Ask HN: Starting a company blog, what should I know for SEO?

[danielandrews43]

I am working on a SAAS startup and want to start posting to a blog for SEO and to refer our customers to our posts for information. What are things I should know for SEO? I think we are going to go with Wordpress.

Does it matter if it's blog.website.com vs website.com/blog? Does it help to have posts link between each other? Are there a list of meta tags I need to take into account? Thanks!

[JunaidBhai]

The most simplest way to get started is to start with publishing product specific content. Gradually move towards industry specific content. Consistency and valuable content is the key to better ranking.

We did a mistake earlier at https://draftss.com where we built the website using Python/Django and then setup WordPress for blog on 'domain-name/blog'. All the articles that we uploaded would appear nested after blog. It would end up something like 'domain-name/blog/article-name'. This hurt our SEO as compared to 'domain-name/article-name'. We are now shifting the complete site to WordPress so we can have achieve a better ranking with the latter. The closer the article is to the domain, the better chances of it to rank higher compared to others.

Does it help to have posts link between each other?

- Yes, interlinking post is very important. Both internal linking and external linking is important. However, you should not worry about this at the current stage.

Are there a list of meta tags I need to take into account?

- Yes, fill all meta tags of all pages describing the contents of each page that you would like to rank. Use header tags to highlight important keywords that you would like to rank for.

[danielandrews43]

Thank you! This is valuable information.

[seanwilson]

You could take a look at my on-page SEO guide (https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo) and Chrome extension that checks on-page SEO for you (https://www.checkbot.io).

Also see Google's SEO starter guide that the above is mostly based on: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en

Generally, you can't go wrong with anything that make pages more helpful to humans e.g. links between relevant pages are helpful.

[semicolonandson]

As someone who grew a site from nothing to 200k/monthlies, here's my advice:

1. The best way is if you get people to link to you. This comes down 20% to having better content and 80% to putting in the legwork to share your work and get others to see it (and then link). This outreach work is back-breaking and filled with rejection. Which brings me to:

2. In my experience nothing is easier (at least holistically) than having a high _quantity_ of content (I'm talking at a scale of 1000s of pages). This is a long-tail play and doesn't require near as many inbound links. Consider finding a low cost (Upwork/algorithmic) way of doing so. This content must still be of value to human readers so don't create keyword-stuffed drivel.

3. Put a lot of thought into how your search snippet appears in Google (look up: meta description and micro-data). This snippet is your website's a sale pitch: you need to convince someone browsing on Google why they should other clicking through.

——

For more:

I make videos about life as an indie-hacker and have a few specials on SEO that might give you some detailed ideas:

https://www.semicolonandsons.com/episode/seo-strategies-for-...

[justcomments12]

You could be attacked by a spam network, making you lose over 50% traffic in 3 months.

There's lots of spam sites like twilightontheolympicpeninsula, codegrepper, everythingtutorial, bestappsfinder etc (everything dot com). The network that's attacking me has over 10.000 sites (you can discover their whole network using a backlink checker like ahrefs)

What can you do about these type of attacks? Nothing. The only way to mitigate this is the disavow tool, but it may take 4 weeks or longer for those domains to disappear. In the meantime, more and more of those spam sites are getting linked.

It is not a rare occasion either, I found the entire niche (and others) are getting these types of attacks. Changing the Google rankings of the entire niche.

So many of those spam domains are being added that no amount of content writing makes your rankings go up.

Reporting to hosting, police etc is useless. Why Google allows spam networks to decide the Google ranking is beyond me.

So what you should know about SEO is that it's unreliable. Spam networks decide the Google ranking now.

[EvanKRob]

There is some good advice in this thread. In the end, just start writing good content which it sounds like you've already started having 20 Google docs. Your post gave me motivation to finish a post I had started on this topic and I hope it provides some value to you. I do disagree with the above comments regarding /blog/ having an impact on ranking, click-depth matters more than URL structure.

I covered this and the sub-folder vs sub-domain, https://searchmentors.io/company-blogging/ on the post.

Also, the guy who said it doesnt matter you need to do direct marketing, he's not wrong but it all plays into the SEO performance of your content. Write good content, promote it and you'll see the benefits. Write and do nothing and you may or may not find some success.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions.

[swanson]

None of this stuff matters at this point. Start writing content.

[pryelluw]

Allow me to reinforce the point made above.

None of this matters, because those decisions do not drive traffic to your product.

What matters is direct marketing. AKA directly targeting people or groups with specific content.

What does that content look like? Start with whatever problem you are solving. Write about how you are solving it. Then actively look for people who have or seem to have that problem and share your blog.

[quickthrower2]

I don’t think it is about mattering or not mattering. It’s about what’s the ROI if I think about SEO for a couple of hours before publishing content. Very high I imagine.

You can still follow the strategy you mention, but make sure the SEO basics are right. If nothing else come up with a decent title and meta description so that the SERP result when seen gets clicks and sets up the right intent and user expectation. Then when Google does send you traffic and it will it pays off.

[danielandrews43]

We've written approx. 20 google docs that we have been sending directly to clients with information and are now trying to formalize the information by publishing them as blog posts. So hopefully this process is sound

[pryelluw]

That is an excellent way to grow your content. Keep it as personal as possible and people will continue to engage.