Technical SEO: The on site stuff with relevant keywords in copy, heading/HTML structure, metadata, alt tags, etc. This is all stuff a good site should be implementing by default, but sadly a lot of them aren't.
External SEO: Link building. Getting attention from authorative sources so people know about your work and link to it.
In theory, a site that does these two things well should be better than a site that doesn't.
The problem is that while they correlate to a site having useful content and being useful to humans, they don't require it, especially when Google's systems are too stupid to tell if a site's content is any good and the company is deathly allergic to the idea of hiring people to check or applying any real penalties for wrongdoing.
So SEO is associated with all the crap sites that do these things badly in an attempt to do well in search, and Google's failure to filter them out (perhaps because it isn't actually possible to do so automatically).
It was free traffic. I'm not selling anything, but if I were, it would be costly to funnel them in via FB ads and such. It does pretty damn well for what's basically a crude net. For this channel, I'd imagine getting even second page on Google would be insane.
A lot of the optimization was increasing website speed and not backlinks or whatever.
Absolutely, "SEO" makes me cringe.
I can expand on this problem in a bit more detail, but it comes down to one key term: cost of acquisition.
There are only so many ways that a website can improve traffic flow. The best is if the site somehow goes viral since this is nominally free. This is a longshot and not likely to happen.
There are places where you can share your site/app with a receptive audience. FB Groups, Reddit, IndieHackers, ProductHunt, and even Hacker News comes to mind. Whether it works or not is somewhat dependent on the audience of the property. For example, travel apps aren't particularly popular with the HN crowd, but my app was on the top of r/InternetIsBeautiful for a full 24 hours and my initial batch of users came from r/TravelHacks. These are good for "bursts", but hard to sustain because you can't just keep posting to r/TravelHacks or HN with the same link.
Then there are paid ads on various ad networks or through content creators. These can be quite expensive and often, the cost of acquisition for a single converting user can be quite high! In the early days, this may not be feasible, especially as you're still trying to figure out your audience. One of the startups I worked at had a CAC over $100 via Facebook ads (!!!), but the product was such that they would make it back in 3 months of a user subscribing; the basic math worked as long as they could retain the user.
Then there's SEO. Effectively, this is "free" as long as you can do it well since you'll naturally show up in the resultset for given search terms. Because so much of our user interaction with the web has been initiated from search, this is one of the few things that can be done to improve traffic and visibility. (I think this is changing with generations and with ChatGPT; younger generations may initiate their web journey through a social channel rather than through search.)
TL;DR: SEO isn't a "silly strategy"; it can be one of the most cost effective ways to get visibility because the cost of acquisition is cheap and works well over a long time scale compared to other options.
That's why SEO specialists exist because there are a variety of techniques.
Just a few things I've learned along the way:
- Google favors mobile web performance. If you want to rank higher, your site needs to render fast on mobile. The reasoning is that Google's search objective is to serve good content (whether they are succeeding at this is a different debate) so they want pages that will load fast for the end user, contain the relevant content, and provide the best experience for the broadest audience of visitors.
- To make mobile web performance fast, you need to send tight, compact HTML with CSS inlined where possible. This is why SSG/SSR are all the rage these days because Google favors it for search results. SPAs are indexed in a different pipeline. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- In some cases, you'll need to use advanced techniques like using service workers to offload some of the page loading to a background thread to speed up rendering. See libraries like PartyTown: https://partytown.builder.io/
- Google can surface structured markup data (JSON-LD, RDF-A, Microdata formats) which will make your results visually stand out. Incorporating it into your HTML output is a must in some domains like e-commerce since pricing and product data is surfaced via this markup. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
- Google's search crawler factors structural HTML into account. Therefore, make use of meta tags, <title/>, <h1/>, and other semantic HTML5 tags to mark up your document. See this link for reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-l...
- Google uses sitemaps to find your content. You can improve your results by properly tagging images, videos, and so on. Make sure you do it well. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- Google's heuristics change all the time. See: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw...
My lesson learned is that this is a very, very hard game to do well. But if done well, your content will eventually make its way up. Because Google re-indexing could take days or weeks, the outcome can take time to actually see.
If your site isn't showing up in search, it's because you're competing against thousands of professionals that are 100% focused on this specific domain of expertise and follow Google's updates to their search heuristics with each release and adjust.
I'm sure backlinks still matter, but the internal search algos have changed so much since the early days of Google that it's hard to know exactly how much weight each part of the equation has.
The main problem with backlinks and keywords is that they are too easy to game so at some point, Google adjusted how they weigh those inputs.
The bigger picture is that SEO matters -- a lot. Backlinks are just one part of they equation. But being optimized against Google's search crawler heuristics is a big picture endeavor.
Having backlinks from NYT, Washington Post and Wikipedia for the term is 1000x more valuable than just hitting all the technical SEO metrics of fast page loading and meta tags.
Backlinks matter so much that many authoritative sites sell them. Of course, they won't admit to that for obvious reasons.
They hit 4 million pageviews/month in less than half a year. Automated ads didn't work, they paid too little and dropped quality too much.
Selling backlinks became one of the core business. They'd actually write full articles for a client and link to their site. The clients were extremely happy with the results. It's not necessarily the ranking, but the article itself would show high on Google.
Also in my own startup experience, I'd buy backlinks from minor bloggers who were blogging on a similar topic. It was something like $10 for a mention. I don't know if it hurt or helped SEO; but it increased credibility in the community and a lot of the people we interviewed mentioned that they bought it because they saw a familiar name.
This is 2016 data though, so take it with a pinch of salt as things could have changed significantly since then.
It's the same. In today's world of hyper SEO optimization and human-like AI content, the only game in town left is authority. And the way to build authority is backlinks.
> Some friends made a sports site for fun. They were a bunch of FB marketers in the early era and just experimented, plus it was a topic they loved ranting on. They did FB ads then funneled the traffic to a WP site. They hit 4 million pageviews/month in less than half a year. Automated ads didn't work, they paid too little and dropped quality too much.
Hah, as it happens, I know quite a bit about that niche. With the legalization of online sports betting around US states in the last few years, there was actually quite a bit of money to be made by high traffic sports blogs working as affiliates. There was also quite a bit of M&A activity, some of these technologically simple blog sites selling for millions to the bigger sports affiliate groups.
SEO should be considered as a bare minimum amount of effort to increase discoverability. Some sites get most of their traffic from social media, so they don't need to optimize for search.