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Ask HN: What would be your best SEO optimization tip?

13 points by Frajedo ↗ HN
Hello HN!

I am currently trying to improve the SEO and visibility of my https://get.mymfa.io website but it is particularly hard to find a proper "guide" to get websites to the top of search results and sometimes I even end up reading contradictory information.

What would be the most important personal (and non-obvious) tip you would share if you wanted to get your new side project to reach the top search results?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help!

Jonathan

15 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] thread
chiefalchemist
To stop and consider if SEO is the best tool and the point in the brand's arc. Yes, of couse do all the usual obvious things. But beyond that, the question is: What marketing tool / tactics should we invest (our finite resources) in? It quite possible SEO isn't the best investment.
Frajedo
Thanks a lot for the quick suggestion. What you're thinking of would be running social network posting and/or adds? Is there something I am missing?
chiefalchemist
It depends on the product and the target market. Given you're just starting you're going to have to experiment to see what works.
Frajedo
What kind of experimentations would you recommend? I'm thinking about sharing the product in specialized dev blogs and running Twitter sponsored tweets ads. What would you also try?
kidgorgeous
Research the keywords people use to find your product, and then write articles optimized for those keywords. Either that, or find one keyword you want your website to rank for and optimize your home page for that one keyword. You can do this with SurferSEO or PageOptimizer Pro. Then do a backlink audit of the websites who currently ranks for that content, and then proceed to build comparable backlinks to your home page to outrank them. You can do this with a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.
Frajedo
Thanks for the links and the strategies to aim for. Will start working on it right away! :)
verdverm
Looks like you are targeting devs, so content is king. Auth is a tough market to get started in. The main issue will be "why should I trust your small outfit over a large and established product?"

See the skyscraper technique mentioned here: https://boringseo.org/

Here are some others I like

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-start...

https://mailmeteor.com/blog/seo-for-dummies

Frajedo
Thanks a lot for the shared resources. I'll try working on the tips provided there :)
arrakis2021
Been SEOing for 12 years.

High on-site score optimization for exact match phrases still moves the needle more than anything, and is STILL the most overlooked technique by most startups.

Frajedo
Thanks for the tip.

The question now would be: How do I figure out what exact phrases are my potential customers looking for? I've tried using google trends but unfortunately there is "not sufficient data", I presume it is because my problematic might be too specific?

Any tips?

arrakis2021
Sign up for Google AdWords and use the keyword planner tool. Punch in an exact match / phrase match keyword.

You don’t need to actually run an ad campaign to make use of this. Many SEOs use this method to find similar phrases.

Gustomaximus
Keyword planner is great. Use it in conjunction with trends to see how words are being used over time.

https://trends.google.com/trends/

You can get a long way with these 2 tools before signing up to any paid stuff.

Frajedo
Thank you both for the tip! Will start working on it right away!
seanwilson
> but it is particularly hard to find a proper "guide" to get websites to the top of search results and sometimes I even end up reading contradictory information.

You could try my on-page SEO checker and best practices guide:

https://www.checkbot.io

It checks for SEO best practices that are mostly cited from things Google recommends e.g. avoid duplicate page titles, avoid temporary redirects, use human readable URL names, use canonical tags. Most of the tips are obviously beneficial for users too. I don't recommend paying attention to tricks that sound like they're trying to guess hidden details about how Google's algorithm works.

Following the above will give you a better chance of success by making your existing content more user and search-engine friendly but to get anywhere you must also be 1) publishing content and 2) getting backlinks.

Besides this, there's really no shortcuts. I find SEO news is mostly noise.

leet_thow
SEO may have been worth the effort prior to 2014, but now everything is so saturated that it is hard to find ROI. There has always been snake oil salespeople in the field. Write high quality content that spiders can index (no SPA) and that other sites link to is all you can do and by no means guarantees success from the channel.