Which brings me to a big point the article missed: Page loading speed is important for search ranking. I have a blog I add to once every other month. It uses HTML and CSS, and I write it in Django admin using markdown. Lots of room for improvement UI-wise, for both reader experience and writing interface. Yet, it's a low-traffic site, and most of the blog entries show up on the first page of Google for relevant keywords. Relevant: It gets a perfect Google Page Speed Insights score, by virtue of being an HTML/CSS page.
I bring this up for 2 reasons: Using a blog engine will probably make it tougher to get fast load times. You can rank high on Google just by having good content and fast load times.
Unless you're doing something simple, then fine.
Also, do build your own blog engine if you are also happy to manage META tags for Twitter, OpenGraph (Facebook) and general META tags for each post. Also if you are good with generating your own schema.org JSON for Search engines, manage your own taxonomies (tagging, categories, events, locations, authors), and also generating/updating sitemap.xml as needed.
One last point from above...
> Using a blog engine will probably make it tougher to get fast load times
No it won't. The blog engine is not the same as the front-end. You can modify the template, theme, or whatever as much as you like. You have full control here. Thats all on you.
> You can rank high on Google just by having good content and fast load times
Um, maybe - but not for anything that will matter. There is more to it than that.
You don't need any of those as a baseline.
I've worked in growth teams with a lot of SEO related work and I disagree too. Another thing is leveraging one of those engines to publish your content sooner, then iterate and build your own content management system.
It wouldn't be so bad if they would at least say, "I made a page with similar information", but suggesting that people straight up lie about it tells me everything I need to know about the ethics of the site that is making that suggestion.
> I got an error message when I tried to click on this site: http://DeadURL.org/index.jsp
> It looks like they made a change to their home page but didn't update it... anyhow, the correct link is here: http://www.FixedURL.org/
I think both of those URLs are third parties and supposed to be the content that the site used to link to. Then the email template goes on with:
> And while you're updating your page, I wondered if you'd be open to including some further resources that could help people struggling with similar issues.
> Compelling Content Title
> http://www.clientsite.org/compellingcontent
> Compelling Content Title 2
> http://www.clientsothersite.com/compellingcontent
Which would be the URLs that you're trying to obtain links towards.
There has got to be a better way to build these links if that is so important for SEO. I think email spam will drop by 10% the day this happens.
How about, instead, you contribute to relevant communities (no, that doesn't mean spamming your keyword soup into them, it means making actual meaningful contributions) and promoting your work organically through real connections to real people.
Edit: I got downvoted for this comment, but the author has made the change. My sacrifice was not in vain!
(If the word ends with an 's' you can (or not) add only an apostrophe and omit the added 's', afaik it's down to style/how you'd pronounce it. 'Socrates' work' for example, because 'Socrates's' looks and sounds awkward.)
Your site is not the customer. Google doesn't care. The customer is the real human person doing the search. Google's top priority is make and keep that customer happy. It's wise to try to do the same.
* Lightweight, accessible website mostly implemented in as close as you can get it semantic HTML. (We used to say, possibly inaccurately, that search engines are like blind web users - make your site accessible, and you're helping blind users and search engines).
* Read your log files. For every customer I used to ask for their log files, and then I'd read them. Very interesting insights can be had about how people find the site and where they go which is more difficult to see from tools. If possible I would spend a few hours tailing the logs live.
> This one is for tech folks specifically. Use Wordpress, Webflow, Hugo or whatever you want, but do not created your own engine. Creating your own engine is a lot of work and a big waste of time.
Is this meant in the sense that existing blogging engines have good defaults with regard to SEO, and if you did it on your own you'd spend a lot of time figuring out by trial and error what you could otherwise get out of the box? Or are they just making a value judgment on how to spend one's time?
* Everybody knows that one person who succeed in both, yay. There's way more that failed.
Look at any HN post about personal websites. This community is more interested in discussing their SSG tooling than actually ever writing anything on that over-engineered Markdown converter.
Not sure I agree. Outsourcing is great IMO but you need 2 things;
1) Give them a solid brief on what you want. This take times but not as much as writing. And a bunch like KW research you need to do anyway before you would write.
2) Rewrite what they wrote after. Don't accept the article as finished, take it as a template to base your own off. Ask for a higher word count than you need and you can cull back content while adding more and rephrasing. At least for me I find it personally much faster re-writing an article that's been given to me than starting from scratch.
