
SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years - flaviocopes
https://flaviocopes.com/blog-seo/
======
zpeti
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.

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.

~~~
generalpass
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?

~~~
dazc
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.

------
zenpaul
"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.

~~~
rchaud
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.

------
AndrewStephens
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.

------
ape4
SEO trick number 6: get on Hacker News

~~~
fennecfoxen
Title is a bit 2 clickbait 4 me.

[edit] Oh, they declickbaited it on HN, removing the digits. That's nice.

~~~
unixhero
Yup. I never waste time on summary blog posts, X things blablabla.

~~~
fraktl
I agree, I never click on such clickbaits. Judging from the comments, it was
(yet again) a good decision..

------
seanwilson
> 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/](https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/)

~~~
johnchristopher
> 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.

~~~
seanwilson
The guide from
[https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/](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](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.

------
chiefalchemist
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.

~~~
franze
Hi, you are on the right track, I wrote a whole book around it.
[https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-
news](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.

~~~
tomcam
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.

~~~
wyclif
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.

~~~
franze
thx, fixed it

------
karterk
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.

------
CM30
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.

------
posedge
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.

~~~
sean2
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!

------
typenil
I found flaviocopes searching how to pass additional parameters to a partial
in Hugo. Worked on me

------
nonseobeliever
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.

~~~
michaelthiessen
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.

------
adwww
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.

~~~
purerandomness
I found NewsBlur quite ok. Have you tried it?

------
ecmascript
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.

~~~
melon_madness
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.

------
pier25
1M views per month is a lot. Hey Flavio are you monetizing it in any way?

~~~
seddin
He seems to be using CarbonAds.

~~~
pier25
Woops I had my ad blocker on...

------
user5994461
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.

~~~
CM30
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.

~~~
user5994461
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).

------
adriansky
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

~~~
pram
C. Publish in a series of small articles and give up after the second one,
leaving it incomplete forever

------
luord
Well, now I feel inspired to get back to writing in my blog. I shall.

------
mtsx
any idea about monthly unique visitors ...?? daily posting one of the best seo
tricks, which i learned form Matt Cutts

------
pier25
TLDR: content is king

------
hobabaObama
tldr; Don't try to fool google. It take genuine efforts with quality of your
content to be on top of SEO.

~~~
userbinator
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.

~~~
zeveb
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.

~~~
dangerface
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.

