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Let's talk SEO, 10 tips you should know

Yaser Adel Mehraban on June 11, 2019

For most companies, ranking #1 is like a blessing to their business. However, most of the web developers are not aware of what should be done to re...
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vuild profile image
Vuild

This is a good list Yaser, always detailed & clearly laid out for people to understand.

Most tips are onpage SEO specifically. Some of these are not really SEO, but useful for traffic gen or making a nice site (twitter cards are not SEO).

Let me add a couple of things.

  1. Quality content (this was always Goo & MC's #1 point).
  2. Page count/page indexing rate (number of pages indexed is highly correlated to traffic levels).
  3. Inbound links/ anchor text (outbound links do nothing for SEO on their own).
  4. Performance.
  5. Text must appear on page (they have been back & forth a few times on this since the miserable failure goo bomb).
  6. Content distinction (if most pages are basically too similar).

Matt Mullenweg (WP) stated, a long time ago in a video interview, that one of the best SEO tips for wordpress.com was removing the meta desc. A 30% bump or something. Results vary.

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jerodsanto profile image
Jerod Santo

Matt Mullenweg (WP) stated, a long time ago in a video interview, that one of the best SEO tips for wordpress.com was removing the meta desc. A 30% bump or something.

That's pretty interesting, any chance you can provide a link (or some keywords I can search) to find that reference?

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vuild profile image
Vuild • Edited

It was a long time ago (many years), I think it was about wp (or wordcamp) & the interviewer asks for one unusual SEO/traffic tip or something.

It came down to "let goo choose some desc keywords from your content" pretty much. Meta desc doesn't do much either way really for 99%. Snippet perhaps, tiny difference.

Looking at wp (org/com) they use them right now. I do too. It's testable.

Not intentionally being vague. If I come across it, I'll drop it here.

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Al Chen

Awesome list! Was wondering if anyone has come across a good CMS that handles a lot of this for you? Currently I'm thinking about migrating our blog to a CMS and want to make it as easy as possible for editors to write content but automating the SEO pieces of the content.

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

I am using Gatsby for my own blog and most of these are in place by default (the starter I chose), but not sure what you mean by CMS for blog

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albertc44 profile image
Al Chen

Thinking more for a company blog that would have multiple authors where each author may not have all the SEO knowledge to write in the proper meta data.

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

That can be achieved using anything, I having some guest posts on my log where the author name is not me, but that just in the frontmatter of the markdown file. Simple as that

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vuild profile image
Vuild

I generally use Wordpress as it has been very battle tested SEO wise.

The majority of the SEO industry used it, many of the big info-sites now started with it. It has a lot of features (inc plugins/self-code) that help publishing a lot & a bunch of things you can do to get extra results. You can do this with any code/CMS but its been done millions of times already with WP. Handles 100K+ uniques a day np, not many ppl go above that.

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Hanish Kamal

Excellently shown. I loved every quote, and I appreciate you sharing the information. Continue inspiring and sharing with others. By the way, I recommend checking out my blog on how to sell used electronic devices at frontlinepatrol.com/home-security/...

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Divyesh Parmar

Hi, just going to complete reading your post, but I have a question I have this clients coming in for me and they are expecting me to know SEO so I'm reading and going through moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo this,

Please recommend some resources from start that will help me get good at it. I'm a junior developer with work in Node, Express, React, Redux, server side rendering with Next.js (which also mentions the good part of the SEO which I completely don't get so yeah please share some insight to begin from scratch and get good/pro I know its subjective but yeah why not)

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban
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oathkeeper profile image
Divyesh Parmar

Thank you :)

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

Your welcome

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mushahid_mushii profile image
Mushahid hussain

Yaser Thanks for great tips! I used your tips for my website and got postive results! You are great man!

Regard:
Mushahid Hussain
Website: mushahidhussain.info/

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jcubic profile image
Jakub T. Jankiewicz

Mouse Scroll Wheel don't work on your website, you need to use scrollbar.

