top | item 14683545

Ask HN: How to get real SEO improvement?

5 points| samayshamdasani | 8 years ago

I have a website (https://enlight.ml) that has really poor SEO results.

What kind of meta tags or strategies would work to improve rankings significantly?

5 comments

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 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|8 years ago

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?

threesixandnine|8 years ago

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|8 years ago

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.