Ask HN: Best Resources to Learn SEO?
18 comments
I wrote a concise developer focused on-page SEO guide (https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/) sourced mostly from things Google says, as well as a Chrome extension that checks the page factors from the guide (https://www.checkbot.io/). You can test a site you run with the extension and follow the guide to fix any problems found, learning SEO on the way.
This is the best resource with lots of best practices.
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
This may sound too basic, but for most people, going through these links[1][2] is more than enough to know what to do.
Once you have understood them, learn the tools of the trade. Come up with clever ideas. "There are always shortcuts and loopholes"[3].
Good tools and execution of effective ideas make all the difference.
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/get-start...
[2] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
[3] http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/10/applied-philosophy-...
Once you have understood them, learn the tools of the trade. Come up with clever ideas. "There are always shortcuts and loopholes"[3].
Good tools and execution of effective ideas make all the difference.
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/get-start...
[2] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
[3] http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/10/applied-philosophy-...
Make good content that people want to consume and promote it. Label everything clearly with the terms your are targeting. Have patience. All this other stuff is a coin toss when it comes to efficacy.
I used to do this for many years at a very high level and was consulting for lots of major brands on this exact topic.
The SEO industry makes things sound a lot more complicated than things are in reality. That mostly comes from the fact that overwhelmingly most people in the industry aren't actually very technical at all and things that might seem obvious to an engineer are not at all to people with more marketing focused backgrounds.
I've not actively followed the industry for a few years now but I strongly recall that there was a lot of hand-wavey voodoo magic vibes to much of the advice out there because of the aforementioned technical skill gap.
Instead I would argue that the best way you can think of it is an engineer where you are crafting a set of input signals into an algorithm and you are then competing against other brands input signals.
Some big ones to keep in mind are:
* Start by understanding what kind of queries you are trying to rank for in the first place. Are you a content site? Are you an e-commerce? etc... I often see e-commerce brands for example throwing huge amounts of effort into mega blog posts that are loosely related to their core business and all that mostly does is drive traffic for people who are never going to buy from you to begin with.
* Think about how search engines crawl your website. Make sure you at a minimum aren't tripping them up with messy site structures, broken links, clear titles etc.
* Know that they are trying to judge you against a set of specific criteria. Some of these are direct signals that you can control and they will impact rankings. Speed is often famously quoted as one for example. But go and take a look at the specific criteria that Google use in order to feed their own machine learning algorithms regarding "what makes a great site" https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
* Think about how you can take your existing website and then mark it up with additional metadata to make things extremely fucking clear what you are talking about on each page. The schema.org website is a great website for this. Using it alone isn't going to "make you rank higher" but you are feeding in clearer signals into the algorithms that will ultimately be deciding what you are relevant for.
* Go and understand the landscape of who you are competing against. Start with who you are trying to reach and work backwards from there. I see unsophisticated people all the time starting with just a random set of keywords that they thought sounded vaguely relevant and spend all their time doing dumb shit like trying to rank for "clothes" because they have a clothing website and that keyword has a high search volume. Don't do this. Start by understanding your audience first, it will save you a lot of trouble.
* Think beyond your website alone. What other signals do you think could hint at the fact that you run a reputable website, are an expert in a topic. Do you have a real world presence? Things like Google Places are a great example of a bunch of real world signals Google has access to for brick and mortar places. Maybe spend some time there getting THAT in order and driving positive customer reviews. Are you a member of any business groups? Think about what communities you belong to etc.
* You are going to hear a lot of things about "links". This is roughly speaking true but a lot of the advice out there is garbage on many levels. You would be much better served in most scenarios like a public relations person than an "SEO".
* There is actually some semi-decent content out the now that is specifically aimed at the developer crowd on YouTube by Google. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUPOalM1zuWD... and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUN6lFDz6qMB... come to mind as good places to start.
The SEO industry makes things sound a lot more complicated than things are in reality. That mostly comes from the fact that overwhelmingly most people in the industry aren't actually very technical at all and things that might seem obvious to an engineer are not at all to people with more marketing focused backgrounds.
I've not actively followed the industry for a few years now but I strongly recall that there was a lot of hand-wavey voodoo magic vibes to much of the advice out there because of the aforementioned technical skill gap.
Instead I would argue that the best way you can think of it is an engineer where you are crafting a set of input signals into an algorithm and you are then competing against other brands input signals.
Some big ones to keep in mind are:
* Start by understanding what kind of queries you are trying to rank for in the first place. Are you a content site? Are you an e-commerce? etc... I often see e-commerce brands for example throwing huge amounts of effort into mega blog posts that are loosely related to their core business and all that mostly does is drive traffic for people who are never going to buy from you to begin with.
