Chasing Google ranks is an abysmal practice, but a basic level of SEO goes a long way in making content discoverable and accessible. As for the rest of the practices of the SEO industry, I believe in the saying "if you provide good content, you don't need to SEO".

We should rename legitimate SEO to Search Engine Usability.

Would you mind elaborating a little on where you draw the line? In my mind "SEO" means adding the correct meta tags to the html, but I suspect that's because I have approximately zero wisdom on the subject.

SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) get mixed up a lot. SEO vs SEM is like aesthetics (color theory, composition, etc) vs a billboard ad. The latter cares about the former, but the former is innocent.

Some things that qualify for essential SEO in my book:

- (Basic) meta tags

- Alt attributes

- Mobile friendly content (always required for a blog)

- Loading speed, optimised images etc.

- No JS rendered content

A number of my blog posts appear on Google's first page. I have some SEO tags but I don't optimise for it, nor do I make content that is purely built to feed the algorithm, I just write content that is applicable to people, and has some of the basic tags in it.

Although I can see why you may do that, it also does discount things that are relevant

I feel like the new kinda-alternative on the rise is to support federation with either ActivityPub, BlueSky/ATProto or both.

That is, instead of going for search engines, go for open social. It’s obviously a new and relatively unpopular ecosystem, but makes much more sense than this SEO stuff IMO.

Wordpress have rolled out their AP support and it seems to be working well so far. I just “replied” to a blog post on mastodon today without even realising it was from a blog.

Yeh definitely agree. Banner blog has support for basic link sharing on social media, but something to look more into definitely!

Same for me, too.

I honestly love https://mataroa.blog it ended my paralysis for searching a blog platform, and every page is bog standard HTML. It accepts Markdown, plus it has its own anonymous analytics, so it's nice.

On the other hand, everyone has different needs, and I wish Banner blog the best of luck!

Thanks! Glad to hear there are other platforms out there.

I'm aware of four in total, excluding yours. Writing them down, so maybe you can get some inspiration from them.

- mataroa.blog - My favorite. Pretty minimal, but well thought out.

- smol.pub - Another favorite of mine, but a little too minimalistic for me.

- prose.sh - A part of pico.sh ecosystem. Very interesting, but I started with mataroa when they started, so I didn't migrate.

- bear.blog - A more comprehensive package, a bit too heavy for my taste.

Again, good luck. We need more small web. Not less!

Yeh, I agree. Especially with the most recent updates.

The sentiment behind this is more about making the posts more readable to bots as opposed to trying to game the system

Don't worry, your website won't be on the first page.

You sound like those guys who don't go to the gym because they're afraid of becoming huge and muscular. Don't worry, it won't happen by accident.