JSChristmas gift
My partner @ymc9 and I have been writing posts in Dev.to weekly since 3 months ago. Mostly, the views count of the post would be around several hundred, few got more than 1k views. As the holiday approaches, the gift we wish to get is to reach 1k views for our last posts of the year.
@ymc9 published the below post first :
Then I published another post:
A gift can be a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.
The view count for the two posts until now(Jan 3, 2022) are:
- 45,861
- 20,991
Find Santa
After Yiming’s post reached 10k views within 3 days, we thought it was mainly because the title is the typical eye-catching one that some top-ranked posts have. Of course, the content speaks for itself, as Yiming shows great insight into Typescript in the post, which you can see the evidence from the comments and the more than 800 reactions it got.
In comparison, my post is just a simple journey of my experience using ChatGTP to resolve a specific coding issue without much insight. You might think it is because of the hot topic of ChatGPT. I think that’s just a small factor as there are already many ChatGTP-related posts in Dev.to, many of which I think are more interesting and very insightful.
One of the most effective ways to find the clue from the rough number is to Drill Down. Dev.to really only give a very limited data dashboard, which I really hope they could enhance in the feature. Luckily enough, along the only direction provided, we could find Santa:
Santa is SEO
Why? The traffic coming from Google are way more than it comes from the Dev.to directly.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of SEO, if you would like a heuristic, think of how many different ways your post could appear in the search result of the possible words people search. The more general the words are, the more view counts you could possibly get.
How Yiming’s post got found
If people want to learn more about Typescript, there is a good chance they would search “how to become a better typescript programmer” on Google. You can see Yiming’s post appears as the second result(As Google now shows the personalized result, you might see a different result as mine, but you would probably still see it on the first screen):
Actually, if you search “better typescript programmer” it even appears at the top:
Moreover, people could also search for “typescript programmer tips”, which is still there.
How my post got found
If people want to know how to use ChatGPT to solve coding issues, they probably will search “chatgpt how to solve coding issues”, and my post would appear as the top result:
For more general keywords, “chatgpt coding issues”, they can still see my post. Although their original intention might not be relevant to my post, it is still possible that they click and check my post.
Extra bonus
If you write posts yourself, you probably know there is a common “one-week” pattern across media platforms, including Dev.to. It usually means the impression time for your post only last one week, or in other words, your post will get few views after the first week like the below chart:
However, if your post has a good SEO, you could probably break the pattern and get the below chart:
From this point of view, you can literally think of Google as the Engine. Even when the platform won’t provide you with any fuel, Google is there like a solar engine to give you energy every day. 😄
The tip
SEO itself is a complicated discipline. It combines a large number of tools and best practices that evolve occasionally. There is even the job role as SEO specialist. Therefore, the only tip I could give is based on my own experience:
Always keep in mind how people could see your post using Google search, and make sure the most possible words appear in your title.
That’s why I changed the title to the current one instead of the original, more attractive one, “The secret that helps you get more than 10k views” 😁
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