Anyone can rank on search engines and generate a ton of free organic traffic. I'll show you how and break down everything you need to do to get the results you're looking for.

First, I consider this a living document. This is a collection of my own research, experiments, and personal notes. As I come across new information and learn more about SEO, I'll always update this post with what I find.

When I'm getting a new website to rank on search engines, this is the resource I go to first.

WHAT WE COVER

This will be a two part all-encompassing guide where I share everything I know and learn about SEO and getting as much organic traffic as possible.

I'm breaking it up into two parts because getting the result you want relies on two things - strategy and tactics.

Strategy is the high-level approach to how you create content. It's a result of your mindset and how you think about and make decisions impacting your work. It leads your decision-making process and determines what you do.

Tactics are different. Tactics are the specific actions you take in order to accomplish your mission or goal. These cover the technical optimizations you make on your content. Things like how do I title my post well and structure my content to help search engines interpret it.

Here's what we'll cover so you can skip ahead if you're looking for something specific.

Part 1: Strategy

• Content quality
• Long-term thinking
• Evergreen content
• Sharing content

Part 2: Tactics

• Search intent
  • Keywords
  • Schema.org microdata
• Performance and pagespeed
  • have your site mobile-first
  • definitely make your site server-side rendered
  • make the site as quick as possible. A static site is great
  • use as little CSS and JavaScript as possible
• Domains and links
  • onsite links
  • backlinks
    • nofollow etc
  • redirects
  • subdomains vs file path
• Domain Authority

Strategy

Blogging has changed over the years. Strategies that used to bring success no longer do etc. etc.

This is my guide on how to blog in a way that you benefit as much as possible from free organic search. Modern SEO.

It's a collection of my own notes from extensive research, and I plan on keeping it up to date as things change.

I follow this same guide when I write new content and ...

Content is King

The best products are products that sell themselves

Focus on the long-term

• takes time for posts to rank well
• doesn't rank well overnight, usually months if not years of building up reputation and links to your content
• this also affects your branding
  • picking a domain that's too niche locks you into that niche - and that niche might be irrelevant in 5 years, and you'll have to start over

Create evergreen content

• is your content going to be relevant 5 years from now? 10 years from now?
• don't focus on news, conferences, the latest tools and technology updates, new versions of things

Share your Content

• important step people overlook / too much work
• get your content in front of more eyes
• get feedback so you can make better content re: content is king
• correct issues people find early
• get feedback around what other content people want to see

Part 2: Tactics

These are more technical topics and tasks you can do right now to improve how search engines interpret and rank your content.

For a list of helpful tools to improve these metrics, check out my SEO tool list.

Optimize your content

• have your site mobile-first
• definitely make your site server-side rendered
• make the site as quick as possible. A static site is great
• use as little CSS and JavaScript as possible
• use schema.org microdata
• set the post published date and updated date as microdata
• add as many links as possible to other posts you have on your blog to increase on-site links

Pagespeed

Check out Google's own tool for measuring pagespeed and performance. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed

It will tell you how your site stands as it is and give you instructions on how to fix the issues impacting your site's performance.