SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years
flaviocopes.comThere 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.
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.
Not to mention that the content of the blog is developer focused.
How would his techniques perform if he were writing about consumer goods such as quadcopters or coffee makers?
Not sure about consumer goods such as coffee makers but a lot of small businesses try blogging as an seo tactic and give up very quickly when they don't see instant results.
Aside from this, lack of focus and an unwillingness to give away free advice are another two common mistakes.
This is a really good point, and one I feel a lot of SEO articles and sites seem to ignore. The niche you're in makes a huge difference in how easy it is to market your work.
As you say, developer focused content is easy to market online. There are tons of blogs and news sites willing to let you write guest articles or link to your work, people tend to share articles about the topic on a regular basis and sites like this one provide a perfect place to share the content too.
Same goes with the gaming and general tech fields too. They're all very easy to build links in, and provide plenty of free traffic opportunities in general.
Many niches aren't like this. They don't have the same number of enthusiast forums and subreddits, people are less likely to share content about them, and the news sites focused on them are either money focused or not interested in giving you a shot at all.
Then there's stuff like gambling, adult content etc, where no one in their right mind will ever link to your site, and where even the ad networks will tell you to get lost. Good luck marketing those without blackhat SEO, or some other way to game the system.
"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."
One of the most inspirational statements I have seen in a while.
Very well put. This is the factor that separates good websites that feature writing with personality, from "content marketing" style articles.
The latter is why surfing the web feels like such a chore today. All the top ranking search results these days are from corporate websites who have no interest in providing useful information beyond the bare minimum they need to put out before trying to sell you something. They all write keyword-optimized articles of a certain length (like those recipe websites).
The titles of these posts reek of SEO thirst, and read like a giant pile of text that a bot threw together.
"Complete Beginner's Guide to Dropshipping in 2020"
"Ultimate Masterclass to Building Lean Muscle in 2020"
"A Curated List of Resources for Email Marketing in 2020"
Blech.
Indeed, a throwback to the internet of yore.
I blog (for pleasure) and can confirm everything in this article.
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.
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.
SEO trick number 6: get on Hacker News
Title is a bit 2 clickbait 4 me.
[edit] Oh, they declickbaited it on HN, removing the digits. That's nice.
Yup. I never waste time on summary blog posts, X things blablabla.
I agree, I never click on such clickbaits. Judging from the comments, it was (yet again) a good decision..
Or Reddit.
you mean the front page? same thing for reddit (when i used to go on there...)
> Most of the time you will see people talking about keywords, and keywords tools.
> 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.
> Right? Wrong.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] Rules checked are here https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/
> duplicate content
On the same website or across the web (or a network) ?
edit: ah, from the page you linked
> Every page should provide unique content that doesn’t appear elsewhere on the site. Search engines will penalise or even completely hide pages that are too similar as showing duplicate search results is unhelpful to users. Duplicate pages can also reduce the search rank benefit of backlinks because it’s better to have backlinks to a single URL compared to backlinks spread over a set of duplicate page URLs. Crawling duplicates will also use up the resources search crawlers allocate to crawling your site which means important pages might not be indexed. You can eliminate sets of duplicate pages by consolidating them to a single URL using redirects or canonical tags.
The guide from https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/ is focused on technical/on-page SEO but Google makes some mentions of how it treats duplicate content across the web here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en
> Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. ...
> Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list.
> In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi, you are on the right track, I wrote a whole book around it. https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news
It never was about all that onpage stuff, it always was about the User <> Google <> Website triangle.
Parent is too circumspect to admit that the book is very, very well written, beautifully designed, and free to HN users. No relation to author, just followed link.
I've read it and it's a good book. However, I'd like to take the opportunity to point out to the author that there's an English error on the landing page linked above. It should be "Info" not "Infos" since it's not a countable noun.
thx, fixed it
Thx. The VP Growth of Angellist once called it "SEO for hackers."
I by now sold a few thousand copies as Ebook and print. Mostly in the German spaeking markets. 5 Stars based on 22 reviews an the german Amazon.
Currently mostly doing other ventures so very very happy to give it away and make SEO agencies (and myself) redundant for good.
Thank you for this! Reading it right now even though I should go sleep.
Exactly this.
The point of most on/off page SEO things like meta tags and link building is to help Google understand what needs your website can satisfy.
