There are no specific stats in this article about what exactly we mean by SEO and traffic. What do you want to do with 1m visitors per month? Make money from them or sit back happy that people read your content? Run a business, or a blog? What is the end goal here, have a well read blog with no specific niche/topic? In that case SEO probably can be organic.<p>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.
"If you write about your passion, you will never lose enthusiasm because you are creating a little corner of the internet that’s yours, you made it, you made it beautiful, and now it’s also available for everyone else, but even if no one shows up, it stands on its own."<p>One of the most inspirational statements I have seen in a while.
I blog (for pleasure) and can confirm everything in this article.<p>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.<p>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.
> Most of the time you will see people talking about keywords, and keywords tools.<p>> 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.<p>> Right? Wrong.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] Rules checked are here <a href="https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/" rel="nofollow">https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/</a>
In the last couple months my mental-model of SEO has evolved. Traditionally SEO tends to be defined by things like kwyword density, proper heading tags, page load speed, etc. I don't dispute those, but the perspective is misguided.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This essentially comes down to quantity vs quality. Keyword research, link building etc. helps you optimize for your time. You can achieve the same traffic from fewer posts. Otherwise you have to keep churning out posts and make up for it in terms of long tail traffic.
In other words, he's basically just saying that if you write enough good content, people will come, SEO be damned. That's certainly one approach to things sure, but I'd be hesitant to say it's one that'd work in most cases.<p>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.<p>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.
One blog post per day? That's crazy. How do you come up with so much content?<p>Here I am, wanting to start a blog for months already but not having any ideas on what to write about. lol.
SEO is an effort made by people to get in front without really offering much.
If they'd be oriented on quality more, maybe their success would come more.
I'm actually surprised that many people read blogs still.<p>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.<p>I tried a number of other RSS readers and aggregators, but nothing ever felt as immersive as Google Reader and I lost touch.<p>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.
He doesn't show any statistics from his own blog to back his theories up.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.
He missed the number one rule to get more views, which is to write about topics with a broad audience.<p>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.<p>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.
This always puzzle me about SEO. Let's say you are writing an article that you want to cover in-depth. Which one is better for SEO (both options has the same content):
A. Publish all in one long article
B. Publish in a series of small articles