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

flaviocopes.com

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

#61

Post by rchaud »

user5994461 wrote: post #52

He missed the number one rule to get more views, which is to write about topics with a broad audience. From my own experience, a good piece on docker or javascript and that will be tens of thousands of visitors instantly from reddit and HN. Whereas a good piece on some obscure technology and that will be a handful of visitors per day, which is truly everybody in the world who cares about that thing.

But that's the point. SEO is not just about putting up big traffic numbers for its own sake. SEO is a means to an end, the end being conversion into something. A sales funnel, an email subscriber list, or a product sale. For that, you need targeted leads. If you write a big piece on Javascript but aren't offering a JS course or upsell of some sort, you'll get a lot of traffic that won't actually convert into anything.

Otherwise, if you're truly writing for passion's sake, then SEO shouldn't be part of the rationale to begin with.

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

#62

Post by rchaud »

ecmascript wrote: post #24

He doesn't show any statistics from his own blog to back his theories up. I don't know, I don't think these are any valuable SEO lessons imo. The tl;dr of this post is "I find SEO optimization boring so I just write whatever I want and don't think about it". There is nothing wrong with that statement except that it isn't a SEO lesson. Sure quality over quantity is a good SEO lesson. To provide stuff of value is good…

The key word in SEO is "Optimization". What is the author optimizing for? He's a developer who's maintained a dev blog for many years. Chances are when he started blogging, he wasn't thinking about selling e-books and courses or about competing for business with other developers who pursued a similar path.

That is the polar opposite of what "Optimization" means for businesses. Usually they're in a competitive product category, and there are lots of competitors who're not only churning out blog posts to boost their organic search hits, but also buying your product's keywords and advertising against you.

Online discoverability is a zero-sum game, so the tactics tends to be fairly scorched-earth compared to what they would for a personal website.

If you Googled "flavio copes", you wouldn't see an ad at the top of the search page that reads "Flavio is a bad developer. Click here if you want a real 10X developer on your project".

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

#64

Post by dang »

userbinator wrote: post #8
hobabaObama wrote: post #3

tldr; Don't try to fool google. It take genuine efforts with quality of your content to be on top of SEO.

Given the quality of the search results I've seen recently, I feel like Google has made the ranking almost random... it's only within the past few years that I've had a lot more of "I'm pretty sure there's more information on this out there, but Google isn't showing it ot me" experiences.

(Apologies for offtopicness: could you please email us at hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you some repost invites but don't have an address to do that.)

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

#65

Post by ilovefood »

franze wrote: post #46
tomcam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for this! Reading it right now even though I should go sleep.

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

#66

Post by wyclif »

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.

I've read it and it's a good book. However, I'd like to take the opportunity to point out to the author that there's an English error on the landing page linked above. It should be "Info" not "Infos" since it's not a countable noun.

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

#67

Post by user5994461 »

CM30 wrote: post #59
user5994461 wrote: post #52

He missed the number one rule to get more views, which is to write about topics with a broad audience. From my own experience, a good piece on docker or javascript and that will be tens of thousands of visitors instantly from reddit and HN. Whereas a good piece on some obscure technology and that will be a handful of visitors per day, which is truly everybody in the world who cares about that thing.

This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, you're right, a more mainstream topic does have a larger potential audience, and if your topic is one few people care about, you're probably gonna get a lot less traffic compared to one with a broader audience. At the same time however, the broader the audience, the harder it usually is compete and make a name for yourself in a niche. There are hundreds if not thousands…

Blog articles are not competitive, the pie is simply bigger for everyone on the more popular subjects .

If you look at HN, you will see articles about javascript popping up almost every day. They all get tens of thousands of views, they're not competing for readership.

If you're considering a niche subject instead, the article would not get enough upvotes to reach the frontpage, and it wouldn't get any views at all. There might be hundreds of people aware of that topic (and thousands who would be curious enough to read if it were front page) but it doesn't have enough audience to reach a critical mass of upvotes, so it simply doesn't exist.

P.S. The Youtube comparison is misplaced IMO. Writing books (blog articles) is trivial in comparison to making Hollywood videos (Youtube).

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

#68

Post by user5994461 »

rchaud wrote: post #61
user5994461 wrote: post #52

He missed the number one rule to get more views, which is to write about topics with a broad audience. From my own experience, a good piece on docker or javascript and that will be tens of thousands of visitors instantly from reddit and HN. Whereas a good piece on some obscure technology and that will be a handful of visitors per day, which is truly everybody in the world who cares about that thing.

But that's the point. SEO is not just about putting up big traffic numbers for its own sake. SEO is a means to an end, the end being conversion into something. A sales funnel, an email subscriber list, or a product sale. For that, you need targeted leads. If you write a big piece on Javascript but aren't offering a JS course or upsell of some sort, you'll get a lot of traffic that won't actually convert into anything…

That's arguable. Considering a shop, SEO is getting people to enter the shop and conversion is getting people to buy something.

SEO does stand on its own really. There are no sales without visitors. On the other hand if you have visitors you can try to sell them something, anything really.

Ironically the internet is all about advertising and eye balls. With the author speaking of a million visitors a month, he can certainly monetize in many ways.

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

#70

Post by franze »

wyclif wrote: post #66
tomcam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've read it and it's a good book. However, I'd like to take the opportunity to point out to the author that there's an English error on the landing page linked above. It should be "Info" not "Infos" since it's not a countable noun.

thx, fixed it
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