I disagree on not building your own blog engine as a general rule: Building a blog engine can be as simple as using a markdown-to-HTML converter library on your server, and using your backend's admin interface. Or a simple HTML page with a big text box and submit button. Depending on use case, this can be fine. The cognitive complexity of integrating with a 3rd-party engine can be more complicated than writing a simple one.<p>Which brings me to a big point the article missed: Page loading speed is important for search ranking. I have a blog I add to once every other month. It uses HTML and CSS, and I write it in Django admin using markdown. Lots of room for improvement UI-wise, for both reader experience and writing interface. Yet, it's a low-traffic site, and most of the blog entries show up on the first page of Google for relevant keywords. Relevant: It gets a perfect Google Page Speed Insights score, by virtue of being an HTML/CSS page.<p>I bring this up for 2 reasons: Using a blog engine will probably make it tougher to get fast load times. You can rank high on Google just by having good content and fast load times.
Today I learned about the broken link building technique. Wow that is gross. At least the way that site says to do it is by straight up lying to people about how the link moved to a new site.<p>It wouldn't be so bad if they would at least say, "I made a page with similar information", but suggesting that people straight up lie about it tells me everything I need to know about the ethics of the site that is making that suggestion.
This broken link building thing has kind of gotten out of hand though. I run a popular website and I had to create a very complicated filter just to keep those hundreds of emails I get about some 10 year old link or look Google changed Adwords to just Ads type emails. Also the free guest post email. Just no.<p>There has got to be a better way to build these links if that is so important for SEO. I think email spam will drop by 10% the day this happens.
As an alternative to techniques like "broken link building" and "the skyscraper technique" have you considered jumping into a hole and never coming out? I am sick to the back teeth of cold emails from these SEO chowderheads fishing for backlinks.<p>How about, instead, you contribute to relevant communities (no, that doesn't mean spamming your keyword soup into them, it means making actual meaningful contributions) and promoting your work organically through real connections to real people.
I hate to be that guy, but point 5 under what not to do should not have an apostrophe for the word "gurus"<p>Edit: I got downvoted for this comment, but the author has made the change. My sacrifice was not in vain!
I highly recommend "Blogging for Business" by AHrefs. It's free.<p><a href="https://ahrefs.com/academy/blogging-for-business" rel="nofollow">https://ahrefs.com/academy/blogging-for-business</a>
Solid list. But there's a key idea missing. That is:<p>Your site is not the customer. Google doesn't care. The customer is the real human person doing the search. Google's top priority is make and keep that customer happy. It's wise to try to do the same.
Back in the mid 2000s I part-owned a start up company and we made a reasonable living going around telling people pretty much the contents of this list (except for the backlinks stuff which is spammy). Good to see some of it is still relevant. I would add a couple more (from back then - don't really know if they're relevant now):<p>* Lightweight, accessible website mostly implemented in as close as you can get it semantic HTML. (We used to say, possibly inaccurately, that search engines are like blind web users - make your site accessible, and you're helping blind users and search engines).<p>* Read your log files. For every customer I used to ask for their log files, and then I'd read them. Very interesting insights can be had about how people find the site and where they go which is more difficult to see from tools. If possible I would spend a few hours tailing the logs live.
This is not a valid Show HN - please read the rules: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html</a>. I've taken that bit out of the title now.
<i>> Do not create your own blogging engine</i><p><i>> This one is for tech folks specifically. Use Wordpress, Webflow, Hugo or whatever you want, but do not created your own engine. Creating your own engine is a lot of work and a big waste of time.</i><p>Is this meant in the sense that existing blogging engines have good defaults with regard to SEO, and if you did it on your own you'd spend a lot of time figuring out by trial and error what you could otherwise get out of the box? Or are they just making a value judgment on how to spend one's time?
This site is auto-blocked by my organization's internet filter and is categorized as 'high-risk'. I wonder if it is because of the some techniques or examples shown?
>"Do not outsource the writing. Vetting good writers is difficult and time-consuming. They are also expensive. If you are just starting out, you probably do not have the time and the money to do it right."<p>Not sure I agree. Outsourcing is great IMO but you need 2 things;<p>1) Give them a solid brief on what you want. This take times but not as much as writing. And a bunch like KW research you need to do anyway before you would write.<p>2) Rewrite what they wrote after. Don't accept the article as finished, take it as a template to base your own off. Ask for a higher word count than you need and you can cull back content while adding more and rephrasing. At least for me I find it personally much faster re-writing an article that's been given to me than starting from scratch.<p>Particular for point 2 I find an efficient middle ground between writing and not.
Respectfully, this is basically the equivalent of "here's how to build a house"<p>* Buy some land<p>* Buy some wood<p>* Pour some concrete<p>* Hammer the wood together on top of the concrete<p>* Put on a roof<p>There ya go, you know how to build a house!<p>And to that end, SEO is simple on the surface - Make sure your site is super easy to crawl and loads super fast. Write search keyword-optimized content. Build (or as the modern SEOs like to say "earn") links from high authority sites.<p>But none of those things are really that easy, in that they all take time, expertise, and honestly some times a chunk of luck (go and try to get a backlink from a site like Business Insider in the next 3 months, it takes a lot of stars aligning).
Anything that starts with talking about "your keywords" mean it is still written for people who are trying to get any site, about any thing, to have good rankings in hopes of future monetization... which is not the same thing as trying to get good rankings for your specific site.<p>The only SEO you need to worry about for your own business site is "Write Good Content". And that does not have to be the vague wishy-washy meaning of "good". There are specific actions you can take -- (BTW, this is where you actually do worry about keywords.) Put the keywords you care about in the title, in the meta description, in headers, and in the content. This proves to the algorithms that the term really is accurate for this page. Do not spam keywords in meta tags, be accurate and selective. Use header tags to actually hold content headers. And make sure your HTML is valid. A few years back, I'd get really easy SEO gigs, with awesome search improvements, just by running a site through the w3c validator and fixing any problems that are listed.<p>Once that is done, you'll start getting better placement in results. Afterwards, people will follow the link and read your content - at this point, Google watches whether or not they come back to their results and follow more links. If your content is engaging enough to satisfy them so they do not go back for more results, you'll get the final boost you need to stay at the top of the results.
> Write good content<p>Then why do pages at the top of search results for everyday searches like recipes all have that godawful life-story blogspam structure?<p>Those sites are the polar opposite of “good content” and yet they hit the top rankings regardless.<p>Nobody writing in good faith sets out to write “content”. Anybody whose objective is “content” is not to be trusted.<p>No, the way to get top ranking is to throw your readers under the bus and recognize how this game works: your objective is to create a page that shoves as many adverts as you can in your reader’s face. Short content? Pad that shit out so you can fit more interstitials amongst its paragraphs. Google makes money off most of these adverts, so they are happy to reward such sites with high rankings. You’re happy. Google is happy. Who else matters?