It has been a long and complicated journey, a long slog so to speak. SEO is quite a process. Over the past 4 years I tried SEO 3 times and 2 out of the 3 times became unsuccessful. My current attempt has hopes even as my pessimism grew. I thought I was following all the rules from the many articles I read. And I was following basic SEO rules but did not read between the lines, hence Lessons Learned.

I have come to a revelation recently when I happened on a concept called keyword difficulty. Always up for a new challenge I tried a new strategy out. Instead of trying to optimize for certain select keywords I changed my approach. I wrote two pieces on two related topics which I thought were quite authoritative and low and behold I started ranking for different keywords than I was expecting. My conclusion is that expectations were way to high in my previous SEO attempts. The new keywords were just as acceptable as the impossible ones I was trying to optimize for. And within one month after my two articles (2 separate html pages at my website) nine other words showed up but there were 2 in particular that reigned. When i googled the new keywords I found that I was ranking at the top of page 6 on a Google search (3-4 months in - woo hoo). Now 5 months in, but in my first month, I wrote a third piece (my original writing) where I deliberately tried to rank for a hard keyword. Because of its difficulty, I still have not ranked at all for this one. See below for actual keywords used. The two articles I wrote where I did rank were 3-4 months in and they picked up a ranking within 4 weeks. So lesson one is, don’t try to force a ranking, write articles with conviction and authority and see what key words show up. Then edit ur title and meta description later on to match these new keywords.

The second lesson learned is that single page apps don’t seem to get noticed quickly. I cannot rank my homepage as of yet. The rankings I received were for the two authoritative articles written on separate pages. So this lesson is that single page apps don’t seem to cut it for ranking purposes. In the beginning I was using React for my page design and ended up abandoning it in favor of Plain JS because I thought React was too much overkill and I did not like that pages are designed in JS vs HTML. I did not want to become beholden to Node JS either. And there was also React Router which I did not like. I even tried to write using a React library vs Node (Babel interpreting JSX) but babel set a cookie which I also did not like. React, for me, became history and I am very happy with Plain JS in Plain HTML along with JS Array Methods to render my data in html. PS: I host traditional multi pages on an Apache httpd server in AWS. And yes I need to do SSL every 3 months.

The third lesson I learned was about including a call to action in everything I write, particularly my meta description. Did u know that if Google does not like ur meta description (too long, too short or does not include key words) that they will write one for u? We want to get clicks not just impressions. At this moment almost 5 months into my seo experiment I am only getting between 1 -10 impressions per day and 5 clicks for a ctr of 2.1%. Remember that book called Waiting for Godot? This is how I feel today. PS, Waiting for Godot was written 70 years ago so this makes me quite an old dinosaur. Hey, I witnessed all of web history since 1969 when I was on an arpanet terminal with my Fortran program, and ps, back then we had Lotus 123 (circa 1983) not MS Excel. Bottom line, asking the viewer to do something sure helps SEO progress.

So it takes forever to do SEO. Thankfully my livelihood does not depend on it. I advertise on Twitter now vs Facebook so this is where I get all my current clicks, not organic clicks, but they too will come I hope. And I seem to get backlinks which is now my forth lesson learned. The more entities that reference ur stuff the better our rankings, I think. I did not realize that Twitter is a good source of a backlink. Dev.to is also a source but Facebook seems to have a ‘do not follow’ approach so it is not a good source for a backlink.

Thanks for reading, I invite ur comments and opinions since SEO is such a hot topic these days.

About the author Rick Delpo. Please do a Google search on Rick Delpo for more about my web development journey, teachings about Java and graduating to Serverless Architecture. And btw follow me on twitter @RickDelpo

Original content supporting this article can be found at my website https://howtolearnjava.com

The keywords I ranked for: jdbc servlet, learn jdbc
The difficult keywords are learn java and previously, java tutorial (still have not ranked for these)
I use Ahrefs to track my backlinks and Google Search console to
track organic activity and keywords.

This is what my activity looks like 7 months in