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

Thanks for the comment Jakob, care to elaborate?

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jcubic profile image
Jakub T. Jankiewicz • Edited

It was comment to Mushahid hussain link in his comment, not to your reply and not to your post.

It seems that Dev.to don't show the thread, and you probably seen the comment and notification. Open the whole post and you will see, that this is reply to someone else comment.

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

By my site you mean yashints.dev? What browser are you using as I cannot reproduce this in any browser

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jcubic profile image
Jakub T. Jankiewicz

See the full thread, this is not comment to your post, it's about comment from Mushahid hussain and his website mushahidhussain.info.

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

Ah, my bad, I just saw your comment, all good

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

Glad you found it useful

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anwar_nairi profile image
Anwar • Edited

I've done some experiments and monitor it using Google Search Console, and it seems my VueJS based app was crawled correctly by using prerendering and redirecting bots to my static prerendered version of my website. The big advantage is that you have nothing to change for your end-user, disadvantage is that you have to do it :)

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

Good question, considering most of these tools work with sitemaps and static HTML files, you should definitely do something. It won't happen for you magically, so SSR, or generating static pages linked to sitemaps are some options there

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Roland Carroll

Nicely written, yaser. I loved especially how you covered some excellent secret and hotcake SEO tips. Also, tip #10 at the end is awesome. :) Special thanks because i got huge ranking benefits after implement all of your tips on my personal hunting blog pickhunting.com

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Yaser Adel Mehraban

Glad to hear that Roland

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lautarolobo profile image
Lautaro Lobo

What about JSON-LD? It doesn't work like Open Graph, in fact, it does not help you when you share content through Fb, but I think it does help you with SEO. Why is not in the list? Is it because you wanted to keep it simple with just HTML?

Also, what's the difference between robots.xml file and that robots tag that you mention? Yeah, newbie question xD

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Yaser Adel Mehraban

Yes this was simply using normal HTML tags which is easy to follow, for people who are developing everyday and are not aware of these.

I am not sure what you mean by robots.xml, I know of robots.txt and the difference is that you can control more than one page in the txt file, the tag only applies to current page 😊

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Thomas Bnt

Eh nice, more completed!

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

Thanks

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dechamp profile image
DeChamp

Great article! I didn’t know about the canonical links. Very cool. Thank you.

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

Your welcome, glad it's useful

 
scorp13 profile image
scorp13

I believe that due to the fact that Google's algorithms are closed, in terms of SEO, we can either rely on own/others' experiments, or on the statements of Google's stuff.

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vuild profile image
Vuild • Edited

There is no problem with well rendered HTML. It doesn't matter the way it is produced mostly. Goo has never read JS well.

If the content is not on the page & obscured by JS (pulled in later/not html etc) then it is not likely to be visible to bots.

Do use GW. Use something else instead of GA (privacy violations, currently being investigated, possible antitrust).

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Lautaro Lobo

GA and GW ... can provide some links bout them? Don't know what those are, never heard of them.

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vuild profile image
Vuild

Sorry, Goo Analytics & Webmasters. Short hand.

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scorp13 profile image
scorp13

JavaScript: SEO Mythbusting from Google Webmasters channel.

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Michael Thiessen

I've built my blog to 60k+ page visits per month, and I didn't focus on any of these tips.

The single most important factor in SEO is to write content that people are searching for.

If you nail that, nothing else really matters all that much.

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Gersom Ramos

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hanish8888999 profile image
Hanish Kamal

Excellently shown. I loved every quote, and I appreciate you sharing the information. Continue inspiring and sharing with others. By the way, I recommend checking out my blog on how to sell used electronic devices at gizmogo.com/blog .

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w3care profile image
W3care Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Go with Custom Coded websites and Apps instead of buying pre designed developed themes to design and develop apps and websites.

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Mahesh K

Great article!