The after-post
As a secondary kind of “post” inspired by the after-show from one of my favorite Podcasts - ATP - I’ve decided to include a “post-blog-post” section where I am going to include whatever interests me since the last time I posted. Like a little popcorn nugget. More succinctly, treat:
- Everything in the real post as the “professional” section where thought, time, and effort went into making something meaningful.
- This? More of a “raw”, current time and place, “P.S.” after-thought.
Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO”
A tertiary role to this whole business of starting a blog as I have discovered is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. The gist - if I can butcher the definition - is in order for your content to be discoverable via the usual means of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc., you need for the content to have words that “pop” in the wasteland of the internet.
As an example, my previous blog post has all the hallmarks (inadvertently) to becoming a rising star in the “technical communication” realm of keywords. I had stumbled upon words and phrases like:
- technical communication
- technical writing
- business outcomes
- audience, purpose, style, content (commonly grouped for technical communication)
All of these phrases in combination through the magic of systems like Google PageRank then get matched against every other website with similar content and thus gets ranked.
In all honesty, it’s a necessary evil - there’s so much content out there now on the web that devising a system to try and determine the most relevant answer to searches like *checks current trends* college football, Manchester United, or California Wildfires is tricky. That being said, a whole - cottage - industry - has popped up now to try and both “help” and partially “trick” these systems to their advantage. (Just like all of these reference backlinks - found through SEO-advantaged sources because going beyond the first page of Google is a cardinal sin.)
I understand the purpose of the whole system - find more relevant information as fast as possible - just this underbelly does feel a bit… icky.
Technical SEO Bits
For anyone still interested, I have invested some time in setting up or analyzing my “SEO” impact in the following ways:
If you can’t beat them, join them. Google Search Console is an effective way of managing your domain “listing” on Google. If you are doing something wrong fundamentally which is preventing your site from being indexed by Google correctly, this should show you why.
Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner
In a similar vein, figuring out what people are searching in terms of related keywords and phrases helps too, although this tooling tends to skew towards those who are using Google Analytics and Google Ads.
SEO analysis tool with both a very limited free tier and a paid tier, both able to analyze basic SEO problems and give some trend/marketing stats around keywords and phrases.
Probably should understand the basics of your tech stack as well and how to use them, like nifty plugins like gatsby-plugin-react-helmet.
Closing
I’m just starting on this other part-time adventure into SEO hacking. There is so much to explore in this space that I can see why people make their careers out of it… We’ll invest some more time into this likely later.
For now, see you in a few weeks.
-EP