SEO’s a dark art.

In general, the more other pages (and the more highly-ranked pages) link to a page, the higher that page will show up in Google. But that’s also quite an oversimplification. (I don’t know that the rules Google uses for deciding how to rank pages in search results are even public info.

I don’t think there’s much any one person (even the owner) of a site can do to make a site show up higher in Google. The owner of a site can make smart decisions about how to ensure the site gets users coming back and posting links on social media and such, but ultimately the way a page/site gets to show up in more Google searches is by being popular.

My advice: don’t focus on Google or SEO or anything. Focus on fostering a community that’s worth coming back to and worth linking to.

Add your site to Google’s search index and Bing’s search index. Most other search engines use one of their indexes. It can take a few days before the site starts showing up on Google/Bing/other search engines that use their indexes.

There’s a bunch of ways to optimize seo other than wait for more people to link to your site, but they won’t have as much of an effect as just having a more popular site with more incoming links.

SEO sucks My site, which has actual content, doesn’t even show up on google. Someone else with the same domain and a different tld who has no content on his site is at the top. They have a marketing team, how am I gonna compete? Don’t worry about SEO, just have good content. People are gonna find it, SEO or not.

Make sure you set the metadata for the site in the HTML. I’ve never hosted a lemmy instance so I don’t know if that’s something that’s done automatically