If your content solves problems effectively, and Google understands how to connect you to the people who have those problems, that's when things work.
> The priority isn't you. It's the asker.
The priority is the advertiser. I think google has given up on indexing the web and just sends searches to authorities like wikipedia, let's face it thats what the "average user" wants, and best part is the rest of us have to pay to compete.
I don't see it that way. The bottomline is, if the asker isn't satisfied with the proposed resolutions the asker might go elsewhere (e.g., DDG). Even if the asker doesn't switch search tools any sense of friction and frustration will trigger less usage, not more. That's not good for Google. It's not good for advertisers.
Pains me to say it, but is in the best interest of the searh engine to maximize the searcher's satisfaction.
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.
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.
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?
Here I am, wanting to start a blog for months already but not having any ideas on what to write about. lol.
Good question; I went and took about what he wrote about this month and I thin I found the answer: he doesn't write about ground breaking ideas <i>every</i> day. Usually, just little tricks he knows or code snippets he's written that might be useful. Two days he just lists printable vs non printable ASCII characters.
So, posting regularly appears less about creating the perfect ideas to blog about and more about just posting something, even if its only an ASCII chart.
Try an ASCII chart; it might make a good initial blog post!
I found flaviocopes searching how to pass additional parameters to a partial in Hugo. Worked on me
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.
Google has gotten very good at weeding out the hacks and tricks that black hat SEOs use (PBNs, spammy links, generated content, keyword stuffing etc.)
These days the most consistent way to get lots of traffic is to provide lots of value and help people.
Google can measure whether people bounce and keep clicking around for better answers to their queries.
I'd really like it to be the case but that requires an indexing algorithm where usefulness as a metric is defined as an objectively quantifiable property of a page. Is there such algorithm?
None of the search engines I use can do that on every kind of content out there. Google works well for software development related stuff and last minute news. Bing is good for video search. Yandex hardly ever censors pirated content which is useful in that niche. DDG works like a lottery where sometimes it is the best among all, but sometimes it shows garbage.
I'm actually surprised that many people read blogs still.
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.
I tried a number of other RSS readers and aggregators, but nothing ever felt as immersive as Google Reader and I lost touch.
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.
I found NewsBlur quite ok. Have you tried it?
He doesn't show any statistics from his own blog to back his theories up.
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".
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.
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.
The article is also very survivorship-bias-y. His blog happened to do fine without him doing any SEO, but that doesn't mean all SEO is pointless.
The key word in SEO is "Optimization". What is the author optimizing for? He's a developer who's maintained a dev blog for many years. Chances are when he started blogging, he wasn't thinking about selling e-books and courses or about competing for business with other developers who pursued a similar path.
That is the polar opposite of what "Optimization" means for businesses. Usually they're in a competitive product category, and there are lots of competitors who're not only churning out blog posts to boost their organic search hits, but also buying your product's keywords and advertising against you.
Online discoverability is a zero-sum game, so the tactics tends to be fairly scorched-earth compared to what they would for a personal website.
If you Googled "flavio copes", you wouldn't see an ad at the top of the search page that reads "Flavio is a bad developer. Click here if you want a real 10X developer on your project".
1M views per month is a lot. Hey Flavio are you monetizing it in any way?
He seems to be using CarbonAds.
Woops I had my ad blocker on...
He missed the number one rule to get more views, which is to write about topics with a broad audience.
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.
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 is a double edged sword. On the one hand, you're right, a more mainstream topic does have a larger potential audience, and if your topic is one few people care about, you're probably gonna get a lot less traffic compared to one with a broader audience.
At the same time however, the broader the audience, the harder it usually is compete and make a name for yourself in a niche. There are hundreds if not thousands of people and sites writing about JavaScript frameworks, Docker, etc, and your work will likely get a lot less attention than theirs will. So while the potential audience is there, the likelihood of you getting said audience is extremely low.
It's like on YouTube with popular games. Sure, a lot of people might watch videos about Minecraft or Fortnite or whatever the kids play nowadays, but there are also thousands of other people also making videos about them, and yours can easily get buried in the avalanche of results there. Hence unless you've already got a one in a million advantage (like real world fame), it's very hard to compete.
