What they are: A backlink is when another website links to yours. Google uses backlinks to help determine your site’s authority and ranking.
Quality over quantity: Links from reputable sites (e.g., CNN, BBC) provide significant boosts; links from spammy sites can hurt you.
Dofollow vs. Nofollow: A dofollow link transfers ranking “credit,” whereas nofollow links do not. Most natural links in articles are dofollow.
Practical tips: Simply be aware that backlinks are important. If someone likes your site, see if they’ll link to it. If you get press coverage or do interviews, make sure they include a dofollow link. You don’t have to buy or heavily engineer backlinks if you’re not trying to “game” the system.
2. Structuring Your Content
Use relevant keywords: If you want to rank for a particular topic, include those keywords in the title and the body of your post. For example, if you’re writing about “Anki,” make sure “Anki” appears in the title.
Match user searches: Think about what search terms people actually use. Incorporating those exact phrases into your content can help Google match you with relevant searches.
Website optimization: Make sure your site isn’t slow or error-prone. A fast, stable site typically ranks higher. Tools such as Lighthouse or Google’s PageSpeed Insights can help you spot performance issues.
3. Using Ahrefs (or Similar Tools)
What it does: Ahrefs provides insights on backlinks, site authority, and the keywords that drive traffic to your site.
Why it’s useful: Even if you’re not deeply invested in SEO, it helps to know who’s linking to you and which topics bring in search traffic.
Practical setup: It’s free to monitor your own site. Install it, check basic reports occasionally, and note any big spikes or dips in your search traffic.
4. Meta Tags & Basic Technical SEO
Meta tags: Properly formatted titles, meta descriptions, and other tags help Google understand what your content is about.
Length considerations: Titles and meta descriptions should typically adhere to Google’s preferred length (around 50–60 characters for titles, 150–160 for meta descriptions).
WordPress plugins: If you use WordPress, plugins like Yoast SEO make it easy to follow best practices (e.g., alerting you when your title is too long or if you haven’t used your keyword enough).
5. Maintaining Consistent URLs
Avoid broken links: If Google sees many broken links, it can harm your ranking.
Use redirects: If you move or rename articles, set up a 301 redirect so visitors and Google can follow the new URL without penalty.
Final Thoughts
Even if you don’t care about advanced SEO techniques, following these basics helps ensure you’re not sabotaging your website’s visibility. Most steps—like keeping your site fast, organizing your content, and being mindful of backlinks—are also just good web practices. By spending a few hours on setup and then following simple guidelines, you’ll capture the majority of SEO benefits without the hassle of deep optimization.
The Android app is called AnkiDroid (free) and the iOS app is Anki (it’s $25 one time and goes to support the sole developer working on it)
You can sync between your mobile app and desktop application by using your AnkiWeb account.
The theory behind Anki: what is spaced repetition?
If you learn a fact, your memory of that fact will deteriorate rather quickly. If you review that fact a few times, your memory will be retained longer. This means that reviewing things at specific increasing intervals will ensure that you always remember that fact. Here’s the cool part – increasing intervals! After each progressive review, your memory will degrade at a slower rate, which means that eventually, you’ll be reviewing your fact once per year, once per 3 years, or even less, while still retaining the information.
This is why spaced repetition and Anki are different from using a deck of normal flashcards. You only review a fact when you’re about to forget it, which means you don’t waste time reviewing cards you already know. Let’s do some napkin math —
Traditional flashcards vs Anki
Let me break this down, comparing traditional flashcards vs Anki’s spaced repetition system (SRS).
