period of time. Or you know, go to BlackHatWorld and fall for one of their scams to prom…

> You can actually rank quite well and get respectable clicks if you just build your site well and create a good action plan to actually optimise your site over a set period of time.

So, in other words, by doing SEO right.

If you think SEO is 'dirty hacks', then you obviously don't know SEO.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#39

Post by nnain »

alphadevx wrote: post #9

I'm coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd. Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they w…

No way, SEO is very relevant. It's still a pillar for inbound marketing. Just for instance, if you're search for the next product you want to buy, there's good chance that you'll visit the top organic search results and buy from there. Big win for the seo optimised site! In mobile apps, it might not seem so appealing, but it's still best if your app shows up in relevant categories etc.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#40

Post by sharkweek »

alphadevx wrote: post #9

I'm coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd. Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they w…

Appreciate the thought, but disagree quite heavily - I think the "dirty hacks to help you rank #1 overnight!" are gone (and even this is debatable for short term gains, just not viable for long term business strategy), but SEO is alive and well and will be for quite some time.

I think trying to rank for "car insurance," for example, as a new company is a fool's errand with how much work it would take to overthrow one of the big guys, but that doesn't mean there aren't thousands (if not millions) of other relevant monthly searches you could go after while you grow a business.

I dabble in SEO quite a lot because I see return on it (B2B SaaS company), and it's still relatively a wild west. Things are always changing, and it pays to be on top of it.

Post reply on HN