BLOGGING FOR DEVS (#28)

SEO gets a bad rap. And for a good reason.

A lot of people use it to try and game the algorithm at the expense of user experience 👎

The flip side is, organic search is one of the most scalable and systematic ways to grow traffic to most websites — including developer blogs.

Done well, SEO has more in common with User Experience and Accessibility than spammy tactics. This week, I'll share a few ways to improve SEO by making your site more user-friendly, accessible, & discoverable ✨

Here we go 🎢

First, specify the tech stack your post is about.

Writing articles on generic topics like "app project structure" and "software best practices" is a little bit like "draw the rest of the owl" ❓➡🦉

It's too high level to be practical for most people. That's why a lot of people put the name of the tech stack or programming language into their search query.

To make your article easier to find, try including the name of the technology in the title and h1 of your article.

One thing to remember: The more something is searched for, the more competitive is (usually) is to rank for it. The quickest way to get an idea how easy or hard it is to rank, is to check if other blogs similar to yours are already on Page 1 ☝

Then, keep your articles up to date — and automate it!

Some people will tell you their articles are timeless and evergreen on their own. But users and search engines agree, time provides a really important context for most ideas and information.

The good news is, there's a middle ground: Instead of showing a "Published" date, show when your post was "Last Updated" instead. Then automate it using your git history.

This makes it frictionless to go back regularly and update your blog posts to reflect new libraries, versions, or emerging best practices.

I recently made this change on one of my sites and saw a 3x increase in organic traffic. From 500 to 1.5K visitors per day in a single week 🎉

(Just make sure that the higher you're already ranking, the smaller and more incremental your changes are 😉 Avoid touching posts that already rank #1 if possible!)

For more details, check out my tweet from earlier this week, gathering ideas on how to accomplish git-powered Last Updated dates with different frameworks. Plus, guidelines from Google about how they determine a publication date.

Include possible error messages to avoid losing readers in a new tab.

If your article doesn't include explanations of the errors we'll encounter while following a tutorial, we're probably going to do what most devs do:

Read the error message carefully Skip reading the error message, open a new tab, and paste the error directly into Google 😅

Including error messages (and solutions!) in your article isn't just about making your content more complete or easier to find for people googling error messages.

It's also about optimizing for actual human behavior instead of expected or idealized behavior.

As I said before, a lot of SEO is really just User Experience shrouded in algorithms 🤷🏻‍♀️

Get backlinks to your site by submitting to Hacker News.

The factors search engines use to rank your articles usually fall into two buckets: on-site factors and off-site factors.

On-site includes stuff like your title, h1, subheadings (h2-h3), content, images, internal links, and basically anything else that happens on your website itself.

Off-site includes stuff that happens, well, off your website. Such as external links from other websites to yours. These links are called "backlinks".

And search engines like Google treat backlinks from quality sites a bit like an "upvote" for your article.

So many websites use Hacker News as a source for roundups, news, and newsletter content. Getting your article to the front page is a great way for all those sites and publications to discover your content, quick.

And then shower you with links 🔗🔗🔗🔗🔗

Ranking in Hacker News is just one of many ways to get backlinks to your blog. I've covered 17 more link building strategies here if you're looking for more ideas.

Last but not least, make your site accessible.

Remember how we said a lot of SEO comes down to user experience?

The same can be said about accessibility. Think about it like this: assistive technologies need to be able to parse, interpret, and navigate your website.

Crawlers like Googlebot, DuckDuckBot, and other SEO spiders work in a similar way.

This list isn't complete, but it should give you some ideas of common mistakes that hurt both SEO and accessibility:

• Using <div>s when more semantic options like headings, images, paragraphs, anchor tags, and lists are appropriate
• Navigating using JavaScript instead of an anchor tag with an href attribute
• Not providing contextual names and alt text for your images

In short, if you make your posts semantic, descriptive, and easy to navigate, you've got a double-win on your hands 👏

What SEO improvement will you make to your site to start the year?

Will you apply more semantic structure to your posts? Include some error messages? Or update existing articles to have more specific headlines?

Let me know by replying to this email!

On a personal note, I just want to say that I hope your year is off to a solid start. Now is an amazing time to set things into motion that will pay off as the year progresses.

SEO is a great example of something that can compound in the background if you put in the effort up front.

I hope this week's edition has helped a bit with that :)

May your posts be plenty,

@monicalent

P.S. Thanks again to Fathom Analytics for sponsoring this edition! If you decide to give them a try, let them know Blogging for Devs sent you 📈

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