[JohnStrangeII]

I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective?

I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations".

If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywords, does additional SEO really make a difference? Are there really any "tricks" that work?

[superasn]

Yes SEO is still very much relevant and effective IMO. Regardless of the paid ads, Google sends a lot of organic traffic when you rank for the right keywords. If you were to buy this traffic you would spends thousand of dollars doing it. Same for Youtube. A good video is amazing source of targeted prospects.

Just think about how you find a new service, chances are you googled it and tried the 2-3 results.

Now as for the question - is it necessary? The answer is yes. Because if you don't do it your competitor will and as the joke goes "The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google".

> Are there really any "tricks" that work?

I'm no SEO expert and so I don't care for meta tags, keywords. Title and page description are still important I think. I believe the most relevant things are the time user a spends on your page and social signals (shares, etc) and unfortunately backlinks from high authority pages (this is the worst part of SEO).

The good news is that you don't have to do anything sneaky to do SEO anymore. Make an excellent page on which a user spends a lot of time (so good that he actually bookmarks or shares it) and it starts ranking. For all its evilness Google is still doing something right here.

[jchook]

sitemap.xml can cause your search result to appear with sub-links.

Keyword density (just the right amount) and total word count seem to have an effect and I’ve seen targeted landers work very well for specific search phrases.

Backlinks will probably always be relevant to rankings as they were the original bedrock principle behind PageRank. If you get prominent blogs to link to you, that can help a lot. Inversely, use rel=nofollow on anchors to avoid seeping relevance to other pages.

Ever since Mobilegeddon your site MUST be mobile friendly or you will get penalized. Also other UI stuff matters (E.g. don’t put ads above the fold)

Not an SEO expert here but I would consider those effective and small things you can do for SEO.

[aledalgrande]

Also performance - make sure you use this tool https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

[graeme]

A lot of people don’t do technical SEO right. It sounds like you’re asking about whether there is something other than technical SEO and links to do right?

Not really. If you write good content, with relevant keywords, and people link to it, that is good SEO. Not clear what distinction you’re trying to draw.

There may be some scammy stuff with short term results, but you’re always one step away from an algo change or a manual penalty.

Edit: I forgot good internal linking/url schemes. Those matter.

[tenaciousDaniel]

There's gotta be like a github repo somewhere that lays out the actual technical aspects of SEO, without any of the bullshit. Anyone know of a project like that?

[wolco]

It would change based on google rollouts. A forum would have more upto date information.

[yread]

I would also like to know, but SEO is also about the backlinks. Quantity and what anchor text they use, where are they etc.