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I keep reading SEO, SEO, and more SEO. But what does that really entails? As a web developer, I thought that doing nothing (other than providing quality content

by nubela 15y ago

I keep reading SEO, SEO, and more SEO. But what does that really entails? As a web developer, I thought that doing nothing (other than providing quality content) and not trying to skew search results is the best path to go?

BasDirks 15y ago
Google's advice is: design your websites for consumption by humans, not our crawler. This is good general advice, but you can cater to both.
acangiano 15y ago
When we talk about SEO, we are really talking about two different efforts, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is all about ensuring that your content can be fairly evaluated by search engines and humans. For example, changing the permalink structure of your posts from /?p=13 to /understanding-dependency-injection is not gaming the system; it's helping Google (and humans) figure out what your content is really about. Off-page SEO is what you do outside of your pages to help Google and humans discover your content, as well as providing Google with positive indicators of the importance and relevance of your content. This is what most developers object to. Consider this. If you have a wonderful article on a blog that you never promote and without an existing audience, your chances of being linked to are slim. Google's ranking algorithm will unfairly think that your content is not that great given that nobody is linking to it. Your off-page SEO efforts are meant to promote your content, getting people to see it, and obtaining backlinks in legitimate ways. Submitting a quality article to HN, for example, provides value to this community and it's good from a SEO standpoint. Contrary to popular belief, white hat SEO is good for the web and crucial for the promotion of your app or products.
- mattmanser 15y ago
  The reason we object to it is that in reality it's spam. 99% of the time it's not a great article, it's crap. You're not writing it out of joy, it's to get links and make a computer deep in google think it's relevant. You need to trick google into thinking people like it so you spam wherever you can and pray you get those links. There aren't 100 great links per day on HN. It's actually extremely difficult to write good content. Yet there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of companies doing this. All off-page SEO is grey as you're essentially trying to trick google into thinking your content is better than organic content. But is there any organic content any more? On the other hand, we have to get off our high horse. Real life is full of spam, TV adverts, radio adverts, billboards, networking events where you have to filter the schmoozers from the interesting. The web is the same way and if you don't compete to get your content out there, you competitor will. As everyone does it now, you have to do it too. So I agree with you, but I'm more realistic about the fact that most content produced is going to suck.
  - danmaz74 15y ago
    There is at leas one SEO element that you can do without compromising your ethics: Study which the most searched keywords are in your niche, and use those keywords in what you would have published anyway (home page, blog posts, press releases, whatever). This is not just SEO, it is adopting the language of your users, which is good in itself.

by nubela 15y ago

BasDirks 15y ago

Google's advice is: design your websites for consumption by humans, not our crawler. This is good general advice, but you can cater to both.

acangiano 15y ago

When we talk about SEO, we are really talking about two different efforts, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is all about ensuring that your content can be fairly evaluated by search engines and humans. For example, changing the permalink structure of your posts from /?p=13 to /understanding-dependency-injection is not gaming the system; it's helping Google (and humans) figure out what your content is really about. Off-page SEO is what you do outside of your pages to help Google and humans discover your content, as well as providing Google with positive indicators of the importance and relevance of your content. This is what most developers object to. Consider this. If you have a wonderful article on a blog that you never promote and without an existing audience, your chances of being linked to are slim. Google's ranking algorithm will unfairly think that your content is not that great given that nobody is linking to it. Your off-page SEO efforts are meant to promote your content, getting people to see it, and obtaining backlinks in legitimate ways. Submitting a quality article to HN, for example, provides value to this community and it's good from a SEO standpoint. Contrary to popular belief, white hat SEO is good for the web and crucial for the promotion of your app or products.

mattmanser 15y ago
The reason we object to it is that in reality it's spam. 99% of the time it's not a great article, it's crap. You're not writing it out of joy, it's to get links and make a computer deep in google think it's relevant. You need to trick google into thinking people like it so you spam wherever you can and pray you get those links. There aren't 100 great links per day on HN. It's actually extremely difficult to write good content. Yet there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of companies doing this. All off-page SEO is grey as you're essentially trying to trick google into thinking your content is better than organic content. But is there any organic content any more? On the other hand, we have to get off our high horse. Real life is full of spam, TV adverts, radio adverts, billboards, networking events where you have to filter the schmoozers from the interesting. The web is the same way and if you don't compete to get your content out there, you competitor will. As everyone does it now, you have to do it too. So I agree with you, but I'm more realistic about the fact that most content produced is going to suck.
- danmaz74 15y ago
  There is at leas one SEO element that you can do without compromising your ethics: Study which the most searched keywords are in your niche, and use those keywords in what you would have published anyway (home page, blog posts, press releases, whatever). This is not just SEO, it is adopting the language of your users, which is good in itself.