SEO, or search engine optimization, is a black box for a reason.
Generally speaking, a search engine is trying to do one thing: help you efficiently find what you’re searching for. When performing well, the result you’d want to see the most would be at the top of the search results page.
Example: Science article
Imagine I want to learn about the Mars Perseverance Rover. Let’s say that the best page on this subject is NASA’s “Mars 2020: Perseverance Rover” webpage.
You’ve written an article on the rover, too, for your science blog. You’d like your article to be ahead of the of NASA site in the search results page.
There are two approaches to accomplishing this goal. One is to write the best article you can. The other is to optimize your page’s SEO.
Approach #1: Writing the best article
Writing the best article is what I, the searcher, want you to do. I want best information, regardless of who is providing it.
In this example, that’s hard: you’re competing with NASA’s professional science writers, who have all the resources, data, and people of NASA at their disposal. Maybe you include your custom illustrations and commentary, update it more often than NASA, or dive into the project history to compete.
It’s possible to beat NASA, but it won’t be easy.
Approach #2: Optimizing SEO
The other approach is optimizing the page’s SEO. This isn’t exclusive to writing the best article, but let’s consider it on its own.
Perhaps you iterate on your title, description, meta tags, and keywords. You pay for keyword analysis, install trackers, try to get an initial spike of traffic from an aggregator, pay for backlinks, etc.
Applying these techniques across your site is a lot easier than trying to improve the editorial quality of each post.
The problem
There’s a problem with the SEO-first approach: you’re trying to inspect a black box that resists inspection.
Search engines don’t want clear maps to the top of the search results. Their goal, mostly, is to provide you with the best results, not the result whose author really wants to be included on the first results page.
This is why search engines don’t tell you in detail how they rank their results. It’s why they change the rules at will. We’ve seen it happen before: swaths of websites fade in search relevance because they employed SEO “best practices” that the engines discovered and made obsolete.
So, what should we do?
As a website maintainer, these changes can be frustrating. All that optimization, de-optimized overnight. But as a user of the internet, it’s a good thing that today’s SEO practices stop working eventually.
I try to write the best articles I can. This accomplishes my goals and reaches the few thousand programmers that I care about. I try to ignore the searchability fashions of the day.
If you’re a business with a technical blog that exists to “have a technical blog”, and SEO is your growth strategy, you’re optimizing for something opaque and ephemeral. Anyone selling expertise about that black box is selling something opaque and ephemeral. The black box resists expertise.