The Season of Improvement

Hey there, Hackers!

It’s a new month, and with it, comes new contests to make money, increased ways to reach your audience, and tips to be an even better writer than you already are. Here’s everything you need to reach your full potential.

5 SEO Tips to Improve Your Articles

1. If you want to backlink to your personal blog, you can only do so every 300 words. This ensures that Google won’t think your article is spam, and it will increase the chances of your article reaching more people.
2. Another helpful tip is to make sure to have diversity in your backlinks. What this means is that all of your backlinks shouldn’t go to just one domain; make sure you link to multiple websites.
3. If you’re reposting an article from a different website, a key thing to remember is that you have to change the title so it’s different from the original. For example, if you published an article on your personal blog that’s titled “The Best Resources to Learn Python”, you can retitle that to “Want to Learn Python? Here are the Top 5 Resources.” This ensures that your articles do not cannibalize each other on search engines.
4. Speaking of doing well on search engines, a helpful tip is to make sure your article isn’t incredibly short. Search engines also consider that, so it’s important that your article is at least 500 words long.
5. And the final tip we have for you is in regards to formatting. If you write your story on a Google Doc and copy and paste it to a HackerNoon draft, there’s a good chance that there will be some formatting errors. Looking through your article and making sure everything is A-OK is a good habit to form.

Here are three recently published articles that were written extremely well:

1. Nobel Laureates by Country - Or Creating a Tag Cloud With JavaScript by @awanshrestha: this article does a great job of having a good length and of having backlinks to numerous different websites.
2. 77% Of Hiring Managers Say Job Hopping Is A Red Flag by @amply: this story backlinks to other websites, but it also remembers to link to other HackerNoon articles. Internal linking does wonders for SEO.
3. Crunch the Lottery Numbers by @alexthoughts: making sure your article looks clean and is well-formatted is a must. This article has plenty of paragraph breaks, no issues with its code, and its images are all clear and working.

For more tips, check out HackerNoon’s Editing Protocol.

Mo Money, Less Problems

We love giving back to our great community, and what better way than with more contests? We currently have two contests going on: The DevOps Writing Contest and the HackerNoon Review Contest.

By publishing a #DevOps story and tag, you’re automatically entered into the DevOps Writing Contest, sponsored by Aptible, which has a $3,000 monthly prize pool! To get the juices flowing, take some inspiration from past finalists:

1. Security Considerations in IAAS Deployments by @lonewolf
2. Efficient Application Updates with Blue-Green Deployments in Kubernetes by @dylanmich
3. Integration Challenges and Solutions in PaaS by @innocentchuks.

But if you’re not really into DevOps, then you’re in luck because we have another great contest lined up for you. We’re talking about the HackerNoon Review Contest. If you don’t know, we launched our official mobile app! (Click here to download for IOS or here for Android).To celebrate, we’re running a contest that anyone can participate in. Find out how you can win a $1,000 here.

HackerNoon - Now in 11 Different Languages

You heard that right: HackerNoon Top Stories and any brand articles can now be automatically translated into 11 different languages (from the previous 8), including Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Portuguese.

So what are you waiting for?

Start writing a top-tiered HackerNoon story today!