On Search Engine Optimization
Week 9 of Founding Typogram
Greetings, friends! I have spent the last weekend putting together a kitchen island! I think kitchen island is one of the starter projects for home renovations to get you familiar with DIY tools and concepts, but not too challenging where you just want to give up and hire somebody. During my two-day process, I learned to predrill for long screws to avoid cracks, how to use a circular saw, and how to apply wood finishes.
Similar to the kitchen island for home DIY, launching a mini free product is a similar starter project for launching a start-up. It teaches me core concepts and provides a real-world environment to practice. One thing that keeps bothering me is that codingfont.com is still nowhere to be found on Google search results unless I search “codingfont” (without space) specifically.
This issue brought search engine optimization (SEO) to my attention, not just for codingfont.com but also for everything I am creating or have created. I spent last week digging into the subject and learned two important things: a) there is a lot to learn about SEO; and b) SEO is vital for start-ups.
I realized how much of a waste it is to create so much content between myself and my cofounder while not knowing SEO properly. We both decided to dig into this subject matter on our own and write down a list of optimization action items to discuss in a week. I think this is a valuable and timely lesson that came out of the coding font launch. With our main product “Typogram” still under development, naturally, I am not worried about SEO. However, SEO takes months to take effect; it would be too late by the time we launch! Launching codingfont.com allowed me to be bothered by its poor performance in Google search results, which propelled me to learn new skills to solve it.
Just to share a few aha moments while I am self-studying SEO:
Sub-domain such as “blog.typogram.co” is seen as a separate site from the apex domain “typogram.co”; it is better to use a sub-folder such as “typogram.co/blog” instead of a sub-domain for SEO purposes. However, tech stack also plays a role, and subdomain can be configured to work similarly to sub-folder
Adding backlinks to my website from other websites is crucial to SEO, which gives codingfont.com another great purpose! I am looking purposefully to find websites to add backlinks to mine.
Content creation should be optimized for SEO from the beginning. With a lot of content that we have already created, it is tedious and time-consuming to go back to fix the SEO mistakes we made in those earlier posts.
With that, I dedicate this week’s Founders’ Besties to the topic of SEO.
It might be helpful to talk about my process of picking Founders’ Besties. I clip good content and tools to a list for myself throughout the week, and when I handpick the Besties, I go back to that list and choose the best three. As you might have noticed, most of the items weren’t new shiny things that were the hot topic of that week. That is because I posted them when I found them, and it could be a decade-old tool that I just happened to get to know recently. My list from the past week is all about SEO. Enjoy!
Founders’ Besties
- a weekly listicle of helpful links for startup founders!
Videos: SEO Snippets
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUPhLQ054sMg3vgzy9md9tWg
A list of bite-sized video content created by the “officials” at the “Search Bureau,” aka. Google.
Article: Subdomain vs. Subdirectory: Which Is Better for SEO?
https://www.semrush.com/blog/subdomain-vs-subdirectory/
In this guide, we want to clarify the confusion and help settle the debate about 'subdomain vs. subdirectory.' We'll dive deep into the technical SEO considerations that you need to take and outline the instances when they make the most sense to use.
Course: SEO for Devs
The problem is, 99% of the time, SEO is explained in a way that makes sense to marketers. And that's why so few developers are leveraging this super powerful tool to drive traffic to their websites. This SEO course is created for developers!
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