Google publishes a pretty clear and simple "Webmaster guidelines" checklist to follow: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
#12I also see ads that say "mom working from home earns $500 a day online!". If it was so easy to make "instant $50/month" then I'd just sit there and set up a new site every day for a year, and then retire. Truth is - there's no get-rick-quick scheme that runs on auto-pilot. A site isn't just a domain, you have to publish content on it, you have to continuously improve SEO and gain links, you have to invest in the domain, hosting, bandwidth, time, content, links, etc, etc.
First decide how much an hour of your time is worth. Then decide if an investment in this website is worthwhile.
Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
#13Black Hat Seo
0. Find a new, non discovered niche. This niche should be gold, this mean the Adsense Pay Per Click is high. Register a related domain.
1. Purchase unrelated domain names, any domains really, get ".info" domains since they are cheap.
2. Buy a SPAM tool like Xrumer and SPAM related/unrelated blogs with unrelated keywords. (Did you wonder the thousands SPAM comments you get with xfdfrg in anchor text and wonder why the spammer didn't found better than those keywords?).
3. SPAM a couple thousands blogs, get a couple hundred back links. You need many links, your anchor is not targeted, so quantity need to beat quality.
4. After you get the back links listed in all your domains, make a 301 Redirect, this will bring all the Google juice (back links) to your domain.
5. Your domain rank high, it brings traffic, optimize it for Adsense.
Why all this mess?
A. It helps stay under Google SPAM radar since you are using unrelated keywords, in fact keywords that related to nothing.
B. Other black hat or white hat web masters won't discover your Gold niche while you are building back links.
As I said, this is black hat and involves spamming. I never tried it, but it seems to bring some good cash it you choose well the niche.
Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
#14Build Links. Here are my 5 steps to get started from nothing, with 5 free bonus steps. Do one of these per week, in a little over a month you'll have a foundation. Remember SEO is like farming, you reap what sow and it takes a long time to reap the harvest of all the hard work.
1. Leverage your competition, by finding your top five closest competitors and spend your first round of SEO getting links from the top 100 sites that link to them. Once you filter out the ones that you won't be able to contact or you know can't edit their content to add another link, you'll be down to 20% of those 500 links. Now, you can do this in a day. Create an email, send it to each one of those guys asking for a backlink, telling them you're in the space and explaining why they should link to you. Don't pay for links, because it's not worth the risk of the google "police" finding out.
2. Long Tail. Don't focus on ranking for the super-competitive keyword such as "flowers", rank for medium-tail keywords that you can make some ground on with less effort. "flowers going away party", "flowers evil mother-in-law", etc. Related to #1, when you ask for a link, feel free to suggest anchor text in the link that helps you get what you want from that link.
3. Kickstart your on-site content strategy. Make a list of 100 articles that would help you drive traffic. Take the top 10 ideas and hire someone to write them. For each article, when you publish it, find 100 more people to ask for links to the article. Send them specific text and a specific page you want them to link to.
4. Authorities. Make a list of 10 authorities on your subject who blog or create content. Write an article that you think would be interesting to them, something specific that is in their space. Make the content really good. Contact them personally (phone call, even) and ask for links to the article. In the flowers example, academics focused on environmental issues related to flower farming, for example.
5. Directories. Build resource articles that cover your space in a way that focuses on your strengths. Find directories and ask them to link to your article. In the flowers example, an article on determining the proper type of flower for all special occasions or religious events.
6. Build links.
7. Build links.
8-10. Build links.
Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
#150. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some common word like Yelp. 1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keyword…
Like anything SEO, there's some inaccuracy here. For instance, I rocketed a microsite to number one for its keywords with a someblog.blogspot.com link. It was at #1 in like a day and a half.
The reason there's so much mystery around SEO is because you've got a black box called Google which may or may not do what you want when you want. You can't run any real scientific method on it because, just like how you can't cross the same river twice, you can't evaluate the same Google twice (since they're constantly running experiments on you, the surfer, in real time), and obviously you're competing with a gigantic graph of web sites, which you also can't evaluate twice, since it changes every time a new page goes online, goes offline, or gets republished with some tiny edit.
Most SEO people don't think this way, but because I'm a programmer, I think you should start learning SEO by understanding how Google works. For instance (blatant self-promotion), you could check out this video where I give you Google PageRank in five lines of Ruby:
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-pagerank-in-...
There's also a free SEO book which is supposed to be great. I haven't had time to read it but I hear great things about it.
Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
#16Nice!
Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
#170. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some common word like Yelp. 1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keyword…
All good advice. I'd add:
1 Speed matters. Google is on record about this. They want your site to load quickly. This factor is part of the 'caffeine' update that Google is in the process of rolling out http://searchengineland.com/site-speed-googles-next-ranking-...
2 Don't stop with H1s. Think about the structure of your page. Subheaders should be H2, and so on.
3 Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap. They'll regularly pull it down from your server so as you add pages to your site, Google will know to index them. They'll tell you how many pages you have submitted, and how many are indexed.
While you're in Webmaster Tools, check out if your site has crawl errors. Check out the HTML suggestions. Google will point out the pages which are missing title tags, which have duplicate tags, short descriptions, etc. Lots of other information in there, including page load times.
Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
#180. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some common word like Yelp. 1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keyword…
All good advice. I'd add: 1 Speed matters. Google is on record about this. They want your site to load quickly. This factor is part of the 'caffeine' update that Google is in the process of rolling out http://searchengineland.com/site-speed-googles-next-ranking-... 2 Don't stop with H1s. Think about the structure of your page. Subheaders should be H2, and so on. 3 Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap. They'…
You don't need a site index unless you have a strange site. If you have text/HTML and you are linked from other sites, the site map won't matter.
Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
#19Really basic: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimiza...
My tips (once you understand the really basic): http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/04/search-engine-op...
HN comments on my tips: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553613
Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
#20It's probably something like this:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/adsense/42980-how-...
Which was discussed on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511935