Particular for point 2 I find an efficient middle ground between writing and not.
* Buy some land
* Buy some wood
* Pour some concrete
* Hammer the wood together on top of the concrete
* Put on a roof
There ya go, you know how to build a house!
And to that end, SEO is simple on the surface - Make sure your site is super easy to crawl and loads super fast. Write search keyword-optimized content. Build (or as the modern SEOs like to say "earn") links from high authority sites.
But none of those things are really that easy, in that they all take time, expertise, and honestly some times a chunk of luck (go and try to get a backlink from a site like Business Insider in the next 3 months, it takes a lot of stars aligning).
And quite honestly, they don't even work anymore. The Buzzfeeds of the world kind of killed SEO as a viable organic traffic strategy.
Source: I run several SEO projects
Startups aren't competing for the same keywords as Buzzfeed.
The only SEO you need to worry about for your own business site is "Write Good Content". And that does not have to be the vague wishy-washy meaning of "good". There are specific actions you can take -- (BTW, this is where you actually do worry about keywords.) Put the keywords you care about in the title, in the meta description, in headers, and in the content. This proves to the algorithms that the term really is accurate for this page. Do not spam keywords in meta tags, be accurate and selective. Use header tags to actually hold content headers. And make sure your HTML is valid. A few years back, I'd get really easy SEO gigs, with awesome search improvements, just by running a site through the w3c validator and fixing any problems that are listed.
Once that is done, you'll start getting better placement in results. Afterwards, people will follow the link and read your content - at this point, Google watches whether or not they come back to their results and follow more links. If your content is engaging enough to satisfy them so they do not go back for more results, you'll get the final boost you need to stay at the top of the results.
I provide SEO services to small businesses. Content creation alone is not enough, you'll eventually hit a wall. Just like creating a Facebook page/Twitter account and posting to it is not enough (anymore).
"Build it and and they will come" doesn't work on the Internet when your new website is an island in the middle of an ocean of websites. Backlinks are the other side of the coin, and while I don't' agree with the advice in this particular article you can do everything else wrong, and with good backlinks you'll rank well.
Maximizing search placement is sometimes useful for small biz sites, but it is never a goal in and of itself - it is a tool. SEO approaches need to regard it as such.
Here's a small tweak that helped me with one of my articles.
I wanted an article to rank higher when people searched for "slack user groups". Initially I had a question h2 with "What are Slack user groups?" and the first sentence started with "user groups allow you to group people...".
I got a tip from a friend that I could add "Slack" somewhere near "user groups" to help with ranking. So I changed the sentence to start with "Slack user groups allow you to..." and it improved my ranking by 6 about a week later.
Then why do pages at the top of search results for everyday searches like recipes all have that godawful life-story blogspam structure?
Those sites are the polar opposite of “good content” and yet they hit the top rankings regardless.
Nobody writing in good faith sets out to write “content”. Anybody whose objective is “content” is not to be trusted.
No, the way to get top ranking is to throw your readers under the bus and recognize how this game works: your objective is to create a page that shoves as many adverts as you can in your reader’s face. Short content? Pad that shit out so you can fit more interstitials amongst its paragraphs. Google makes money off most of these adverts, so they are happy to reward such sites with high rankings. You’re happy. Google is happy. Who else matters?
Recipe blogs all suck because it’s nearly impossible to make money just publishing recipes. So every single one has to do the worst stuff just to barely survive. Song lyrics are a similar area.
If you want to see a strong SEO play supporting a product, look up almost anything related to film production, like “line producer” or “second assistant director” or “call sheet.” I bet you find a studiobinder.com link in the top 5 results. They publish a ton of super helpful and easy to understand content about how movies get made. And they make money via sales so they have no ads in the content.
The article is an SEO guide for startups, not recipe blogs, which exist in a separate category of SEO gamification.
Startups usually get their SEO hits by writing detailed guides on something tangentially related to their product. For example, I will see posts from Lucidchart's website when I'm looking up "process mapping template". They've created a lengthy web page discussing different types of process mapping, and include downloadable templates.
I had never heard of Lucidchart before, they appear to be a competitor to MS Visio. I ended up signing up for an account, but ultimately felt it wasn't right. I wouldn't have signed up at all if I felt the article I discovered wasn't useful.
Of course you can choose not to bother with SEO at all and hope your website magically generates qualified leads.
