SEO is an enigma

[BusyBusinessPromos]

My most effective backlink strategy is to ignore DA and DR and do what makes sense. Exchanging backlinks is about relationship building. I exchanged links with people in similar niches and similar locations.

Take a jewelry website and a wedding website for example. This is a perfect combination for a link exchange. It absolutely doesn’t matter what DA and DR is or any other third party vanity metrics. What matters is people looking for engagement rings and wedding rings are also looking for information about weddings and visa versa.

Now to be clear, similar niches don’t matter in SEO. However, why not try to increase your income as you increase your search engine ranking?

Think for yourself and do what makes sense and you’ll make even more money for you or your client.

[cloud-native-yang]

My aha moment came when I stopped chasing perfect Lighthouse scores and focused on just one thing: user intent.

[askoshbetter]

I love this question! 100 lighthouse score is dang good, so congrats on that. 

Not ranking well for exact match is concerning but not too uncommon, especially for high competition keywords, there are hundreds of ranking factors, and what’s worse, even if you do rank well, Google’s AI Answer Engine is eating up tons of traffic. 

A couple quick ideas: 

– do a scan of your site with SEO optimer – 

– if your clients have HubSpot, the HubSpot SEO scan tool is fairly robust 

– ensure you have a sitemap, and solid robots txt. Offer your clients an LLM.txt as well. 

– check Backlinko’s 200 ranking factors is a great place to too — I bring this up because there are so many rank signals Google is relying on. 

– ensure you have access too and live in Google Search Console — that way you can rule out any major errors or security issue.  

– The backlink grind is very hard. Get em where you can — Reddit posts and comments count as backlinks but tread carefully, because you can get banned. Medium works for back links too. 

[Infamous-Cattle6204]

Time.

[cloud-native-yang]

Good question! In practice, for me it means forgetting about keywords for a second and asking “What problem is someone trying to solve when they search for this?” Are they looking for a quick answer, a detailed guide, a product to buy, or just comparing options?

[GrumpySEOguy]

How are people building backlinks? There are 4 ways to get backlinks:

1) do nothing and let people link to you. This only works if you are previously ranking, as otherwise no people can find your site

2) buy backlinks. This can work, but you have to know what you’re doing.

3) guest post and link outreach. This is emailing people and asking if you can write content for them in exchange for a link or just have a link.

4) build your own. This is the most expensive way to do it at the start but is much cheaper in the long run, and safer, etc. But technically probably against the TOS.

Source: I have been building backlinks for 16 years, nearly exclusively with number 4 above. I have a free podcast where I teach everything for free. We have a couple episodes that explain precisely the 4 methods above and how to do them. Let me know if you’d like a link. We also have two episodes that explain the difference between good backlinks and bad backlinks, which you should listen to before buying backlinks.

[WebLinkr]

You’re looking at is as a server performance issue.

>My understanding is that there are generally three elements to SEO:

SEO is about two things, there is no Techncial ‘component” –

1. Relevance: Every document you make = relevant to something. If your document is called “Best Webhosting UK.php” and the page title is “Best Webhost UK”- then your document is relevant to “Web hosting UK” and possibly “Web hosting” and “web uk” and “hosting uk”.

As you add more content – you dont become “more relevant” but you can add relevancy to other keywords – but

1. Your Relevancy score is mostly in your document name and then in content its going to have less % of authority as its lower in the page or outside of a header.

2. Your Authority MUST be external – you cannot create it. Authority comes from organic traffic and backlinks . but backlinks are not equal. Backlinks from the highest most authoritative sites and your distance from them (PageRank Nearest_Seed)

3. PageSpeed/ CWVs are negligible.- sure, a slow site might be impacted by user bounce – but Google is not ranking your site higher because its fast or scores well or has less errors.

Some things to remember:

Google supports 57 files types – HTML is just one. Text files, PDFs, Sheets, .bas files can all be processed and rank. They all have one thing in common: a filename. If that doesnt tell you something important about how Google works, I can’t help you much more 😉

>**Backlinks -** Having backlinks from other sites which are credible to your site.

Actually Nearest seed works by how far you are from sites like (maybe) the NY times, Harvard(.)Edu (maybe)…

[WebLinkr]

>**Content -** Having original and relevant content which utilises the keywords given in the meta tags. This can be achieved by just having lots of natural mentions in the page or by having original and unique blog posts; and

Unfortunately Google has to be content agnostic. While there are people who went to writing school and think there’s a global objective standard for “good” content – there isnt’

>the keywords given in the meta tags.

Definitely not – keywords are in the document name and headings

> be achieved by just having lots of natural mentions

Definitely not

[teheditor]

I’ve always been inundated with agencies offering money to post a crummy blog post and ignored it. Lately, I’ve been saying yes to everything as these guys actually pay. The quality is improving too (I’m guessing Ai). There are loads of publishers out there who struggle with revenue and will happily post an article for money. It can only help you when they hit Google News and Ai Overviews too, right? Not sure how that’s measured, though.

[Wolfofsomestreetidk]

If there is one thing that I have learned about SEO all these years that I have been doing it is that there is nothing better than trial and error. It sounds boring and cliche, but there must be a period of time that you devote to trying out tools, methods, strategies that you have never followed so you can see what works best for you and how it works. There is so much information and content that can help you available online.

[UBIAI]

– Guest blogging: This is a classic approach, but it still works. By writing a post for a site in your niche, you can often negotiate a link back to your site in return. Just make sure the site you’re writing for has good authority.

– Broken link building: Basically, you find a broken link on a site in your niche, then reach out to the site owner and let them know.

-Local citations: If your site is local in nature, you can build a lot of backlinks by submitting your site to local directories. Many of these sites will list your site for free, and they often have good authority.

– Skyscraper technique: It involves finding a popular piece of content in your niche, creating something 10x better, then reaching out to the sites that linked to the original piece and asking them to link to your content instead.

[dubaidigital]

If you create really interesting information which is not available any where else then other sites would be happy to quote you and link back to you.

[KoreKhthonia]

Hey, so. I’ve worked in SEO for over a decade. It’s not terribly uncommon for clients, who aren’t familiar with either digital marketing or web dev, to ask a web developer or web development agency to do SEO for them.

Thing is, SEO typically isn’t part of a web dev’s job or specialization. Imo, it’s often the best option to try to find someone reputable to whom you can refer these clients. Either an agency, or an individual consultant, that does good SEO work. (Also depends on clients’ industries, budgets, needs, business types and sizes, etc etc.)

Or, you could work with an agency that offers whitelabeled SEO services. In that case, you’d be charging for SEO as part of the package, but outsourcing the actual SEO work to someone else.

Ofc, you could also learn SEO and offer it yourself. But honestly, I feel like it’s best approached as a separate thing, a separate role and job description.

[Rude_Tap2718]

SERP intent volatility is something most SEOs completely ignore but explains a lot of ranking drops for otherwise solid pages.

Been tracking this on some of my sites and you’re right about Google shifting preferred content types for the same keywords over time. Page that ranked well as a comprehensive guide suddenly drops when Google starts favoring tool pages or forum discussions for that query.

The monthly SERP analysis workflow makes sense. Manual SERP checks are tedious but you can spot these shifts before your rankings tank. When you see the top results changing format, that’s your signal to pivot your content approach.

Treating this as a fourth pillar alongside technical, content, and backlinks is a smart framework. Most people optimize their pages once and assume they’ll keep ranking, but search intent evolves and your content needs to evolve with it.