Ask HN: Best way to build an SEO friendly, high content site in 2024?

3 points by someuser54541 2 years ago | 5 comments

I have a few upcoming projects that will be fairly content heavy and need good SEO. Most of my experience is in mobile and embedded systems dev, though I've briefly touched Rails and Node.js.

The last site I had, was just an index.html file, some css, and a bit of attached JS. I threw it on a ridiculously expensive webhost (MediaTemple) and that was that.

What's the best and cheapest way to build a fairly content heavy site these days, without as much "magic" as possible? I can write Javascript but I've read previous threads like this and people are often throwing out names like Next.js, React, or whatever the new shiny thing is, and it seems like massive overkill. I generally like to be able to reason about systems I write with not too much "magic" and 102321232 dependencies.

Any suggestions?

PaulHoule 2 years ago |

Pick a static site generator from this list

https://jamstack.org/generators/

My take is Hugo is pretty good and crazy fast (written in Go) but I like Pelican because it is easy to customize in Python.

someuser54541 2 years ago | |

It's funny because Next.js is the first thing on that list.

Is there any real benefit to using one of those generators versus just writing all the HTML yourself?

PaulHoule 2 years ago | | |

Say you have 1000 pages of content and you want to change the footer or something in the header (suppose Google or Facebook now demand a new meta tag). Do you really want to change all those HTML pages by hand?

Also most web sites have navigation, lots of internal links will help web crawlers find everything and decide that it is important. Are you going to back and change them all by hand whenever you make a change?

noashavit 2 years ago |

For a content heavy site you need a cms first and foremost. Wordpress has free seo plugins, as do many of the others. But you will need to learn a bit about the basics of on page seo to make infuse keywords correctly, interlink, use appropriate url structure and metadata etc

dosinga 2 years ago |

Webflow is pretty good