AMA about how I made my SaaS blog SEO-ready

Thanks for asking David, the tool I am building is for lifelong learners and content creators. I am still thinking about it, but I want to use the blog section to build awareness about the cognitive overload that such activities can provoke over time and how to deal with them. So for example how to use social media for learning, how to read a book effectively etc. We are constantly bombarded by any type of content and many people are struggling with that.

Then, regarding the consideration and decision stages of the funnel, I plan to write posts on how to take notes from YouTube videos with my tool for example. However, I think it's too early for that, I want to talk to more people first to better understand what they really need and what are their struggles along their creative process. Then build a demo and only at that point write some posts about it.

So for now I'll try to build awareness on the topics mentioned, possibly including meaningful keywords that give me a chance to rank too. I hope it makes any sense to you, happy to hear your thoughts if you like! :)

P.S You wrote some great blog posts about education! I love this one https://www.ramoswriter.com/colleges-sell-credentials/

Thanks for asking John, I mostly focused on the following things:

1. Make HTML more semantic. Honestly, I have realized that I've never taken HTML tags seriously enough. My blog was a divs soup that was hard to be crawled by google. So I spent some effort fixing it by using gatsby-plugin-mdx and components to style each tag like this:

import { MDXProvider } from "@mdx-js/react"
import { MDXRenderer } from "gatsby-plugin-mdx"

<MDXProvider components={components}>
<MDXRenderer>{mdx.body}</MDXRenderer>
</MDXProvider>

2. I got familiar for the first time with the CanonicalURL which is what google spends its energies on to rank your page. I made sure to make it consistent with all my routes on the frontend and with the redirects on Nginx because I found that google was ranking 2 versions of my website, one with www and another one without www.

3. On Gatsby I have used React Helmet to set the headers like the title, canonical, description, image, and also the OpenGraph tags and the Twitter card tags that make the links you post on social media pretty and semantic.

It helped me a lot in the development process this extension to check the results https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/detailed-seo-extension/pfjdepjjfjjahkjfpkcgfmfhmnakjfba

Thank you!! :D