Assumptions:
Each card review takes ~5 seconds
Traditional flashcards: Reviewing all cards daily
Anki: Following typical intervals that grow exponentially
Duration:
Traditional Flashcards (100 cards):
100 cards × 5 seconds = 500 seconds (8.3 minutes) per day
180 days (6 months, an arbitrary period of time) × 8.3 minutes = 1,494 minutes (≈25 hours total)
Anki (100 cards):
Initial few days: ~100 cards/day (like traditional)
Total Anki time: ~277.5 minutes (≈4.6 hours total)
So Anki takes roughly 1/5 the time (4.6 vs 25 hours) for almost similar results. You’re trading off a surprisingly tiny amount of forgetting for a surprisingly huge amount of time, which allows you to have vastly more cards in your deck. This is a simplified model – actual results vary based on card difficulty and individual memory patterns.
This means that you can have a deck of 100,000 cards and still keep up with it! You can memorize an insane number of facts and retain them indefinitely.
How to use Anki?
Let’s look at the desktop app. The iOS and Android apps work similarly.
Once you’ve downloaded the app, you can create a deck, which is a collection of cards.
Let’s add a card to this deck now.
Now we can study this card
Notice how you can select the difficulty you had in recalling the card. “Again” and “Good” should be self explanatory. My headcanon for when I select “Hard” is when I get something almost right (like one letter off) and “Easy” is for when I instantly recall the answer without even thinking about it.
The numbers above each button are how soon until you see that card again.
What can I do with Anki?
Reverse cards
You can use “Basic (and reversed card)” — this is when you turn one card into two cards, with the fields swapped. This is useful when you decide to learn a foreign language and need to train both recognition and recall.
There’s more to this than you may think. Let’s say you’re learning the periodic table. You’ll need to remember iron -> Fe, as well as the opposite relationship of Fe -> iron.
With the reverse card feature, you can skip creating two cards when one will do, plus you won’t need to update the card twice when you need to change it.
Cloze deletion
Let’s say you’re trying to learn grammar in Spanish. In your textbook you’ll see this phrase in your familiar conjugation table:
Yo quiero
You’ll be tempted to create the following card:
Front: Yo (querer)
Back: quiero
Stop! Don’t do it! There’s a better way!
The best way to learn this is by using context. We learn through pattern recognition, so it’s tough to apply facts memorized in isolation.
Create cards in this format instead:
Front: Yo ____ (querer) comer una manzana
Back: Yo quiero comer una manzana
You’ll remember the conjugation in context and you’ll also get some free practice with the surrounding words.
You can create these cards by using the Cloze card type and clicking here to delete a certain part of the word.
Image occlusion
This is basically cloze deletion but for images — you can black out certain parts of an image and then reveal it.
Audio
You can add audio cards! I’ve never done this, but it is an option, say for training listening comprehension.
Card design
The Fundamental Trade-off: there’s always a trade-off between creation time and review time.
More effort during creation = Easier reviews later
Quick creation now = More challenging reviews
The beauty is that you get to choose where on this spectrum you want to be. If you don’t make this choice explicitly, it’ll be made for you implicitly.
I think having a card in Anki is far more important than having a perfect card in Anki. Sometimes, I intentionally create “bad” cards just to get the information into the system. Later, when I have more time or when the card starts bothering me during reviews, I’ll clean it up. This approach keeps the momentum going while allowing for future improvements. This works for me, but it may not work for you — I have many friends that feel it’s very important to have well made cards.
The best Anki cards share two key characteristics:
They’re extremely short (one to two sentences)
They have minimal ambiguity
If you’re looking at paragraphs in your cards, that’s usually a red flag. While I have a few cards like that (intentionally), they’re the exception, not the rule.
Let’s look at what works and what doesn’t:
Good examples:
Vocabulary terms
Specific dates or events (like offices in the Cursus Honorum)
Clear, single-concept questions
Challenging examples:
Long, opinion-based content
Complex historical events (like the fall of the Western Roman Empire)
Detailed explanations that require multiple concepts
When dealing with complex topics (like system design), I use a different approach. Instead of trying to recall exact answers, I aim for conceptual understanding. For instance, with a question like “Why is caching useful?”, I’ll count it as correct if I can articulate the main concepts, even if I don’t recite the answer verbatim.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Start creating cards, use them, and let your review experience guide your improvements. The time you spend perfecting cards is time you could spend reviewing them – find the balance that works for you.
