
Ask HN: How to get real SEO improvement? - samayshamdasani
I have a website (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enlight.ml) that has really poor SEO results.<p>What kind of meta tags or strategies would work to improve rankings significantly?
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mattbgates
Your website is only about 7 months old. I was lucky to have 30-50 visitors
around then. Think about the universe and you are Earth. It is kind of like
that. Social media will help you get it out there. But the majority of people
have no idea that you exist. You have to work to get them to notice.

Meta tags don't work anymore or at least are not very important. You should,
however, have a good description and a headline that is unique for every page
you have. A subheadline is recommended. Then it is just unique content from
there. It looks like you are on the right track. I'd recommend getting a
Twitter account and sharing those articles with some hashtags.

Remember that your audience is a niche audience and you will attract people
who are interested but there are only about 20 million coders in the world,
not every single one of them is going to be interested in your website, and
others who might scan it once and be done.

You have the right idea on your "getting started with coding", as you can gain
attention and traction to get new coders on board. So you just need some time
and exposure. Any time you can, mention tutorials on your website to help
others.

I run a website called
[http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com)
and I remember when I had just three visitors in the beginning: my mom, my
girlfriend, and Googlebot. Having posted to Twitter, Triberr, LinkedIn, and
other media over the years, I'd say my average daily visitor count is around
1,000, over 4 years later, but I have seen the website go viral at times, in
fact, just a few weeks ago, it was getting 10,000 visitors a day for almost 2
weeks.

What's my secret? I'm not the only one writing articles for the website. I
opened it up so everyone else can write and share articles. What does that do?
People who are likely to have their articles on your website are going to
share those articles with their fans and following. So if I have a thousand
articles on the website written by different people who have their own fans
and following, and you encourage them to share for maximum exposure, that
amounts to at least an average of 500 people each (with generosity for
exposure in mind), that is the potential reach of at least 500,000 people.

Become a community that people want to be at and write for and you will find
the best SEO results that you never had to pay for.

~~~
urahara
Thank you for the tips, especially the idea of accepting other's articles.
What's your process for moderating them, do they often require additional
communication with an author?

~~~
mattbgates
Accepting others' articles means that I do not know everything nor do I claim
to know everything. For my website, which focuses on jobs, careers, and the
workplace, which can cover a wide range of topics, I've never been a police
officer or a teacher or a judge or a mechanic, so how can I write about that
kind of stuff? I let others do it for me.

Back in the day, I had a submission form right on the website where people
could submit their articles, but the form got spammed so much I had to remove
it. Now people just email me their articles and infographics. That was another
thing -- accepting infographics increased the amount of articles on the
website greatly. Every time you make a post, it is a gateway to another search
on the Internet and another way for visitors to find you.

So almost every article is acceptable, though there are some rules:

\- no "self-promotion" (you cannot sell your product on the website directly
-- but you can talk about it and lead visitors back your own website)

\- article must contribute some type of knowledge to the Internet

\- 500 words minimum per article or 250 word summary per infographic

For the most part, I've never had too many issues, and I think of the 2,000
articles I've accepted, I've only ever rejected less than 10 because people
tried to submit a spun article, they just didn't get the concept of "no self-
promotion", and there was this one time where an article was encouraging women
to do works of charity in areas of the world that I would consider dangerous,
so I was very skeptical about publishing something like that. Most
contributors have been fans of the website for a while before they contribute
so they have an idea of the types of articles we are looking for and how they
should read.. though everyone has their own unique personality and writing
style, which helps greatly with SEO.

I read every article and it goes through a processing phase which consists of
making sure there are no spelling mistakes, making sure the actual article
makes sense, preparing the article for any additional SEO (meta description),
finding at least two images (one main and one featured which greatly help
SEO), and adding to a feature I call Quick Glimpse (I write 4- to 5- bullet
points summarizing the article which is located on the left hand side of every
page, which also may help with SEO), and then I schedule the article. I also
write out every single infographic in order for it to be a text-friendly
version (I have blind readers who can't read infographics), and that too, is
also great for SEO.

Sounds like a crazy time-consuming process, which is why it can take anywhere
from a week to two weeks to get published, but actual time it takes to do all
this (including writing out infographics) is anywhere from 10 minutes to a
half hour per article. Every week to every other week, I'd say I get an
average of about 5-10 emails contributing articles to the website. I also
spend time writing my own and those get published every so often too.

The amount of work you put into your website will yield the results you want
to see. In the beginning, I must've spent too many hours working on the
website, but have since limited myself to no more than an hour a day,
including the processing of articles.

I will say this: in the beginning, I solicited articles on Craigslist,
MyBlogGuest, and later on, MyBlogU. I also would hop on Fiverr and pay people
to write articles for me. After the first year, however, I stopped all of this
because I was receiving so many contributions from the submission form (and I
was also writing so much), and now it is no longer necessary for me to solicit
anything at all.

Your website is a coding-niche but you might want to consider writing actual
articles not always just focused on code, unless that is all you want to
reach: people with knowledge of code. I mean... if I were visiting a website
like yours with interest in coding or even a little knowledge in coding, I'd
want to know:

\- Why should I learn code?

\- What kind of money can I make and what is the programming language to help
me do that?

\- How can I make money with coding while freelancing?

\- What types of jobs can I do?

\- Who is hiring?

\- Why is coding important for the future?

\- Why should I teach my children to learn how to code?

The topics are numerous on what you can write about. These types of topics
will draw NEW coders in and people who want to learn to code, so you aren't
just after assuming everyone knows how to code, and that should likely gain
some traffic to your website.

Something that is recently receiving attention in the news is that more
schools are now offering courses on coding, some even mandatory. Imagine being
an important website resource that helps children learn how to code. Just some
things for you to think about!

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threesixandnine
First you need to establish which keywords you want to rank for. Then, get as
many high quality backlinks as possible with those keywords. Make sure to mix
with other non-related keywords as well, like your domain and what not.

This is still working in 2017 even if search engines will like you to believe
otherwise. Links still rule.

Now, the best would be to make some killer content on the website that would
attract journalists and blogers that would want to write about it aka that
would consider your content worthwile to write about and worthwile for their
audience to read about.

------
iurisilvio
Your content is targeting nobody. Who is your target? I guess it is people
learning to code.

Build your content based on that. Change your headlines to something like
"Learn how to build a Twitter Bot in node.js".

Setup Google Webmasters to understand what Google is doing. Actively send your
sitemap to them (it is a manual input there).

I do this content SEO a lot. People say good content is king, but after 2
years I have some websites with a lot of pageviews and the only thing I did
was poor content.

