Ask HN: What would be your best SEO optimization tip?

To stop and consider if SEO is the best tool and the point in the brand's arc. Yes, of couse do all the usual obvious things. But beyond that, the question is: What marketing tool / tactics should we invest (our finite resources) in? It quite possible SEO isn't the best investment.

Been SEOing for 12 years.

High on-site score optimization for exact match phrases still moves the needle more than anything, and is STILL the most overlooked technique by most startups.

Looks like you are targeting devs, so content is king. Auth is a tough market to get started in. The main issue will be "why should I trust your small outfit over a large and established product?"

See the skyscraper technique mentioned here: https://boringseo.org/

Here are some others I like

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-start...

https://mailmeteor.com/blog/seo-for-dummies

Research the keywords people use to find your product, and then write articles optimized for those keywords. Either that, or find one keyword you want your website to rank for and optimize your home page for that one keyword. You can do this with SurferSEO or PageOptimizer Pro. Then do a backlink audit of the websites who currently ranks for that content, and then proceed to build comparable backlinks to your home page to outrank them. You can do this with a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.

> but it is particularly hard to find a proper "guide" to get websites to the top of search results and sometimes I even end up reading contradictory information.

You could try my on-page SEO checker and best practices guide:

https://www.checkbot.io

It checks for SEO best practices that are mostly cited from things Google recommends e.g. avoid duplicate page titles, avoid temporary redirects, use human readable URL names, use canonical tags. Most of the tips are obviously beneficial for users too. I don't recommend paying attention to tricks that sound like they're trying to guess hidden details about how Google's algorithm works.

Following the above will give you a better chance of success by making your existing content more user and search-engine friendly but to get anywhere you must also be 1) publishing content and 2) getting backlinks.

Besides this, there's really no shortcuts. I find SEO news is mostly noise.

SEO may have been worth the effort prior to 2014, but now everything is so saturated that it is hard to find ROI. There has always been snake oil salespeople in the field. Write high quality content that spiders can index (no SPA) and that other sites link to is all you can do and by no means guarantees success from the channel.