Sticking with it
Something that doesn’t get enough attention in the Anki community is how to stick with it long-term. After starting and stopping Anki at least 8 different times, I’ve learned some valuable lessons about maintaining a sustainable practice.
The most crucial piece of advice I can give you: don’t delete your decks. Ever. I’ve made this mistake too many times
Always keep backups
Store them even when you’re not actively reviewing
Think of them as a knowledge investment
Returning to Anki after a break can be intimidating. Coming back to 1,000+ reviews is enough to make anyone want to quit before starting. This is fundamentally a UI/human psychology problem. The interface isn’t well-suited to handling breaks in usage. Fortunately there’s a hack:
Adjust your daily review limit (in Options)
Start with just 10 cards per day
Gradually work your way back up
Remember: any review is better than no review
Rather than treating Anki as a formal study session, I use it as a gap filler:
During elevator rides
On the train
Waiting for food
Any spare moment where I might normally check Twitter
Even minimal use is incredibly powerful. Reviewing 5 cards is better than 0. Some days, I only do 1 card. The goal is maintaining the habit, not hitting perfect numbers.
Make your own decks
This is important enough to warrant its own section. Don’t download huge decks from the internet, make your own. I’d recommend downloading a deck only if it’s less than 50 cards (let’s say learning an alphabet, or something like that).
The problem is that Anki is not for learning, it’s for reviewing. Learning on Anki is incredibly painful since you’re learning without context. If you use someone else’s cards, you’ll hit a brick wall.
Using Anki for language
I primarily use Anki for language learning. Most of my cards are straight vocab, with a few being cloze deletions (not enough I’d say).
A few quick notes
Shove it into Anki (even if you don’t think you need it). I regret not having more cards. I only spent around 25 hours!!!! this year reviewing Anki.
If you have multiple words with the same meaning (eg wealthy, affluent), generate two different images and then put them on the front of each card. You’ll associate the word with the image so you’ll remember both individually
If a word isn’t sticking, create a mnemonic for it and put an image reminder of the mnemonic on the front of the card.
My Russian teacher gives me a long list of vocab words after a lesson. I have a virtual assistant input them into Anki — I highly recommend this if you’re falling behind on card creation! You can also input words via .csv.
Using Anki for Leetcode
I also use Anki for Leetcode practice. Instead of endless random practice, I focused on mastering a core set of problems. Traditional LeetCode practice assumes you’ll naturally absorb patterns through repetition. Since I have a poor memory, this traditional practice empirically wasn’t effective — I’d do a problem, retry it a week later and have completely forgotten how I had done it. Memorizing with Anki is a time efficient way of learning patterns.
The generation process:
Selected about 30 fundamental LeetCode problems
Created simple Anki cards for each problem
Front of card: Problem name/link
Back of card: Just time/space complexity
The review process:
See card
Open LeetCode to that problem
Solve the complete problem
Review complexity
Mark the card as done
As you can see I’m using Anki purely as a scheduling tool.
The goal is not to memorize solutions per se, but rather common patterns. For example: converting adjacency matrix to adjacency list is now a pattern I recognize instantly. I wanted to focus on building “muscle memory” for common coding patterns.
The most common criticism I get is about overfitting – the worry that I’ll only learn to solve these specific problems. I’m not really worried because –
My memory isn’t great (ironically, this helps)
The goal is pattern recognition, not memorization
These patterns transfer well to similar problems
So far, I can say it’s been working quite well. I’m far more comfortable with Python syntax in a Leetcode context, and I can apply chunks of what I’ve memorized elsewhere in new problems.
I used to panic during coding interviews. Every interview felt like starting from zero and I had a significant fear of blanking out.
