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

by someuser54541 on 5/10/24, 3:43 PM with 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?

  • by PaulHoule on 5/10/24, 3:46 PM

    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.

  • by noashavit on 5/11/24, 2:51 PM

    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

  • by dosinga on 5/10/24, 3:45 PM

    Webflow is pretty good