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by the__alchemist
1719 days ago
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I disagree on not building your own blog engine as a general rule: Building a blog engine can be as simple as using a markdown-to-HTML converter library on your server, and using your backend's admin interface. Or a simple HTML page with a big text box and submit button. Depending on use case, this can be fine. The cognitive complexity of integrating with a 3rd-party engine can be more complicated than writing a simple one. Which brings me to a big point the article missed: Page loading speed is important for search ranking. I have a blog I add to once every other month. It uses HTML and CSS, and I write it in Django admin using markdown. Lots of room for improvement UI-wise, for both reader experience and writing interface. Yet, it's a low-traffic site, and most of the blog entries show up on the first page of Google for relevant keywords. Relevant: It gets a perfect Google Page Speed Insights score, by virtue of being an HTML/CSS page. I bring this up for 2 reasons: Using a blog engine will probably make it tougher to get fast load times. You can rank high on Google just by having good content and fast load times. |
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Unless you're doing something simple, then fine.
Also, do build your own blog engine if you are also happy to manage META tags for Twitter, OpenGraph (Facebook) and general META tags for each post. Also if you are good with generating your own schema.org JSON for Search engines, manage your own taxonomies (tagging, categories, events, locations, authors), and also generating/updating sitemap.xml as needed.
One last point from above...
> Using a blog engine will probably make it tougher to get fast load times
No it won't. The blog engine is not the same as the front-end. You can modify the template, theme, or whatever as much as you like. You have full control here. Thats all on you.
> You can rank high on Google just by having good content and fast load times
Um, maybe - but not for anything that will matter. There is more to it than that.