Today I’ve been diving into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because I realized that nobody is reading my blog posts-not the long ones and not the short ones. In fact nobody is finding my blog to begin with. I had some general background knowledge on SEO from my background in computer science but no practical knowledge.
So I started where I always start my trusty friend google. I swear if you want to do anything related to tech becoming very close friends with google is the way to go. The top non ad result was https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/digital/seo/ which had the following to say about the subject.
“1. Publish Relevant Content
Quality content is the number one driver of your search engine rankings and there is no substitute for great content. Quality content created specifically for your intended user increases site traffic, which improves your site’s authority and relevance. Fine-tune your web writing skills.”
This is a valid tip but this site really didn’t give me the information I needed. That I found on https://neilpatel.com/blog/ which is written by Neil Patel a guy who specializes in improving SEO ratings for companies. It’s definitely geared towards developing business for him but it had some good tips. more importantly it had a handy SEO analysis tool https://neilpatel.com/seo-analyz . This gave me a great starting point for things I could immediately improve like the fact that my website did not have a sitemap.xml . I had never heard of this before. Neil Patel suggested on his site using a plug in called Screaming Frog. When I looked up SEO plugins for WordPress though Yoast SEO popped up which is what I ended up using. It worked a little better with WordPress. Plus it’s one of the top rated ones.
I then started going through the options for Yoast SEO learning about stuff like Meta Descriptions which are those little snippets that pop up telling you about the page. I also learned about keyphrases which are apparently the new thing. No longer is SEO based off of key words now due to Google’s evolving intelligence key phrases are used because it is capable of picking out little bits of context related to how you use words. For example if I was looking up stuff about Avocado Puffer care I’m not going to get stuff about how to make avocado puffs.
If you’re reading this my SEO improvements must have paid off. I’m really looking forward to seeing the results from today’s experiments. Also shout out to Neil Patel for having a self promotion blog that actually has useful tips without a lot of run around.
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