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Ok but does it actually work? I’ve never been lucky enough to see my site on the first page of google for any good search terms. It feels like trying to do this

Ok but does it actually work? I’ve never been lucky enough to see my site on the first page of google for any good search terms. It feels like trying to do this is like a kid trying for the NFL or NBA as a plan. Very few will make it. And isn't the best thing you can do is get backlinks? Which has nothing to do with just changing your URL structure and making the HTML nice and searchable. Getting backlinks is all about either 1) being so linkable people just do it 2) business development deals.

CharlieDigital 3y ago
It works, but you really, really have to know what you are doing. That's why SEO specialists exist because there are a variety of techniques. Just a few things I've learned along the way: - Google favors mobile web performance. If you want to rank higher, your site needs to render fast on mobile. The reasoning is that Google's search objective is to serve good content (whether they are succeeding at this is a different debate) so they want pages that will load fast for the end user, contain the relevant content, and provide the best experience for the broadest audience of visitors. - To make mobile web performance fast, you need to send tight, compact HTML with CSS inlined where possible. This is why SSG/SSR are all the rage these days because Google favors it for search results. SPAs are indexed in a different pipeline. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... - In some cases, you'll need to use advanced techniques like using service workers to offload some of the page loading to a background thread to speed up rendering. See libraries like PartyTown: https://partytown.builder.io/ https://partytown.builder.io/ - Google can surface structured markup data (JSON-LD, RDF-A, Microdata formats) which will make your results visually stand out. Incorporating it into your HTML output is a must in some domains like e-commerce since pricing and product data is surfaced via this markup. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu... - Google's search crawler factors structural HTML into account. Therefore, make use of meta tags, <title/>, <h1/>, and other semantic HTML5 tags to mark up your document. See this link for reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-l... - Google uses sitemaps to find your content. You can improve your results by properly tagging images, videos, and so on. Make sure you do it well. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... - Google's heuristics change all the time. See: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw... My lesson learned is that this is a very, very hard game to do well. But if done well, your content will eventually make its way up. Because Google re-indexing could take days or weeks, the outcome can take time to actually see. If your site isn't showing up in search, it's because you're competing against thousands of professionals that are 100% focused on this specific domain of expertise and follow Google's updates to their search heuristics with each release and adjust.
- andrewfromx 3y ago
  ok this is great info and you sound like you are expert and have done this but my question then is: what about backlinks? Do they not even matter anymore?
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago
    I'm not an SEO specialist; just spent some time working with an e-commerce team and did some large-scale scraping so I learned much of this along the way. I'm sure backlinks still matter, but the internal search algos have changed so much since the early days of Google that it's hard to know exactly how much weight each part of the equation has. The main problem with backlinks and keywords is that they are too easy to game so at some point, Google adjusted how they weigh those inputs. The bigger picture is that SEO matters -- a lot. Backlinks are just one part of they equation. But being optimized against Google's search crawler heuristics is a big picture endeavor.
    - andrewfromx 3y ago
      ok last question :) what do you think of https://ahrefs.com/ https://ahrefs.com/ ? Is that the best one?
  - i_have_an_idea 3y ago
    Backlinks matter a lot. Say I wanted to rank first for "Court dress". Having backlinks from NYT, Washington Post and Wikipedia for the term is 1000x more valuable than just hitting all the technical SEO metrics of fast page loading and meta tags. Backlinks matter so much that many authoritative sites sell them. Of course, they won't admit to that for obvious reasons.
    - muzani 3y ago
      Some friends made a sports site for fun. They were a bunch of FB marketers in the early era and just experimented, plus it was a topic they loved ranting on. They did FB ads then funneled the traffic to a WP site. They hit 4 million pageviews/month in less than half a year. Automated ads didn't work, they paid too little and dropped quality too much. Selling backlinks became one of the core business. They'd actually write full articles for a client and link to their site. The clients were extremely happy with the results. It's not necessarily the ranking, but the article itself would show high on Google. Also in my own startup experience, I'd buy backlinks from minor bloggers who were blogging on a similar topic. It was something like $10 for a mention. I don't know if it hurt or helped SEO; but it increased credibility in the community and a lot of the people we interviewed mentioned that they bought it because they saw a familiar name. This is 2016 data though, so take it with a pinch of salt as things could have changed significantly since then.

