Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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I have enormously mixed feelings about anyone who says they are a professional in SEO. I don't doubt there are people who show results to their clients, and they will range from amateurs to people who charge to do it for a living and they will be black, grey and white hatted variants.

My own experience is that carefully reading the google documents which return when you do the obvious searches on how to improve SEO are very clear: do some structural work, be very clear about your sites underlying page relations, proffer keywords which contextually make sense, but do not try and game the system.

If you pay search engines money they increase visibility of your site. If you host adverts since they place adverts it increases visibility of your site in their systems because its a "virtuous circle"

If you attempt to use other mechanisms to direct traffic to your site which the search engine can (a) detect and (b) proscribe, you will be penalised.

What else is there?

The biggest problem nowadays, though, is that we're building sites more and more that aren't crawlable by the search engines. Basic site structure and usability issues plague many sites. A good SEO will fix those issues.

It's not the link building or content that needs to be fixed, what is needed is the skills of a competent technical SEO who understands web dev. In many cases a site just needs to fix it's site structure and the crawling issues and it will rank well.

For example, I've seen plenty of sites that have over 1 million pages of content but the only way to get to those pages is through an XML sitemap--that's not SEO.

Well said. The biggest problems these days stem from things like client-side rendering and making crawler-accessible versions of things that are using new technologies (like simple pagination for infinite scroll, etc.).

>> carefully reading the google documents which return when you do the obvious searches on how to improve SEO are very clear: do some structural work, be very clear about your sites underlying page relations, proffer keywords which contextually make sense, but do not try and game the system.

I honestly wish it was that easy. Trust me, it's not.

It is that easy if the site is worth the front page, which is the point of the doc.

I think everyone just assumes the front page is fair game for them. If there are ~10 better sites then yours (not out of the question unless your in a tiny niche or started the site long ago) then doing the work still won't reward you with the front page, and there isn't anything necessarily wrong with that.

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