SEO distracts writers from writing. It's a rabbit hole of unproductive efforts when the goal is to write. The hard part of writing is writing something good. SEO doesn't make writers write better and this piece of writing isn't here because of SEO. It's here because it is intellectually interesting and because an actual human submitted it to Hacker News and because other actual humans voted it up.
What matters is the writing not the web page. Once a writer thinks about the web page their writing suffers.
SEO is only a part of your strategy to get eyeballs in front of your text. SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) are important (more ore less, depending on your product).
SEO is not part of my strategy at all. I try to avoid optimization whenever practical because optimization is a distraction from just getting on with the work.
Luckily, there are projects that will do it for you. But it seems like your motivation isn't to actually drive traffic to your site, but instead just to do work for the sake of doing it? I'm not sure. Avoiding "optimization whenever practical" is a very strange concept.
Well yes it’s an unusual way of looking at one’s self and the unusualness of that awareness probably makes me strange. But I am ok with that.
I write because I write. It might help to think about an analogy to growing flowers in the garden instead of cash crops like cotton, tobacco, or weed. While cash crop husbandry is interesting in and of itself what cash crops produce is cash. Of course cash is useful but it’s one of the less interesting things a person can spend their time making and thinking in terms of cash tends to make people a bit tedious to be around, well at least it makes them so for me because they’re often preoccupied with Bol Weevils and spot market prices and the cost of diesel for the truck and payroll taxes.
On the other hand, when a flower gardener looks up from their work they are likely to say something practical in general like “I’m thirsty” and occasionally something about our shared experience such as the weather. But sometimes they say something insightful because of all the time they spent not thinking about all the things one must think about because those things are part of what “growing cash crops” means when someone says it and they are not part of what “a flower garden” means.
I enjoy writing. I write because I write. I write because writing is productive. I write because writing produces interesting things.
I wrote this with my thumbs because my phone was in my hand when I read your comment. I just got on with the work. I didn’t futz with switching devices to use my Unicomp model M keyboard because doing so would have changed what I wrote by forcing me to write faster. Not actually forcing me of course but the interruption would require me to chase what I was thinking instead of thinking it. And of course the model M is an awesome weapon for arguing the internet. So awesome that the pleasure of forum combat would also change what I write. Buckling springs machine gun clicking like the old days.
So I optimize for doing this because this is what I do but that means not optimizing in the ways people mean when they say “optimization” in regard to writing on the web. It means optimizing with the premise that writing this matters and is the goal and that it was a productive day looks like. YMMV.
What matters is the writing not the web page. Once a writer thinks about the web page their writing suffers.