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SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

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Re: SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

#41

Post by seanwilson »

> Most of the time you will see people talking about keywords, and keywords tools.

> We like tools, so we start using them, spending days to get the maximum value out of the free ones, spending a lot of time.

> Right? Wrong.

> I have a confession to make: I never used a keyword tool. I do not currently use one, and I find that just thinking about it bores me.

I don't use keyword tools myself but I do think on-page/technical SEO is important. You're not going to rank well on Google with perfect on-page SEO + awful content but if you've got well written content then good on-page SEO can only help. On-page SEO helps Google understand the content better.

I have my own project/tool that checks technical SEO [1] where I've intentionally stayed away from adding any checks/recommendations that aren't backed up by something Google says. I avoid any advice that's based on trying to reverse engineer however Google search works today that could change tomorrow.

For example, I recommend every site is checked for broken links (it's easy to miss broken internal links as you make changes), badly named URLs, missing image ALT tags and duplicate pages+titles (this one is really ease to miss without a crawling tool). You can still rank well even if your site has these problems but SEO fixes like these can only help. Obviously you need to prioritise fixes against time you could spend writing more content but there's a lot of low hanging fruit with on-page SEO.

[1] Rules checked are here https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/

Re: SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

#42

Post by tomcam »

franze wrote: post #35
chiefalchemist wrote: post #21

In the last couple months my mental-model of SEO has evolved. Traditionally SEO tends to be defined by things like kwyword density, proper heading tags, page load speed, etc. I don't dispute those, but the perspective is misguided. Ultimately, someone comes to a search engine with a need. The search engine's top priority is to satisfy that need. That's the relationship that matters to the search engine. That's the cu…

Hi, you are on the right track, I wrote a whole book around it. https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news It never was about all that onpage stuff, it always was about the User Google Website triangle.

Parent is too circumspect to admit that the book is very, very well written, beautifully designed, and free to HN users. No relation to author, just followed link.

Re: SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

#43

Post by johnchristopher »

seanwilson wrote: post #41

> Most of the time you will see people talking about keywords, and keywords tools. > We like tools, so we start using them, spending days to get the maximum value out of the free ones, spending a lot of time. > Right? Wrong. > I have a confession to make: I never used a keyword tool. I do not currently use one, and I find that just thinking about it bores me. I don't use keyword tools myself but I do think on-page/te…

> duplicate content

On the same website or across the web (or a network) ?

edit: ah, from the page you linked

> Every page should provide unique content that doesn’t appear elsewhere on the site. Search engines will penalise or even completely hide pages that are too similar as showing duplicate search results is unhelpful to users. Duplicate pages can also reduce the search rank benefit of backlinks because it’s better to have backlinks to a single URL compared to backlinks spread over a set of duplicate page URLs. Crawling duplicates will also use up the resources search crawlers allocate to crawling your site which means important pages might not be indexed. You can eliminate sets of duplicate pages by consolidating them to a single URL using redirects or canonical tags.

Re: SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

#44

Post by seanwilson »

johnchristopher wrote: post #43
seanwilson wrote: post #41

> Most of the time you will see people talking about keywords, and keywords tools. > We like tools, so we start using them, spending days to get the maximum value out of the free ones, spending a lot of time. > Right? Wrong. > I have a confession to make: I never used a keyword tool. I do not currently use one, and I find that just thinking about it bores me. I don't use keyword tools myself but I do think on-page/te…

> duplicate content On the same website or across the web (or a network) ? edit: ah, from the page you linked > Every page should provide unique content that doesn’t appear elsewhere on the site. Search engines will penalise or even completely hide pages that are too similar as showing duplicate search results is unhelpful to users. Duplicate pages can also reduce the search rank benefit of backlinks because it’s bet…

The guide from https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/ is focused on technical/on-page SEO but Google makes some mentions of how it treats duplicate content across the web here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

> Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. ...

> Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list.

> In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved.

Re: SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

#45

Post by zenpaul »

"If you write about your passion, you will never lose enthusiasm because you are creating a little corner of the internet that’s yours, you made it, you made it beautiful, and now it’s also available for everyone else, but even if no one shows up, it stands on its own."

One of the most inspirational statements I have seen in a while.

Re: SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

#46

Post by franze »

tomcam wrote: post #42
franze wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, you are on the right track, I wrote a whole book around it. https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news It never was about all that onpage stuff, it always was about the User Google Website triangle.

Parent is too circumspect to admit that the book is very, very well written, beautifully designed, and free to HN users. No relation to author, just followed link.

Thx. The VP Growth of Angellist once called it "SEO for hackers."

I by now sold a few thousand copies as Ebook and print. Mostly in the German spaeking markets. 5 Stars based on 22 reviews an the german Amazon.

Currently mostly doing other ventures so very very happy to give it away and make SEO agencies (and myself) redundant for good.

Re: SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

#49

Post by djmobley »

zenpaul wrote: post #45

"If you write about your passion, you will never lose enthusiasm because you are creating a little corner of the internet that’s yours, you made it, you made it beautiful, and now it’s also available for everyone else, but even if no one shows up, it stands on its own." One of the most inspirational statements I have seen in a while.

Indeed, a throwback to the internet of yore.

Re: SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

#50

Post by user5994461 »

adriansky wrote: post #15

This always puzzle me about SEO. Let's say you are writing an article that you want to cover in-depth. Which one is better for SEO (both options has the same content): A. Publish all in one long article B. Publish in a series of small articles

A. Google prefers long article, around a couple thousands words.

If your article are getting really long, like above 5000 words, consider splitting in two.

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