
The Basics of SEO - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/08/the-basics-of-seo/
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paulpauper
How did this get up-voted to the front page? Maybe this would have been good
advice in 1997 but nowadays it certainly does not work. I have a site with
perfectly optimized titles and urls and rankings still terrible... You need
lots of links and domain authority to rank well...that's what it boils down
to. That's why the NYT, Wikipedia, Forbes, and Fortune rank well for
everything.

~~~
taprun
The answer is in the "about" section [1]. The site seems to be run by the
folks at YC. They probably have a leg up on making it to the front page at HN.

[1] [http://themacro.com/about/](http://themacro.com/about/)

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hbcondo714
I'm surprised this article didn't reference Google using HTTPS as a ranking
signal [1]. Seems like basic SEO to me at least.

[1] [https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-
ranking-s...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-
signal.html)

~~~
ommunist
That signal is weak. Yet.

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tucaz
Four points taken out of external resources included in the page. Don't mean
to be ironic, but I thought it was way harder to get to the front page of HN.

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rezashirazian
I think a lot gets lost in SEO and developers and marketeers miss the forest
for the trees. They spend so much time trying to understand how they can game
search engines they forget the number one ingredient for making it to the top
: Good Content.

It doesn't matter how optimized your website is, if the content is useless,
you will not rank. If you want to rank you should probably spend 90% of your
time and effort on content optimization, 10% on SEO.

Check out what we are doing at YourMechanic (YC W12). We introduced an advice
section earlier this year and now it drives 50%+ of all our organic traffic.
[https://www.yourmechanic.com/advice/](https://www.yourmechanic.com/advice/)

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CM30
Well, basics is certainly right here. It's the very lowest level stuff
relating to title tags, content and meta descriptions.

It's still useful to know (the amount of people who have a useless title or
don't set the meta description for the search listings is ridiculous), but I'd
say the off site SEO factors matter a ton more than these on site ones.

Because at the end of the day, SEO (like any other marketing) is all about who
you know rather than what you know. Not literally in the sense that knowing
someone at Google will give you better results, but in the sense that knowing
the right influencers to boost your content's 'signal' is more important than
how well written or 'good' it is.

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matsim
Digital advertiser/marketer here. As others have rightly pointed out in some
the comments--and as seen appropriately in the title of this blog post!--these
really are just the pure basics. Elements to understand extend far beyond this
to items such as semantic markup & rich snippets, the crucial role of
"outreach" and "viral marketing" (that is, essentially digital PR), "domain
authority" as defined by the volume and quality of incoming links to a site,
and so much more.

As the topic of SEO is fairly rare on HN, some words I want to share while I
got some of your attention: if something gives you pause, don't think to trust
a single thing that an SEO consultant or agency out there says to you until
you read up on it yourself and/or consult another party. In the end, SEO-
pitching digital marketers are pretty much selling snake oil 90% of the time
and what you really need is someone on your team with a marketing background
who can responsibly manage vendors and force performance working to prove
ACTUAL traffic/"brand awareness"/sales growth over an extended period of time
(and if they can't show growth, they can intelligently explain to you why.)

I can't count the number of times I've been on calls with "SEOs" just rambling
off their traffic reports without any real insight nor any technical
knowledge, despite the fact that their agency is charging $100-150/hour for
such material. I've seen reports from even large, recognizable digital
advertising agencies with many locations worldwide that provided flawed or
irrelevant data, a lack of focus on client goals, etc. I could go on and on.

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j_s
Here is a recent free chapter from a book (Secret Sauce) coming out soon; it
is a bit more hands-on, explaining how to figure what what keyword to go
after:

[https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-
by-s...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-step-seo-
tutorial-for-beginners-that-will-get-you-ranked-every-single-1b903b3ab6bb)

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shardinator
I understand this is just the basics, but the URL is also crucial. Keywords in
the URL (that match the page content) will give you order of magnitude better
results.

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ommunist
Agreed. Keyword in URL is the kingpin of SEO.

~~~
bishvili
Helpful but not kingpin [http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-
keywords-i...](http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-keywords-in-
the-url-16976)

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josephjrobison
The intro is interesting enough, and there is a good point he makes about
needing to satisfy the ultimate user intent rather than just focusing on
keywords and queries.

Ultimately pretty basic, but good for beginners to dip their toes.

