Ask HN: What's your references to learn SEO? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your references to learn SEO?

44 pointsggregoire14 comments

Any suggestions are welcome (websites, books, etc).

For now, I know only the very basics, e.g. having one h1 per page.

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- Google: Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide [PDF][0]

- Google Webmasters[1]

- Matt Cutts' blog[2]

- Search Console Help[3]

You also gain a lot by listing the major players (Google, Bing, Alexa, etc) and then telling them about your site (domain verification, etc).

Needless to say that good content and being a good citizen help.

[0] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

[1] https://www.google.com/webmasters/

[2] https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/

[3] https://support.google.com/webmasters#topic=3309469

I mean long story short the Google guide is common sense — write high-quality original content for people, make it easy to crawl, expose as much structured data as you can, use clean URLs, etc. I don't feel like there are any real secrets to be found (maybe that's a good thing).

I find running PageSpeed and Webmaster Tools periodically and looking at Analytics regularly is all you really need to do. Maybe I've just been doing this too long and what feels intuitive to me isn't the same way for everyone.

Well, OP asked for references to learn SEO and I answered with resources to get him/her started. I view them as guidelines to keep in mind while I do things. A bearing of sort.

But I think this is the very essence of SEO. Optimizing without overfitting. Learning is continuous. A few years back, living in an underbanked country, I got a MasterCard after searching for quite a long time, contacting banks, and digging through contradictory information.

I wanted to get a MasterCard because I wanted to try trading stocks, and to buy stuff online. I was a student working part time and our postal service wasn't trustworthy, so I set a budget I was okay to burn for testing. Again, the most visible brokers in the U.S. didn't want anything to do with me (I called a bunch of them) until I found one that was willing to open an account for people in my region, they mailed me the forms, etc.

When I was done, I created a blog and wrote an article detailing how to get it, where to get it, how much it costs, which documents to get, how long it takes. I even included a custom made form the bank requires but doesn't ask for until you're there (so a wasted trip).

Around 400,000 people read the article. If it takes one month of search out, that's a lot of time saved. In my calculation, I lost T time looking for all that information and it was unacceptable that this would become NxT (N being the number of people who also want to get that item) so I set to minimize it.

I learned a lot of very cool stuff tinkering with the blog. The number of visitors increased dramatically when I hosted it on its own domain as opposed to wordpress.com. Not much, but around 300 readers daily for one blog post. It outranked the bank in question for the very search terms, including their name + card. It became sort of the reference that people on forums would exchange the link for (I check refer[r]ers). When someone would share it on a blog, I'd chime in and offer support and info. So much that many people who knew me would be looking to get a card, stumble on the article on their first search and then go "Wait a minute, I know that guy!" and then call me/text me to ask me about it. I'd read search terms and change the article to account for that. Still answering questions in the comments (700+) three years later. But that's all optimizing not to duplicate the time wasted.

A few years later it was a rarity, and now it's very common to have a card. The Prime Minister, however, wants to forbid people from using these cards to pay for ads on Facebook or Google. We still have a long way to go. Yaks here are quite hairy and shaving them is a lifelong effort, apparently.

> The number of visitors increased dramatically when I hosted it on its own domain as opposed to wordpress.com. Not much, but around 300 readers daily for one blog post. It outranked the bank in question for the very search terms, including their name + card.

Now that's quite interesting. Great story — thanks for sharing!

Moz.com has pretty good resources: https://moz.com/learn/seo

Thanks for the link! They have a PDF for those of us that like reading off-line

http://d2eeipcrcdle6.cloudfront.net/guides/Moz-The-Beginners...

yeah it is a pretty good source for learning SEO, but everytime they teach you something they do it using their own paid tool. My problem with them is that they recommend their own tool in all of their articles and don't care about what tool I am currently using. I don't mind using a paid tool, I am currently using SEMRush.

For a long time I worked in one of the biggest and most highly respected SEO agencies in the world. I was very very good at it, without sounding like a dick hopefully I want to convey that I do know what I am talking about. The biggest problem you are going to face is ultimately so many different people out there are going to give you conflicting advice and most of it is just plain horrible.

There is a single book that I would recommend on the topic as pretty much the gold standard, if you read and absorbed absolutely nothing else on the topic besides it I would confidently put you in the top 20% of experts globally on the topic.

Spend the $40 get this book https://www.amazon.com/Art-SEO-Mastering-Search-Optimization... and be done with it. The entire topic is much less complicated than it is made out to be and if you have decent technical chops then you are already at a huge advantage over others.

For content writing, installing Yoast on a WP site does wonders for the whole "what search engines look for when writing content" part. You can score your content as you write and it'll give you actionable numbers — "you should have 3 more outbound links" or "this keyword was only found on this page once, try adding it some more".

I'd consider installing it and using it to test my content against, even if you're not using WP as a part of your stack.

This is part of a much larger project on which I was working, but this checklist is a good overview of the fundamentals plus some details, ordered by priority:

https://tylershuster.gitbooks.io/agile-seo-campaign-methodol...

Here are a bunch from QuickSprout. I dont know how updated some are but QuickSprout itself also has guides for SEO as well.

https://www.quicksprout.com/2010/09/21/the-seos-handbook-53-...

Please for the love of god do not listen to Neil Patel, his advice is generally horrible.

I higly recommend Source Wave. Start by watching their youtube channel, and if you like it - entroll into their program. It is by far the best SEO resource I have ever seen.

Also check out Alex Becker's youtube channel(he is the founder of Source Wave). He is really awesome and shares a lot of amazing things.

seobythesea.com is always a good read.

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