Ask HN: Where to Start with SEO in 2024? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where to Start with SEO in 2024?

9 pointsPaulRobinson13 comments

Hi all,

The last time I tried to do any SEO was in the late 2000s, when the Web was a very different place. My partner is now asking for help to improve ranking for her online business, and I am starting work on some bootstrapped side projects that I plan to launch over the winter, and I don't want either to rely on advertising to support.

Thinking it through as an engineer I want to work backwards from an end goal (high quality traffic of people interested in a particular product or service), to the actions I need to drive that traffic. Searching around all I'm seeing is quite vague guidance like "write some content to get backlinks", or "write good product descriptions". I think I'm after more detailed guides or tools to help me understand the bricks a bit more. I don't mind paid, per se, but obviously prefer free in no small part because this sector seems to be the most spammy, scammy and hard to trust sector I've encountered, ever.

What are the key resources I should look to use today? What are the best books, online guides or videos to absorb? Are there high signal-to-noise forums, podcasts or other resources I can dig into? I'm also particularly interested in software to track impact, and help me improve product pages.

TIA.

My take.

I don't believe SEO has changed as much in the last 15 years as many people would say. There is more an emphasis on "social media optimization" because you can observe how much traffic a social media post brings in whereas in the end you don't really know what ranking signal (a keyword, a link, the domain name you are on, the length of the page, + thousands of other things) is responsible for. It's a fair guess that, for a population of thousands of links, the ranking value of links are proportional to the amount of traffic you get from those links.

It is a bigger job than you might think. If you don't believe me I suggest you turn on broadcast television and see how many ads you see for the same personal injury lawyer and for the same cleaning product brand like Dawn or Tide. If you imagine how much work it is going to take and then think it is going to be 10x more than that and then another 10x more than that I hate to break it to you that it could be another 10x more than that.

Specifically, every web page you make is a ticket to the ranking lottery. If you buy a lot more tickets it becomes more likely than you can win. This is true in terms of "link juice" which spreads to the rest of the site, it is also true in terms of keywords: it might not be realistic to rank #1 for the most competitive keywords but it is very realistic to get great rankings for a large number of less competitive keywords.

There's only so much you can do to make individual pages attractive, but you can take control of your fate by making more pages.

Thus the blog is the king of online marketing. If a real estate agent, just to pick some average boring business that has a marketing budget, puts up a "business card" page for herself this accomplishes very little. Who cares? If she commits to writing (or paying someone to write) two blog posts a week about her city, real estate in her city, neighborhoods in her city, housing in her city, etc on the other hand each blog post has the possibility of showing up in a search, being shared on social media, forwarded to someone else in an email, etc. Such a blog can also develop followers on social media, RSS subscribers, email subscribers and other things that sustain traffic other than search rankings.

Fascinating. I honestly thought blogging was a dead end these days, but I like this approach. Do you think that social media achieves the same or is worse due to differences in indexing? Is it one or the other, or very much both?

I don't see any contradiction between a blog and social media marketing, actually they go together like peanut butter and jelly because a blog gives you something to promote, for people to share, etc. It also means you collect some value when your social media posts bring people in.

If blogging is dead it's more of an "eternal September" thing. In any social movement there is a big difference between the early adopters and people who come later. The first bloggers were smarter and harder working than people who got to it later. It may sound harsh, but Twitter has empowered people who have a mental capacity of 140 characters -- and that's a much bigger market than that of people who are going to put the effort into a blog and I have to admit I've even been seduced into writing at venues like this one instead of blogging lately. On the other hand if there are fewer people doing it it is easier for you to stand out.

New friends of mine have gotten me interested in print-on-demand fabrics; I've already made something that's unique and I've figured out a production process where I can make something special consistently. These could be sold to consumers by the yard or I could get them made into curtains, pillowcases, drapes, and also clothing.

Selling these in an online marketplace or through drop shipping is straightforward. From the viewpoint of art and technology I could work with these people

https://www.contrado.com/custom-sweaters

and have a small collection of my clothing designs in an online store. However I could not take it for granted that my stuff is going to be sufficiently visible in an online marketplace like this one

https://www.spoonflower.com/en/shop?on=squareThrowPillows&q=...

so if I want to make money and not just flex about being a fashion designer I need to find a way to create "news" about my products multiple times a week. I could put up a landing page for my collection and expect my friends to share it once, but if I want my brand to go anywhere I'd expect to push on it hard for a long time and give my followers hundreds of chances to share. For instance I might release more designs than I might do otherwise just to have something to promote.

Recent algorithm updates from Google have once again clarified what kind of web pages will rank at the top: those that are "useful to users" Whether it’s content or tools, as long as they are beneficial to users and the time spent on your page per click is above a certain threshold (while avoiding fraudulent practices), your page will rank higher in search results. In this era where generative AI is becoming increasingly dominant, valuable content seems to be even more precious, and people are getting better at discerning content quality. A webpage that covers many keywords but has low-quality content will eventually be pushed down in search results due to its lack of usefulness to users. Additionally, backlinks are akin to endorsements for a website, but no matter how many backlinks a low-quality site has, users won’t want to spend much time on it. These are just my personal thoughts, and I welcome any criticism or feedback.

I think going over the official google guide is a decent start.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s...

I have two questions about this:

1. Do people find this advice this work for all SEO, or just Google? Are there things Google suggests that are going to harm ranking with other engines? Are there other steps needed to make sure you're ranking well with DDG, Bing and others?

2. If everyone in a similar niche is doing the exact same thing, how do you differentiate? Is it purely about quality of execution? This has always slightly confused me with this aspect of SEO guides...

> for all SEO, or just Google

It‘s the same, for practical purposes. Other search engines have miniscule market share.

Optimizing for OpenAI and Anthropic might be an interesting avenue, though. Has something been published about that?

The question that will shape the answer the most is:

What is the business and what is her audience?

The strategy for a local business that has a storefront is wildly different from an e-commerce business shipping to customers all around the country/world.

SEO itself isn't that different. The question of whether or not SEO matters to a local storefront does have a wildly different answer than an e-commerce business, but if you have decided that SEO matters, then going about it is pretty much the same.

But you are 100% correct that there is a more important underlying question - does old-school SEO matter in modern business? I'd argue that it does not. You need to do actual marketing these days, not "SEO it and they will come."

> SEO itself isn't that different. The question of whether or not SEO matters to a local storefront does have a wildly different answer than an e-commerce business, but if you have decided that SEO matters, then going about it is pretty much the same.

Not correct in my experience.

You would absolutely want to have accurate accounts set up for maps and local directory sites for the local business but these would be a waste of time/effort for the e-commerce company.

Start by making a strategy that don't need to rely on SEO.

I am not sure what that would entail other than paid advertising. What did you have in mind?

What do you want from SEO? traffic? Do you have a blog or do you sell something? SEO is not the only (or best) way to sell your stuff, it is just the most "common", which makes lots of people do 2 things: ruin the internet and spend money on google ads. None of them will bring you to profitability unless you work exclusively on creating trash for SEO then it is better to stop your side projects and make one side project about ruining the internet with bad SEO content.

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