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Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?

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Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?

#21

Post by sscheper »

My advice:

1. Content is king, obviously, but get inbound links through guest posts

2. The rest is details

The details: 1. Use alt img text to describe images

2. Use hyperlinks with solid naming conventions: http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/

and not

http://www.localseoguide.com/p=188270

3. Use rel=nofollow for links that you don't want the search engine to pick up.

For instance, if you're an amazon affiliate, your links should look like:

http://amazon.com/product/affiliateid=blahblah rel="nofollow">name of amazon product

4. Pick a title tag that you think people will search (e.g. "How to Lose Weight," not your post title, "Amazing thing that I did last month")

6. Add certain pages to your robot.txt file that you don't want to get picked up (i.e. your privacy policy or terms).

7. Ensure that there are no broken links within your site (internal broken links)

8. Have keywords and a metadescription on each page

Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?

#22

Post by bradrydzewski »

SEO can be expensive and time consuming, and a single update to Google's algorithm can send you back to the drawing board.

My advice: take all of the time and money and, instead of SEO, focus on making your product great or creating great site content.

If you have a site worth visiting, the quality linking and SEO will eventually take care of itself. People will blog about your site and link to it without you having to do anything other than being the best at what you do.

Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?

#23

Post by noodle »

here's the basic set of rules i adhere to:

1) only pick a few keywords.

2) make sure you have those keywords in the title tags, in an h1 that either copies or restates the title, and in an h2 that is basically a site summary sentence/paragraph. you can use css to hide or image replace the h1/h2.

3) get some other sites to link back to you. old, established, trusted sites are best. avoid link farms. avoid becoming a link farm yourself to obtain links. links with "nofollow" attributes don't count.

4) the url you have helps. whether it is yourkeyword.com, your-key-word.com or whatever.com/your-key-word, it isn't a huge thing to worry about (especially if you can't help it). but it does help to have the keywords in the url in some form.

5) in the end, content trumps most things. search engines are smart enough to recognize most spammy things. if you want to get good results, produce a good webpage with good content.

Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?

#24

Post by chaosmachine »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #18
jsm386 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's been my experience, as well.

Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?

#27

Post by metaprinter »

qeorge wrote: post #10

Here's the basics: - Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords, first 4 words of the title count the most) - Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4, img alt text, ul's, dl's) - Get links from…

what's wrong with subdomains?

Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?

#28

Post by webwright »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #2

0. 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…

Great summary.

I'd add that SEO is not just a ranking exercise-- it's a conversion exercise. On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should consider that the first ~60 characters of you tag and the first ~150 of your meta-description are what drives people to click through to your site.

Also, all other things being equal, the first position on SERPs gets ~42% of clicks... So it's a winner take all game unless you are talking about a content business.

OH-- also do some keyword analysis. In Andrew's example-- how many people search for "fishing tips" versus "fishing advice" or "how to fish" or "intro to fishing"? Keyword analysis is about finding out what people are searching for and then digging in to see how competitive those keywords are. If you want to dethrone the #1 result for "fishing tips" you'll want to analyze their SEO. If they are a 10 year old page-rank-9 domain with 87,500 inbound links, you might consider gunning for a less sought-after search term.

Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?

#29

Post by minouye »

metaprinter wrote: post #27
qeorge wrote: post #10

Here's the basics: - Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords, first 4 words of the title count the most) - Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4, img alt text, ul's, dl's) - Get links from…

what's wrong with subdomains?

It dilutes link juice--a subdomain is viewed as a separate site. Putting your blog as a subdirectory helps to build the authority of your main domain.

Re: Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?

#30

Post by eli_s »

metaprinter wrote: post #27
qeorge wrote: post #10

Here's the basics: - Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords, first 4 words of the title count the most) - Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4, img alt text, ul's, dl's) - Get links from…

what's wrong with subdomains?

they get treated as separate sites so your raking gets diluted
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