Memorization transformed my entire interview mindset:
Instead of “solve this impossible problem,” it became “identify the right pattern”
Having a solid foundation of memorized patterns gives confidence
The interview feels more like pattern matching than pure problem-solving
The canonical use case for Anki is coursework, and for good reason. Beyond just acing tests, memorizing specific facts creates a mental scaffolding that helps you grasp bigger concepts. I’ve found that having these little details firmly in mind gives you something concrete to anchor those abstract theories to. If you’re interested in this check out how med students use Anki to memorize stuff for their coursework.
Language Learning
This one’s a no-brainer. Anki feels like it was purpose-built specifically for vocabulary and language learning. It’s perfect for that steady accumulation of words and phrases that language mastery requires.
I’ve also been experimenting with some less conventional uses:
Nature Knowledge
I’m currently using Anki to memorize trees in my area. It’s part of my goal to be more outdoorsy in New York, and having this knowledge makes every walk more engaging.
Literature
I’ve started creating cards for poetry & quote memorization. This is tough since I find memorizing ordered lists difficult.
Book Retention
I’m experimenting with transforming entire nonfiction books into Anki decks. For example:
“Through the Eye of the Needle” by Peter Brown (about early Christianity)
“Designing Data-Intensive Applications” (a technical book)
The time investment for experimentation is surprisingly low. I spent 25 hours total this past year on Anki, so a failed experiment might only cost me 5 hours across an entire year. That’s a pretty low-risk way to potentially discover a game-changing use case.
I don’t have definitive advice about what you should be memorizing. What I do know is that experimentation is key. The time cost is low enough that trying new approaches is almost always worth it. Be sure to delete/suspend/heavily-edit liberally when you encounter cards that you don’t like any more.
Note for spaced repetition appreciators: The concept of notes is out of scope for this article
New EA cause – get everyone to try nasal strips. The positive impact of better breathing at night for the low price of $0.30 is an insane cost / benefit. Even if they do nothing for you, they’ll come in handy when you catch a cold.
How I figured out I have sleep apnea
I was always super tired in the morning and about every two weeks I’d have a situation where I’d wake up gasping for air. I never really paid attention to it, because I figured that this was normal.
Thanks to a Facebook advertisement, I decided to take the Lofta sleep test, which revealed that I have sleep apnea with an AHI of 18 and RDI of 26. This is classified as moderate
I followed up with an ENT to take a look at my throat. Viewed through an endoscope, it was obvious that my tongue was too far back, close to obstructing my airway.
I figured that while CPAP is a decent solution, it’d be a good idea to test some less annoying ways of fixing my sleep apnea. The masks are rizzless, see below
A quick aside though – CPAP is the gold standard therapy for sleep apnea and if my exploration doesn’t work I’ll very likely begin using one. It’s just that my sleep apnea is relatively moderate, I’m young, and I’m highly motivated. Don’t use this article as an excuse to not treat your sleep apnea!
Measurement
In order to properly measure the impact of interventions, I’d have to measure my sleep somehow. There aren’t a lot of options unfortunately.
Oura Ring – it measures sleep quality in a general sense, not specifically sleep apnea. It does have a blood oxygen measurement feature, but it’s not very sensitive. I decided to buy one mostly on the theory that improved sleep apnea would likely correlate with better sleep in general.
Wellue O2 ring – I’m not sure why continuous pulse oximeters are so hard to find (glares at FDA?), but this one does the job. It measures my sleep apnea decently well. The only issues I have with it is that 1. if I toss and turn too much I get bad readings 2. The rubber ring has started to wear out, which I counteract by putting on progressively larger fingers.
Lofta sleep test – This is the test I used to get a formal diagnosis. It’s usually $189 for the test. Lofta ships you a pulse oximeter which is connected to a single EKG lead that you attach to your chest. You connect it via an app, measure for one night, then discard the hardware (!!!). Someone please hack this thing so it’s not such a horrible waste. You then get a call from a doctor who discusses the test results with you and tries to sell you a CPAP from Lofta.
