What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO • Hacker News Board

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#31

Post by franze » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 4:18 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #29

franze wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You're telling us to read a 4 year old book

yes

>Lots of SEO involves guess work.

no

everything is measurable, if you can't measure it, don't do it.

>on technology that changes on a monthly basis?

if you don't have a model of how SEO works, you can not improve on this model, even with new information. that books provides a - sustainable, working, applicable, employable - model.

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

... (words fail me)

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#32

Post by franze » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 4:21 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #30

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 you…

i only do organic/unpaid unbranded. i mostly only work with the companies internal resources.

>Blogs are a great resource (especially for SEO).

blogs yes, SEO blogs, no (with about 80% probability) - if you want to justify a bad decision that did cost your company thousands and thousands of revenue, just google it. there is a very high possibility that a ("high reputable") SEO blog recommended it at one point.

Re: What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

#33

Post by newman314 » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:19 PM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #8

The article is very good. I actually coded a project where my entire goal was to reach number one on google for the search term "male female translation." It took about a month but I eventually made it to the top following most of what was mentioned in the article. I just had to figure it all out via research, trial and error.

Honestly, I would expect any experienced web dev to have this knowledge as part of what they bring to the table, especially for a front end dev.

The article is not really stating anything new and there is already any number of similar articles out there basically documenting the same thing. In fact, given her past job experience as VP Eng for SEOmoz, I'm a little surprised at how little insight there is in the post. (Honest opinion, not trying to be snarky).