Starting a thread here to solicit a solid discussion around SEO as it relates to Sparkle sites, best practices, tools and experiences if you have any to share. I think it’s important, and we can eventually compile these into a resources useful for everybody.
First I want to stress that there is a lot of information on the web, overwhelmingly so. Why? Because since this pertains traffic to your site, and potentially money or status that comes from that, any information is considered valuable. People earn money selling SEO services, not always warranted by actual experience in doing it, and try to attract you to it. Also there’s been a lot of evolution of search engines and their understanding, so you’ll also find a ton of outdated or simply superstitious recommendations.
The SEO features we have implemented in Sparkle reflect our current understanding of how search engines work, trying on one hand to have a pragmatic approach and on the other to give you independence over its implementation.
So, here’s the official documentation on the SEO, SEO Assistant and SEO target features in Sparkle:
https://sparkleapp.com/docs/seo.html
Next a relevant post from a previous discussion, this outlines how I believe search engines interact with websites, and what you can do about it:
While there are several SEO checking tools, the first resource as it pertains to major search engines is how the site performs in Google’s “Lighthouse” tool, the main frontend for that being PageSpeed Insights:
GT Metrix is also based on Lighthouse, but has a few additional indicators:
While what search engines do is not known exactly, there have been attempts at reverse engineering and analyses of some information leaked that suggest that an important factor in ranking a search result is a baseline “domain rank” or “domain reputation” score. This starts very low for a new domain, so if your domain hasn’t been around for long, you’re facing an uphill battle. But not all hope is lost, one important discriminator that can give you a huge advantage is if the website serves a geographically restricted market, or a limited niche due to other constraints, so “piano lessons in phoenix” can be a lot simpler to get a good rank for compared to “cheap flights” or “pizza in New York” (that are both broader and more generic).
One technique commonly used by SEO professionals is to guess a keyword/keyphrase area your content is in, then use a so called “keyword research tool” to figure out which keywords have a reasonably high volume, but relatively few destination pages that would contend that keyword, so by producing a page that’s super optimized around that keyword they will (hope to) acquire additional traffic, sort of like casting a wider net on the space of possible keywords.
The obvious geography restriction advantage mentioned above is frequently used to break up content to be more specific, so if you have a page for “plumber in New York City”, you can easily add borough specific pages such as “plumber in Manhattan”, “plumber in Brooklyn”, etc. But note that this isn’t only about the page title, you need to create content that is convincingly (and usefully, as far as the site visitors will see) specific for the search.
All these tools are priced for people who can then resell the knowledge they acquire, so $99/month per user is typical. For example semrush.com and ahrefs.com. And I frankly have no idea where their information comes from, it could be that their data source is that expensive. Regardless, would they be useful for you? Hard to say. As the example above shows, you can do a certain amount of experimentation yourself, for free.
Now about tools geared specifically at checking SEO, they are very frequently custom coded and somewhat broken. Unlike Lighthouse, which is a Chrome plugin running on a server variant of Chrome, I’ve seen several of these tools grossly misinterpret the page contents or not understand the latest web standards, flagging issues that were not in fact issues.
For example this is one of those superficial tools:
It does a decent job at extracting information from the page, and will essentially tell you whether search engines will be able to read the relevant information. Sort of a syntactical understanding of the page. It’s something Sparkle’s SEO assistant should already be doing for you, and where it doesn’t it’s because we didn’t get around to implementing a specific check. But critically this sort of tool doesn’t know what keyword or keyphrase you were looking to optimize the page for, so from a semantic point of view, when it comes to the merit of the content you have in the page, it doesn’t and can’t say anything at all. This is not to pick on the specific tool, they’re mostly like that.
Ultimately you’ll only be able to truly evaluate whether SEO has worked by monitoring site traffic over time, and the pro SEO tools do also do that. Generally SEO is considered a long term investment, meaning months or years, particularly if starting with a new domain, or all new content for a domain, it can’t be super fast. If you already have millions of visitors per month, you can probably see the effects of SEO-focused changes in a matter or days or weeks, otherwise I wouldn’t hold my breath.
All of the above is referred to as “on page SEO”.
The other kind of SEO is “off page SEO”. If you recall what made Google work originally it was the concept of backlinks, so every website sort of voting for each other via links. This isn’t really how ranking works anymore, there are much more complex metrics at play, but having other reputable websites link to yours still is valuable. So off page SEO is what you see when someone emails you asking to exchange links, or when you see blogs without an anti spam filter where the comments are all links to other sites. Advertising and social media are of course other ways to build links, and they can be very effective, though clearly those are as long lived as the ad funding is, or the social media attention span. Whereas so called “organic SEO” of on-page nature is intrinsic in your own website and doesn’t expire.
So that’s all for now. What about you?