Sunrise sleep test – I haven’t tried this but it looks really cool. It measures sleep apnea with a sensor placed on your chin. The idea is that your jaw moves forward to counteract a collapsed airway, so by measuring jaw movement you can determine respiratory effort.
Lifestyle interventions (listed from least woo to most)
Sleep position – this is by far the best effort to results item on this list. If you currently sleep on your back, try sleeping on your side. There are countless ways to achieve this, so I won’t bother listing them all, but suffice to say they usually work by mechanically forcing you to sleep on your side. (Un?)Fortunately for me, I’m a lifelong side sleeper. Interestingly though, the O2 ring and Oura helped me discover a position issue during sleep. I usually sleep hugging a pillow, but for a short period during a move I slept without one. My sleep and oxygen scores were significantly worse! It turns out that hugging the pillow were helping my breathing by preventing me from flopping onto my stomach. The conclusion for you should be to experiment with various position interventions.
I started with the wedge pillow, since it was the easiest of the interventions. Unfortunately, it was a total failure, with my sleep apnea appearing to only get worse. You can also try tilting your bed.
Nasal breathing! Mouth taping appears to help some people by preventing you from breathing through your mouth. The theory goes that you can reduce snoring, improve mouth position, and take advantage of the benefits of breathing through your nose.
Nasal strips, as previously mentioned, can be a lifesaver. I don’t even have nasal based sleep apnea but just having an open nose is super helpful in having better sleep quality.
Nasal dilators are an alternative to nasal strips where rather than pulling open your nose through an adhesive on the outside, they push it open from the inside with a plastic bit. I tried them and found that they feel exactly like having a piece of plastic in your nose. My friend, however, prefers them to nasal strips — he says they’re easier on the nose skin.
Weight loss can help a LOT with sleep apnea. If you have less fat in your airway, you’ll have less to collapse. Sleep apnea tends to cause weight gain, so treating sleep apnea can actually help you lose weight as well. I’m at a normal weight, so not much relevant here for me.
Vik Veers says that only 6% of patients exclusively have a tongue issue. On hearing that, I thought I’d try Flonase to have a bit easier time breathing through my nose, hoping that it’d have an effect on my sleep apnea. Unfortunately, while I did subjectively feel that it improved my sleep quality, it didn’t affect my Oura or O2 scores. Note – you can use Flonase continuously for up to 6 months, which should cover you for allergy season.
Azelastine is an alternative mentioned by my doctor for allergies. It’s an antihistamine that you can spray directly into your nose, which means it works significantly better for opening up nasal passages. Do note that there’s a specific spraying technique you should use to avoid getting it into your throat since apparently it tastes terrible. I use azelastine during peak allergy season. It apparently may help protect against COVID too?
There’s some evidence that mouth exercises can help with sleep apnea. Here are some links to research papers and Reddit posts about various exercise techniques. Since my apnea is mostly tongue related I’ve been doing this set from Vik Veers. So far I haven’t seen much in terms of effects, but it takes a while to build up muscle tone. If you want exercises in a nice app format, check out Airway Gym.
Have you wanted to learn an instrument? No? Me neither, but here we are. There’s some (sketchy) evidence that playing specifically either a double reed instrument, which is the oboe, or a didgeridoo can be protective against sleep apnea. The suspected mechanism in the didgeridoo appears to be the circular breathing, which doesn’t make sense because many woodwind instruments require circular breathing. The oboe may be useful since you need to generate high pressure in the mouth and also move your tongue to play music. In any case, it’s worth trying, but don’t hold your breath (hah).
I’ve been playing the didgeridoo now for 3 months — I’ll be taking a follow up sleep apnea test soon. Will report back with results.
Update: I’ve been playing the didgeridoo for about half a year now. Great news, it seems to have worked! Results below.
Buteyko breathing is a technique by which you work to increase your CO2 tolerance. In theory this should help with sleep apnea symptoms since you’ll have a lower reaction to holding your breath (which in this case is choking on esophagus). Buteyko does seem to work for freediving, so maybe it works for sleep apnea, someone please try and report back.