CharlieDigital 3y ago

It works, but you really, really have to know what you are doing. That's why SEO specialists exist because there are a variety of techniques. Just a few things I've learned along the way: - Google favors mobile web performance. If you want to rank higher, your site needs to render fast on mobile. The reasoning is that Google's search objective is to serve good content (whether they are succeeding at this is a different debate) so they want pages that will load fast for the end user, contain the relevant content, and provide the best experience for the broadest audience of visitors. - To make mobile web performance fast, you need to send tight, compact HTML with CSS inlined where possible. This is why SSG/SSR are all the rage these days because Google favors it for search results. SPAs are indexed in a different pipeline. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... - In some cases, you'll need to use advanced techniques like using service workers to offload some of the page loading to a background thread to speed up rendering. See libraries like PartyTown: https://partytown.builder.io/ https://partytown.builder.io/ - Google can surface structured markup data (JSON-LD, RDF-A, Microdata formats) which will make your results visually stand out. Incorporating it into your HTML output is a must in some domains like e-commerce since pricing and product data is surfaced via this markup. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu... - Google's search crawler factors structural HTML into account. Therefore, make use of meta tags, <title/>, <h1/>, and other semantic HTML5 tags to mark up your document. See this link for reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-l... - Google uses sitemaps to find your content. You can improve your results by properly tagging images, videos, and so on. Make sure you do it well. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... - Google's heuristics change all the time. See: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw... My lesson learned is that this is a very, very hard game to do well. But if done well, your content will eventually make its way up. Because Google re-indexing could take days or weeks, the outcome can take time to actually see. If your site isn't showing up in search, it's because you're competing against thousands of professionals that are 100% focused on this specific domain of expertise and follow Google's updates to their search heuristics with each release and adjust.

andrewfromx 3y ago
ok this is great info and you sound like you are expert and have done this but my question then is: what about backlinks? Do they not even matter anymore?
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  I'm not an SEO specialist; just spent some time working with an e-commerce team and did some large-scale scraping so I learned much of this along the way. I'm sure backlinks still matter, but the internal search algos have changed so much since the early days of Google that it's hard to know exactly how much weight each part of the equation has. The main problem with backlinks and keywords is that they are too easy to game so at some point, Google adjusted how they weigh those inputs. The bigger picture is that SEO matters -- a lot. Backlinks are just one part of they equation. But being optimized against Google's search crawler heuristics is a big picture endeavor.
  - andrewfromx 3y ago
    ok last question :) what do you think of https://ahrefs.com/ https://ahrefs.com/ ? Is that the best one?
- i_have_an_idea 3y ago
  Backlinks matter a lot. Say I wanted to rank first for "Court dress". Having backlinks from NYT, Washington Post and Wikipedia for the term is 1000x more valuable than just hitting all the technical SEO metrics of fast page loading and meta tags. Backlinks matter so much that many authoritative sites sell them. Of course, they won't admit to that for obvious reasons.
  - muzani 3y ago
    Some friends made a sports site for fun. They were a bunch of FB marketers in the early era and just experimented, plus it was a topic they loved ranting on. They did FB ads then funneled the traffic to a WP site. They hit 4 million pageviews/month in less than half a year. Automated ads didn't work, they paid too little and dropped quality too much. Selling backlinks became one of the core business. They'd actually write full articles for a client and link to their site. The clients were extremely happy with the results. It's not necessarily the ranking, but the article itself would show high on Google. Also in my own startup experience, I'd buy backlinks from minor bloggers who were blogging on a similar topic. It was something like $10 for a mention. I don't know if it hurt or helped SEO; but it increased credibility in the community and a lot of the people we interviewed mentioned that they bought it because they saw a familiar name. This is 2016 data though, so take it with a pinch of salt as things could have changed significantly since then.