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10 Comments

How did you get started with SEO?

I've built a number of small websites for fun but have never bothered with SEO.

How did you learn and start doing it?

  1. 4

    SEO was the first thing I learned when I started "doing stuff with websites", even before learning how to code or manage wordpress websites. It's still one of the things I constantly have to stay up-to-date on, because its changing and moving all the time.

    The best way to learn & do it is to apply its principles on actual websites.

    The most consistent quality resources in my eyes have been Moz's blog & Ahref's blog along with their YouTube channel. Another great resource is Backlinko.

    Start with the basics: title tags, meta descriptions, headings, sitemap, internal linking, canonicals, hreflang if you have multiple languages, image optimization (alt, title, filename).

    Doing this along with writing great content for the topics you need and some general performance optimizations and you will see improvements quickly, if you haven't done any of these.

    These basics won't automatically give you great rankings, but provide the foundation great rankings are built on!

    The most important part in my mind is content. Make sure you answer all potential questions somebody interested in the topic could have. You don't have to answer everything right away, there is nothing wrong with expanding content over time, adding more and more value.

    If you don't have a strong website already, try to focus on smaller keywords (lower competition & most of the time lower searches) & long tail keywords (e.g. by providing answers to very specific problems).

  2. 3
    1. I began to write a blog.
    2. After a while, I wondered how I could increase my reach with SEO.
    3. It worked well!
    4. Google updated... something. My traffic got divided by 2 from one day to another.
    5. I don't spend so much time on SEO anymore :D

    In my experience:

    • Backlinks work well (external websites linking to yours, bigger it is, better it is) but difficult to pull of.
    • Internal links are good too (links between your own content, for example blog posts).
    • Optimize for some keyword, https://keywordseverywhere.com/ can help for that. If, for some keywords, the concurrence doesn't provide good content at the top of the search page, it's even better.

    The number one rule:

    • Your content needs to be valuable.
  3. 2

    The best thing I learned this year was Chrome built-in tool Lighthouse. from there you can see what issues you get and start learning about them. Of course, there are other stuff it doesn't cover but I found it a great starting point

  4. 1

    read as much as you can - so you don't have to learn everything from scratch again.

  5. 1

    Started a blog based on content that my target audience was searching for. You can enter a topic into something like AnswerThePublic to get an idea of what people are asking about in your industry.

    Also, what has worked for me and my clients is writing a long-form article (around 2000-3000 words) on a topic in my industry. The idea is to answer as many questions in the written piece as possible that people are asking. Then, you can use Google Seach Console to find other keywords and other content opportunities from that one long-form article.

    If you're interested, I put what I learned together into a course, SEO Growth For SaaS. I run a SaaS product and SEO is what it's built on!

    But like others have said here: focus entirely on providing value. The best angle (I think!) to take with this is to answer people's questions!

  6. 1

    My website started to reach ~30k monthly sessions without me really thinking a ton about SEO. Then I realized that if I did it intentionally, I could scale it.

    This got me to about ~130k monthly sessions until COVID hit (my website is in the travel sector).

    The best thing is actually seeing patterns that work on your own website.

    Google rewards different things for different queries, and there are many industry-specific tips and tricks you'll pick up as you're "in the field".

    Agree with @scholz that Ahrefs and Backlinko are great resources.

    Shameless plug, if you're a developer I run a free email course and newsletter that teaches some of this https://bloggingfordevs.com.

    1. 1

      I'll check it out thanks

  7. 1

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