Myofunctional therapy
Mewing is a practice invented by Mike Mew to expand the palate in order to increase jaw size. It’s unclear as to whether it works, and if it does work, it’s unclear if it would resolve sleep apnea. Mewing is where you suction the tongue to the roof of the mouth, thereby expanding the upper jaw. The theoretical mechanism by which it could address sleep apnea would be — larger jaw -> more room for tongue in jaw -> less tongue collapse. It probably wouldn’t address issues with throat collapse.
People on Reddit say Wim Hof breathing helped, but frankly I’m not certain by what mechanism it would help with sleep apnea. Let me know if it worked for you?
Medical treatments
CPAP
REM catchup
Poor sleep regardless
Mask fitting + settings
iNAP is an alternative to CPAP which I find super interesting. It solves tongue based sleep apnea by suctioning the tongue to the back of your teeth — preventing it from falling into your throat. Image below —
Bongo RX is a nasal-only insert that takes advantage of creating back pressure on your exhalation. When you breathe out, there’s reduced pressure on your throat, which allows it to collapse. If you maintain some small amount of pressure, it should prevent the collapse. Diagram & image below.
Note: I’ll use the word “shock” to describe what the next few devices are doing, but it’s less of an electrocution and more of a gentle pulse. Nobody’s looking like this —
Inspire is a bit hardcore for my tastes, but it does appear to be super helpful for people. It involves surgically implanting the equivalent of a pacemaker that then shocks your esophageal muscles every time you take a breath. This ensures that your airway has the same level of openness as it does when you’re awake and your muscles are tense. Downside is that it requires surgery.
Zeus is basically Inspire but without the surgical implantation step. You attach it to the bottom of your chin and it shocks the tongue & jaw muscles through the skin.
ExciteOSA is a fascinating product — exercise in a device! If you don’t have the executive function to stick with the tongue exercises, you can try using this instead. You put the device in your mouth and it shocks your muscles to exercise them. You use it for 20 minutes per day for 6 weeks.
Oral appliances are generally anything that manipulates your mouth physically to prevent sleep apnea. They fall into two main categories, mandibular advancement devices and tongue retention devices. Mandibular advancement devices shove your jaw forward, which should open your esophagus more. Tongue retention devices grip your tongue and thus prevent it from falling back and choking you. I can’t use the jaw advancer since I have TMJ, but you should feel free to try! Tongue retention devices are notoriously uncomfortable since they’re usually grabbing your tongue.
Surgery is an option, but I don’t know much about it. I’d be careful if I were you.
Sleep apnea
Sleep apnea is where your breathing stops and then restarts during sleep. This can be either due to airway collapse or because your brain forgets to send a signal to your body to breathe. Your brain forgetting to breathe is pretty rare and called central sleep apnea. Most treatments here will have no effect on central sleep apnea — if you do have it you should go on a CPAP since you’re literally forgetting to breathe.
Obstructive sleep apnea, where your airway collapses, is generally because your airway muscles relax during sleep. Since you now can’t breathe, your body attempts to counteract this by increasing heart rate (to deliver oxygen more effectively) and releasing adrenaline (since you can’t breathe). This makes you do a mini-wake-up, where you wake up just enough to bring back some muscle tension to your airway. Your AHI is the number of times you stopped breathing per hour, your RDI is AHI + the amount of respiratory effort–related wake-ups you had per hour.
A question I hear often is — why is sleep apnea so common now? Unfortunately, the modern diet of soft foods means that our jaws are drastically underdeveloped compared to the jaws of people living in the pre-Industrial era. This means there’s less room for the tongue in the mouth, leading to the tongue falling back into the throat. The modern diet and predilection for cleanliness also mean allergies are far more common — leading to nasal breathing issues. Throat collapse can be caused by many factors, but the most common are obesity and age. Obesity is a modern problem, and can also traced back to the Western diet.
