Napkin SEO for Indiehackers

Research keywords: Use AHREFS or a similar tool to check the keywords you want to rank for, e.g. “case study.” Type in “case study” first and then try to find more keywords. You should aim for the ones with the good ratio difficulty to volume (more volume, less difficulty). Long-tail keywords (i.e. consisting of a few words) are your friends usually.

Carry out on-page optimisations:

• H1 with your main keyword, like “case study.” There can be only one H1 on page.
• H2, H3 mentioning keywords.
• meta description and title tags with keywords and good catchy descriptions — they’ll appear in Google search and affect your click-through-rate. Unleash the best copywriter in you. With keywords and decent descriptions.
• Mention keywords you dug up in your KW research phase generously throughout your texts, but with no implications for the text readability or quality.
• Using slugs in the URL usually helps, i.e. sitename[.]com/case-study-with-gorgeous-mockups
• Overall, you can check your on-page SEO at https://pagespeed[.]web[.]dev

Use Google Search Console to monitor whether you’re ranking, how you’re ranking, & for what queries. It’s free. You can submit a sitemap there, too. It’s useful if you have multiple pages — helps Google index your site faster.

Now, go out & try to get backlinks to your page. Mentioning your keywords in the anchor tags helps. You’re on a hunt for do-follow links.

<a href="yoursite[.]com" rel="follow"> is amazing, <a href="yoursite[.]com" rel="nofollow"> ain't bad, but it won't affect your domain rating that much.

Backlinks can be toxic, if pointing from a garbage site. Strive for those from reputable sources that have a good domain rating (DR).

Rule of thumb: Google understands whether you’re reputable and should be shown to people by a myriad of factors, one of which is whether other reputable source point their fingers at you (in a good way). Kind of like in academia.

The most important thing personal website holders/content creators should look into is this: Intent Based SEO

For example, if someone is looking to buy marathon running shoes, they will look for: Keywords use specific intent modifiers - “buy”, “how to”, “best”, “cheap”. High CPC, low volume ones are less competitive.

How to find right long-tail keywords?

More specific, the better. From “t-shirts”, to “blue t-shirts” to “blue american apparel t-shirts”. Long tail keywords also make up the majority of the searches.

With short-tail keywords, we don’t really know what they’re looking for. So the intent is a bit obscure. This would not be a great keyword to target.