What kind of meta tags or strategies would work to improve rankings significantly?
Meta tags don't work anymore or at least are not very important. You should, however, have a good description and a headline that is unique for every page you have. A subheadline is recommended. Then it is just unique content from there. It looks like you are on the right track. I'd recommend getting a Twitter account and sharing those articles with some hashtags.
Remember that your audience is a niche audience and you will attract people who are interested but there are only about 20 million coders in the world, not every single one of them is going to be interested in your website, and others who might scan it once and be done.
You have the right idea on your "getting started with coding", as you can gain attention and traction to get new coders on board. So you just need some time and exposure. Any time you can, mention tutorials on your website to help others.
I run a website called http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com and I remember when I had just three visitors in the beginning: my mom, my girlfriend, and Googlebot. Having posted to Twitter, Triberr, LinkedIn, and other media over the years, I'd say my average daily visitor count is around 1,000, over 4 years later, but I have seen the website go viral at times, in fact, just a few weeks ago, it was getting 10,000 visitors a day for almost 2 weeks.
What's my secret? I'm not the only one writing articles for the website. I opened it up so everyone else can write and share articles. What does that do? People who are likely to have their articles on your website are going to share those articles with their fans and following. So if I have a thousand articles on the website written by different people who have their own fans and following, and you encourage them to share for maximum exposure, that amounts to at least an average of 500 people each (with generosity for exposure in mind), that is the potential reach of at least 500,000 people.
Become a community that people want to be at and write for and you will find the best SEO results that you never had to pay for.
Back in the day, I had a submission form right on the website where people could submit their articles, but the form got spammed so much I had to remove it. Now people just email me their articles and infographics. That was another thing -- accepting infographics increased the amount of articles on the website greatly. Every time you make a post, it is a gateway to another search on the Internet and another way for visitors to find you.
So almost every article is acceptable, though there are some rules:
- no "self-promotion" (you cannot sell your product on the website directly -- but you can talk about it and lead visitors back your own website)
- article must contribute some type of knowledge to the Internet
- 500 words minimum per article or 250 word summary per infographic
For the most part, I've never had too many issues, and I think of the 2,000 articles I've accepted, I've only ever rejected less than 10 because people tried to submit a spun article, they just didn't get the concept of "no self-promotion", and there was this one time where an article was encouraging women to do works of charity in areas of the world that I would consider dangerous, so I was very skeptical about publishing something like that. Most contributors have been fans of the website for a while before they contribute so they have an idea of the types of articles we are looking for and how they should read.. though everyone has their own unique personality and writing style, which helps greatly with SEO.
I read every article and it goes through a processing phase which consists of making sure there are no spelling mistakes, making sure the actual article makes sense, preparing the article for any additional SEO (meta description), finding at least two images (one main and one featured which greatly help SEO), and adding to a feature I call Quick Glimpse (I write 4- to 5- bullet points summarizing the article which is located on the left hand side of every page, which also may help with SEO), and then I schedule the article. I also write out every single infographic in order for it to be a text-friendly version (I have blind readers who can't read infographics), and that too, is also great for SEO.
Sounds like a crazy time-consuming process, which is why it can take anywhere from a week to two weeks to get published, but actual time it takes to do all this (including writing out infographics) is anywhere from 10 minutes to a half hour per article. Every week to every other week, I'd say I get an average of about 5-10 emails contributing articles to the website. I also spend time writing my own and those get published every so often too.
The amount of work you put into your website will yield the results you want to see. In the beginning, I must've spent too many hours working on the website, but have since limited myself to no more than an hour a day, including the processing of articles.
I will say this: in the beginning, I solicited articles on Craigslist, MyBlogGuest, and later on, MyBlogU. I also would hop on Fiverr and pay people to write articles for me. After the first year, however, I stopped all of this because I was receiving so many contributions from the submission form (and I was also writing so much), and now it is no longer necessary for me to solicit anything at all.
Your website is a coding-niche but you might want to consider writing actual articles not always just focused on code, unless that is all you want to reach: people with knowledge of code. I mean... if I were visiting a website like yours with interest in coding or even a little knowledge in coding, I'd want to know:
- Why should I learn code?
- What kind of money can I make and what is the programming language to help me do that?
- How can I make money with coding while freelancing?
- What types of jobs can I do?
- Who is hiring?
- Why is coding important for the future?
- Why should I teach my children to learn how to code?
The topics are numerous on what you can write about. These types of topics will draw NEW coders in and people who want to learn to code, so you aren't just after assuming everyone knows how to code, and that should likely gain some traffic to your website.
Something that is recently receiving attention in the news is that more schools are now offering courses on coding, some even mandatory. Imagine being an important website resource that helps children learn how to code. Just some things for you to think about!
This is still working in 2017 even if search engines will like you to believe otherwise. Links still rule.
Now, the best would be to make some killer content on the website that would attract journalists and blogers that would want to write about it aka that would consider your content worthwile to write about and worthwile for their audience to read about.
Build your content based on that. Change your headlines to something like "Learn how to build a Twitter Bot in node.js".
Setup Google Webmasters to understand what Google is doing. Actively send your sitemap to them (it is a manual input there).
I do this content SEO a lot. People say good content is king, but after 2 years I have some websites with a lot of pageviews and the only thing I did was poor content.