Focusing on something less popular can help you build a smaller but more focused audience, and you do pretty well off being 'that one guy' who covers said obscure topic. You can then maybe branch out and gradually use your popularity in said smaller field as the jumping off point for popularity in the larger one.
Blog articles are not competitive, the pie is simply bigger for everyone on the more popular subjects .
If you look at HN, you will see articles about javascript popping up almost every day. They all get tens of thousands of views, they're not competing for readership.
If you're considering a niche subject instead, the article would not get enough upvotes to reach the frontpage, and it wouldn't get any views at all. There might be hundreds of people aware of that topic (and thousands who would be curious enough to read if it were front page) but it doesn't have enough audience to reach a critical mass of upvotes, so it simply doesn't exist.
P.S. The Youtube comparison is misplaced IMO. Writing books (blog articles) is trivial in comparison to making Hollywood videos (Youtube).
But that's the point. SEO is not just about putting up big traffic numbers for its own sake. SEO is a means to an end, the end being conversion into something. A sales funnel, an email subscriber list, or a product sale. For that, you need targeted leads. If you write a big piece on Javascript but aren't offering a JS course or upsell of some sort, you'll get a lot of traffic that won't actually convert into anything.
Otherwise, if you're truly writing for passion's sake, then SEO shouldn't be part of the rationale to begin with.
That's arguable. Considering a shop, SEO is getting people to enter the shop and conversion is getting people to buy something.
SEO does stand on its own really. There are no sales without visitors. On the other hand if you have visitors you can try to sell them something, anything really.
Ironically the internet is all about advertising and eye balls. With the author speaking of a million visitors a month, he can certainly monetize in many ways.
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
C. Publish in a series of small articles and give up after the second one, leaving it incomplete forever
A in my experience.
The goal is to answer the question or problem as best as you can.
Typically this means not just giving a one line answer, but expanding and elaborating, going into relevant details and explaining more in-depth.
Often this extra detail will overlap with extra detail from other questions. You can link between articles, but you can also rephrase / repeat ideas.
eg. If you're searching for "Redirect in javascript" or "Simulate link in Javascript", you'll want two separate articles.
You know that the answer is the same for both, but the searcher doesn't. And as you go more in-depth explaining how `window.location` works, you'll end up covering similar material in both articles (which is not duplicate content so Google won't penalize you).
A. Google prefers long article, around a couple thousands words.
If your article are getting really long, like above 5000 words, consider splitting in two.
A
Well, now I feel inspired to get back to writing in my blog. I shall.
any idea about monthly unique visitors ...?? daily posting one of the best seo tricks, which i learned form Matt Cutts
TLDR: content is king
tldr; Don't try to fool google. It take genuine efforts with quality of your content to be on top of SEO.
Given the quality of the search results I've seen recently, I feel like Google has made the ranking almost random... it's only within the past few years that I've had a lot more of "I'm pretty sure there's more information on this out there, but Google isn't showing it ot me" experiences.
I've had that feeling too, but I wonder if it's because the good old Internet of enthusiasts enthusiastically posting about the things that enthuse them has given way to the faceless content farms to such an extent that even Google isn't able to filter the signal out from the noise. I.e., I wonder if it is not so much their fault for being less good than they used to be as it is their fault for not being so much better than they used to be.
The end users have changed from enthusiasts who want detail to average people who want to get caught up on a subject quickly. It seems to be two fold and I think google have just given up trying to filter signal to noise and just promote conglomerates that it sees as authoritative.
(Apologies for offtopicness: could you please email us at hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you some repost invites but don't have an address to do that.)
At best, Google is correlating concrete things to quality. There are plenty of SEO contests where you can see they can still be fooled. Including a pretty famous one where a site that's 100% Latin ranks for a competitive local search query.
In other words: SEO doesn't work anymore.
Depends what you mean any rando cant just rock up and get position 1 for "car insurance" probably true.
But improve the performance for a site absolutely or get the right traffic to the right geo version of your page yep (bloody hard work I might add)
Ikea is having a bit of a problem in this area at the moment for example.
Things like load speed, security and mobile responsiveness can make or break a site's Google performance. So yes, some stuff works but chasing trophy keywords and such is a fools errand.
Why do we always assume that Google is some entity with perfect intelligence? Isn't it just a bot? People outsmart it all the time? The very fact that SEO exists means that you can fool Google.