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Ask HN: How can I make my website more SEO friendly?

3 points by yelkosnyc ↗ HN
My website is: https://www.jackscustomcleaning.com/ I provide restaurant cleaning services in NYC, Miami, DC. I am long time reader of Hacker News and think this forum can help me optimize SEO for my website.

6 comments

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gregjor
Suggest starting here:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s...

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, so SEO means the process of optimizing a web site for better discovery by search engines.

The world of SEO teems with frauds and scams, people promising to get your site to the top with one weird trick, etc. Don't get fleeced. If you pay an expert make sure you tie payment to measurable results (using actual analytics). The search engines you care about have countermeasures to prevent the more obvious ways to artificially increase search engine rankings. You can do a lot with the content in the site, making the site friendly to crawlers, and getting other real sites to link to yours.

enjoyyourlife
The color contrast on your website is terrible. Try using an accessibility checker
ksaj
I suspect this is about the two sections with light blue background and dark blue text. Yup, it's hard to read. And then that weird clashing green Contact button is jarring when hovered over them. The rest seems fine.

Never been a fan of the yellow highlighter look at the top, but it at least doesn't make the page unreadable. But the only other place I ever see that is on sites trying to sell snake-oil products. On one line like that, maybe it's not that bad, but I could see search engines ignoring sites that have any of the snake-oil text effects.

itake
You need more text content. There isn't much data (text) for google to learn about your website. If someone searches "best cleaning in NYC", only the keywords cleaning and NYC would match on the content of your website.

But, targeting those keywords will be really hard (as Yelp and friends) would be hard to beat in the rankings for that.

You could try targeting diy keywords ("how to clean a tub in nyc"), but even that might be challenging to beat websites like e-how or youtube.

If it was me, I'd try doing organic marketing on social media (e.g. fun tiktok videos), as their content goes stale fast, which means more opportunities to get in front of your audience.

sandreas
SEO is mostly about being linked by other pages, the more popular, the better... second most important thing is to have a good amount of high quality content (like a bunch of blog articles, a glossary with great explanations, etc.). To prevent getting downvoted, it is also good to have technological basics in place (fast loading times, good image formats, no rendering issues, etc.).

Pretty hard to take influence on the "linked by other pages" thing, but this will come automatically as soon as you take the time to write good content and fix the technological basics. To do so, you could take a look at google page speed insights (https://pagespeed.web.dev). It also gives you hints what's wrong with your page, e.g.:

  Reduce unused javascript (316kb)
  Minimize third party javascript
  Reduce javascript execution time (7.9 seconds)
  Reduce load for the main thread (14.6 seconds)
  ...