SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years
flaviocopes.com
flaviocopes.com
But if you are a business dependent on some google traffic for your business, and your competitors are optimising for keywords and building links, you are probably going to have a super hard time winning. It's not impossible, but you have to a magnificent job just concentrating on content to beat out your competition.
How would his techniques perform if he were writing about consumer goods such as quadcopters or coffee makers?
Aside from this, lack of focus and an unwillingness to give away free advice are another two common mistakes.
As you say, developer focused content is easy to market online. There are tons of blogs and news sites willing to let you write guest articles or link to your work, people tend to share articles about the topic on a regular basis and sites like this one provide a perfect place to share the content too.
Same goes with the gaming and general tech fields too. They're all very easy to build links in, and provide plenty of free traffic opportunities in general.
Many niches aren't like this. They don't have the same number of enthusiast forums and subreddits, people are less likely to share content about them, and the news sites focused on them are either money focused or not interested in giving you a shot at all.
Then there's stuff like gambling, adult content etc, where no one in their right mind will ever link to your site, and where even the ad networks will tell you to get lost. Good luck marketing those without blackhat SEO, or some other way to game the system.
One of the most inspirational statements I have seen in a while.
The latter is why surfing the web feels like such a chore today. All the top ranking search results these days are from corporate websites who have no interest in providing useful information beyond the bare minimum they need to put out before trying to sell you something. They all write keyword-optimized articles of a certain length (like those recipe websites).
The titles of these posts reek of SEO thirst, and read like a giant pile of text that a bot threw together.
"Complete Beginner's Guide to Dropshipping in 2020"
"Ultimate Masterclass to Building Lean Muscle in 2020"
"A Curated List of Resources for Email Marketing in 2020"
Blech.
The only posts of mine that continue to get hits are advice on C++ and Python coding, while my lovingly crafted hot takes on Star Wars and whatever book I read last week are generally ignored.
I don't care. You write what you want to write, I'll write what I want to write. The important thing is to write something.
[edit] Oh, they declickbaited it on HN, removing the digits. That's nice.
> 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/
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.
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.
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 customer. Supplying you visits is not what the search engine cares about. Your source site is a means. It's not the ends.
Your website page rank, and such are effectively irrelevant. The priority isn't you. It's the asker. They have the need. They need to be happiest.
Yes. Of course. There are things you can do help the search engine help others. The key to maximum effectiveness is to understand your role and your place in the process.
It never was about all that onpage stuff, it always was about the User <> Google <> Website triangle.
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.
The point of most on/off page SEO things like meta tags and link building is to help Google understand what needs your website can satisfy.
If your content solves problems effectively, and Google understands how to connect you to the people who have those problems, that's when things work.
The priority is the advertiser. I think google has given up on indexing the web and just sends searches to authorities like wikipedia, let's face it thats what the "average user" wants, and best part is the rest of us have to pay to compete.
Pains me to say it, but is in the best interest of the searh engine to maximize the searcher's satisfaction.
Doing what he says is fine and dandy if you've got little to no competition and are operating the site on a purely 'eh if anyone visits that's nice' basis, but it's likely a sure fire way to fail if other people are doing all the other stuff and writing content as good as yours.
Also, some stats would definitely be nice to see here. The number of Twitter and YouTube followers show a creator/site that's moderately popular and getting more so as time goes on, but they don't exactly suggest millions of visitors or tons of number 1 rankings or what not. So some stats would help clear things up there.
Here I am, wanting to start a blog for months already but not having any ideas on what to write about. lol.
So, posting regularly appears less about creating the perfect ideas to blog about and more about just posting something, even if its only an ASCII chart.
Try an ASCII chart; it might make a good initial blog post!
These days the most consistent way to get lots of traffic is to provide lots of value and help people.
Google can measure whether people bounce and keep clicking around for better answers to their queries.
None of the search engines I use can do that on every kind of content out there. Google works well for software development related stuff and last minute news. Bing is good for video search. Yandex hardly ever censors pirated content which is useful in that niche. DDG works like a lottery where sometimes it is the best among all, but sometimes it shows garbage.
I used to spend a lot of time reading a long list of blogs I enjoyed, but I never really got over Google Reader being killed off.
I tried a number of other RSS readers and aggregators, but nothing ever felt as immersive as Google Reader and I lost touch.
The only time I end up on blogs now is a result of a link here, Redit or Twitter, or from an occasional organic search result.
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 for SEO but that goes without saying.
SEO is about optimizing your content and the value you already bring. If you load the whole blog async for example, it won't be very good for SEO no matter how good or helpful the content it.
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".
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.
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 of people and sites writing about JavaScript frameworks, Docker, etc, and your work will likely get a lot less attention than theirs will. So while the potential audience is there, the likelihood of you getting said audience is extremely low.
It's like on YouTube with popular games. Sure, a lot of people might watch videos about Minecraft or Fortnite or whatever the kids play nowadays, but there are also thousands of other people also making videos about them, and yours can easily get buried in the avalanche of results there. Hence unless you've already got a one in a million advantage (like real world fame), it's very hard to compete.
Focusing on something less popular can help you build a smaller but more focused audience, and you do pretty well off being 'that one guy' who covers said obscure topic. You can then maybe branch out and gradually use your popularity in said smaller field as the jumping off point for popularity in the larger one.
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).
Otherwise, if you're truly writing for passion's sake, then SEO shouldn't be part of the rationale to begin with.
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.
The goal is to answer the question or problem as best as you can.
Typically this means not just giving a one line answer, but expanding and elaborating, going into relevant details and explaining more in-depth.
Often this extra detail will overlap with extra detail from other questions. You can link between articles, but you can also rephrase / repeat ideas.
eg. If you're searching for "Redirect in javascript" or "Simulate link in Javascript", you'll want two separate articles.
You know that the answer is the same for both, but the searcher doesn't. And as you go more in-depth explaining how `window.location` works, you'll end up covering similar material in both articles (which is not duplicate content so Google won't penalize you).
If your article are getting really long, like above 5000 words, consider splitting in two.
But improve the performance for a site absolutely or get the right traffic to the right geo version of your page yep (bloody hard work I might add)
Ikea is having a bit of a problem in this area at the moment for example.