* Think about how search engines crawl your website. Make sure you at a minimum aren't tripping them up with messy site structures, broken links, clear titles etc.
* Know that they are trying to judge you against a set of specific criteria. Some of these are direct signals that you can control and they will impact rankings. Speed is often famously quoted as one for example. But go and take a look at the specific criteria that Google use in order to feed their own machine learning algorithms regarding "what makes a great site" https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
* Think about how you can take your existing website and then mark it up with additional metadata to make things extremely fucking clear what you are talking about on each page. The schema.org website is a great website for this. Using it alone isn't going to "make you rank higher" but you are feeding in clearer signals into the algorithms that will ultimately be deciding what you are relevant for.
* Go and understand the landscape of who you are competing against. Start with who you are trying to reach and work backwards from there. I see unsophisticated people all the time starting with just a random set of keywords that they thought sounded vaguely relevant and spend all their time doing dumb shit like trying to rank for "clothes" because they have a clothing website and that keyword has a high search volume. Don't do this. Start by understanding your audience first, it will save you a lot of trouble.
* Think beyond your website alone. What other signals do you think could hint at the fact that you run a reputable website, are an expert in a topic. Do you have a real world presence? Things like Google Places are a great example of a bunch of real world signals Google has access to for brick and mortar places. Maybe spend some time there getting THAT in order and driving positive customer reviews. Are you a member of any business groups? Think about what communities you belong to etc.
* You are going to hear a lot of things about "links". This is roughly speaking true but a lot of the advice out there is garbage on many levels. You would be much better served in most scenarios like a public relations person than an "SEO".
* There is actually some semi-decent content out the now that is specifically aimed at the developer crowd on YouTube by Google. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUPOalM1zuWD... and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUN6lFDz6qMB... come to mind as good places to start.
I can confirm that, as I work in large non-tech company as Product Manager on the Software side. Our marketing people are solely composed of marketing people who send everything to agency and hire a few east-asia developpers to make Dashboards (campaign, click through rate, price per click...).
I wanted to break a bit into that field but have a hard time as I am not even able to have deeper discussion with this team as they keep sellinh me this as voodoo.
Is there a value to know that skill nowadays or will this be outsourced to « agencies » or using salesforce like tools?
Is there a value to know that skill nowadays or will this be outsourced to « agencies » or using salesforce like tools?
> The SEO industry makes things sound a lot more complicated than things are in reality
Yes, just write high quality content on a site that's performant/fast and make use of references/outbound links, aswell as inbound links linking to your own articles and you're golden. It also helps to be as descriptive as possible and categorize all your content to make crawlers happy.
Yes, just write high quality content on a site that's performant/fast and make use of references/outbound links, aswell as inbound links linking to your own articles and you're golden. It also helps to be as descriptive as possible and categorize all your content to make crawlers happy.
As a dumb marketing SEO person, I can confirm this is the way.
Make sure the site is crawlable, indexable and reasonably fast first - the tech part.
Then spend 90% of the time generating content and links.
Make sure the site is crawlable, indexable and reasonably fast first - the tech part.
Then spend 90% of the time generating content and links.
I understand generating content, but how do you generate links? Or did you mean generating content will generate links?
Generating great content that is linkable is the mindset to be in.
But putting some media outreach muscle behind it gets you 10x the results. So it's content + link outreach.
But putting some media outreach muscle behind it gets you 10x the results. So it's content + link outreach.
I recently went through this tutorial - it's well organized and I thought they explained the concepts well.
https://mangools.com/blog/learn-seo/
I also really liked the ahrefs one you linked. I've only ever looked at SEO guides on the first page of search results - I figure that's the best way to gauge if they know what they're talking about.
https://mangools.com/blog/learn-seo/
I also really liked the ahrefs one you linked. I've only ever looked at SEO guides on the first page of search results - I figure that's the best way to gauge if they know what they're talking about.
An account created 2 days ago, promoting lesser know SEO site as a good option. This feels like disguised spam?
Do not read the book SEO 2021 by Adam Clarke. Despite 4.5 stars on Amazon, this book is too surface level and introductory to be useful.
Understanding SEO by Franz Enzenshofer
thanks for sharing goldhatseo.com!
Black hat still works. Take that into account
I'd recommend to read whatever patio11 has written about your problem. Start in https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
For example, some of the ones I like are:
- https://www.goldhatseo.com/
- https://ahrefs.com/blog/
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNEsahyXxNJvYNsMhru-UzQ