There is an entire industry built around “optimizing” content. We are told to chase keywords, engineer backlinks, and structure paragraphs to please an algorithm. But after years of writing here on Misframe and for the engineering blog at FunnelStory, I’ve found that the best growth hack is actually much simpler.

The best SEO is just great content.

When I look at the posts that have really taken off, they weren’t the ones where I used a clickbaity title or filled the page with keywords. They were the ones where I simply shared something I learned.

The problem with this strategy is that it is hard work. It isn’t attractive because it falls into the category of “get popular slowly” rather than “hack the algorithm for quick views.” To write great content, you first have to do something meaningful. You have to build the software, debug the nasty failure, or deeply explore a new technology. Only then do you have something worthwhile to write about.

I use a simple heuristic to decide what is worth publishing: if it took a long time to figure out, write about it. Time spent figuring something out is a reliable proxy for value.

If you spent hours debugging something or researching a niche topic, the solution is valuable. It is likely nontrivial, which means other people are probably looking for it right now. People like reading about genuine exploration; it is much more engaging than standard content marketing.

I have seen this play out repeatedly. Recently, I wrote a post that hit the front page of Hacker News (Scaling Go Testing with Contract and Scenario Mocks ). HN is huge and has a low tolerance for fluff. I didn’t try to game the system; I just wrote about something interesting, and they upvoted it because it was substantive. Similarly, when I wrote Practical Patterns for Go Iterators, it was picked up by newsletters and circulated through the Go community naturally, not because of keywords, but because it was useful.

This is the core of what I try to do with Misframe. Do interesting things. Learn and explore. Write about it to share.

We should stop writing for search engines. These days, LLMs are effectively the new search engines anyway, so “optimizing for LLMs” is likely the new SEO. Optimizing for humans will, by default, make content better for LLMs.

That said, there is still some value in technical SEO. It isn’t about gaming the system, but about being “search engine friendly.” Even if you have great content, technical issues like a slow site or broken canonical tags can hurt your discovery. SEO strategies are useful for fixing the impediments to your content, but they won’t make bad content good. It always starts with the content.