A super quick rundown on SEO | Hacker News Reader

A super quick rundown on SEO

entreprenerd.blog

45 pointsentreprenerd25 comments

Is SEO even worth it in 2020 considering how saturated markets are and the number of ads displayed? I remember going after long tail searches in the early 2010s with some success. Not sure if cost-benefit still adds up.

Depends on the cost, and depends on the benefit. What I find interesting is that many SERPs on Google don't even lead to another page anymore[0].

Still, there are plenty of niche areas where the cost/benefit still definitely makes sense - some areas of law, local service businesses, etc.

[0] https://searchengineland.com/now-more-50-of-google-searches-...

You've got a point, but consumers are consistently more and more tired of ads. I've clicked on one out of the hundreds of thousands I've been shown.

Whereas if I look up a question on google, I'm clicking. And I probably do that twice a day at least.

Overall, I think it's definitely worth it. Yes it takes time, but it's not that hard, and it's evergreen if you target the right long tail keywords!! :)

As a solo developer, I think doing SEO and content marketing might still be worth, but I prefer to spend my time on improving the product. My goal is to make a product and user experience so good that the word-of-mouth marketing would be the main SEO driver. So, in some way, by working on improving the product I also work on SEO.

I respect it! But SEO is related to how google finds you, not other people. Word of mouth marketing is going to be effective for finding your first users though. :)

By word of mouth I mean mostly social shares (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Forums, blog and news coverage) which I think might have a greater impact on SEO overall than doing your own content markering. It's like your customers are doing the content marketing for you.

SEO is anything but passive. It's an ongoing, active effort with a lot of frustration. Most of the frustration is that you're optimizing for a blackbox. Google's algorithm can change rapidly, without warning in unexpected ways. A large site can move in and take over with little warning. SEO is a constant battle and long term effort.

It would be really interesting to see a "post mortem" of sorts for a site that suddenly dropped off the first page of search engines. It would describe:

What were we doing before?

What happened? (if we know)

What did we do to fix it?

There are many of these out there. Search for "SEO recovery case study".

Ooooh - this would be great to add - thanks!!

Totally fair!! I think my experience is with much more niche keywords, so competition is less of a worry for me, but you're not wrong.

Just like any other form of marketing, a competitor can come in and sweep you!

It's funny how the blog talks about the importance of backlinks while being full of links to other sites itself. It's almost like he needed an excuse to exchange links with other sites and did it in one blog post. I'm not judging, but I don't have my rose colored glasses any more.

Hahahah - no I don't actually think my linking to other external sites helps my SEO, sadly. I was just trying to link to other sites for ease of access if you want to check out the tool I mention.

Sorry about that, I didn't mean for it to come across that way!

What's the latest on SEO and single page apps (SPAs)? I've heard conflicting things on this front. Do we still need to be creating static content or can we just serve a skeleton HTML page and let client side JS do the rest?

So for things like Carrd.co and other single page apps I've used, the SEO is dodgy at best.

I think since standard content is hard to do on those types of sites, your best bet is going to be a lot of backlinks, but even then, it's hard to rank for keywords if your website is structured like a landing page, not a blog.

That's just what I would assume though!! Good question!!!

If you host your SPA on Netlify for example you can enable prerendering with just a checkbox, that way they will automatically serve the static content to Google. (as rendered in a browser)

If this is naive, then please change my view, since I know nothing about web marketing! My opinion:

> The best SEO is to do honest work for a fair price, so that others talk about you and link to your stuff.

Doing honest work and optimizing your website for search engines are not mutually exclusive.

I always say it like this:

SEO is partly creating content so good that search engine mathematicians will change their algorithms to reward content like yours. The other part is making it easy for search engines to find and parse your content.

I really like that :)

SEO is just another sales/marketing channel. Engineers (of which I considered myself) generally dislike the idea of having to sell/market something, hoping it will just come if they do a good job. In my experience, it's both. You have to do a great job and also do a great job of telling others about your great work.

Agree completely. :)

SEO is slightly different, but when you're starting out, referrals are always going to be your best bet - they'll be way way better than SEO. :)

So you're still right! The best way to find clients is to do great work!

Yes and no.

Yes, if you do good work/make a good product/run a good service and its fairly priced, it's more likely to do well than if your work is terrible. It'll usually be a million times harder to promote a terrible business than a good one, for obvious reasons.

But also no, because 'build it and they'll come' hasn't worked as a marketing strategy for... maybe thousands of years. If people don't know you exist, they won't become customers, and since most customers won't promote even a good business or service to other people, relying on word of mouth is unreliable at best, suicidal at worst.

We all wish build it and they'll come worked - but we've all gotta market somehow. I agree you gotta market some way, but referrals from successful customers will always be a super good place to start! (of course, assuming you can actually get those first customers)

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