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SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

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Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#71

Post by alvah »

buboard wrote: post #21
Cenk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From personal experience: Yes, correct markup and h1 tags etc (“On-Page SEO“) all matter. Set everything up correctly, that should take your frontend dev a couple days at most for a small to medium site. But that will do almost nothing unless it’s coupled with loads of backlinks. Get a tool like ahrefs or semrush (they’re expensive because they’re good, but a one-week trial is enough to take a look around in the begi…

> ahrefs or semrush OK I gotta ask: these 2 particular bots constantly scan my site once an hour. Why?

There's an arms race in the SEO tools market, to have the largest / most frequently updated / most accurate backlinks database. Ahrefs have used the claim that their bot is the most active (apart from Googlebot) in their marketing.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#72

Post by Cenk »

buboard wrote: post #21
Cenk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From personal experience: Yes, correct markup and h1 tags etc (“On-Page SEO“) all matter. Set everything up correctly, that should take your frontend dev a couple days at most for a small to medium site. But that will do almost nothing unless it’s coupled with loads of backlinks. Get a tool like ahrefs or semrush (they’re expensive because they’re good, but a one-week trial is enough to take a look around in the begi…

> ahrefs or semrush OK I gotta ask: these 2 particular bots constantly scan my site once an hour. Why?

Basically what the other commenters said, they scan the entire web to find out who links to whom and how many backlinks each site has.

One thing you can do is stop them from scanning your site with robots.txt – some SEO people recommend this to prevent your competitors from finding out where you got your backlinks from, but I haven’t tried it.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#73

Post by Cenk »

throwaway77384 wrote: post #23
buboard wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ahrefs or semrush OK I gotta ask: these 2 particular bots constantly scan my site once an hour. Why?

Complete speculation: They make their money by assessing back-links. So they crawl as many websites as possible, as often as possible, to establish some kind of view of who is linking to what. From that, they extrapolate some kind of popularity score, which they can probably correlate with keywords and types of users and searches. That is what they sell back to users, presumably. I am actually quite interested to see…

> I am actually quite interested to see how clear their data / recommendations would be, but haven't had the time to do so yet.

I have tried both, and while ahrefs probably has a better dataset, semrush does very specific recommendations when it comes to link building for example. They will suggest what sites to contact to ask for backlinks (something I have not yet tried, because other people email me all the time asking for backlinks or guest posts so I know how annoying it is).

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#74

Post by gundmc »

tyre wrote: post #64
PaulRobinson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but interestingly (to me, at least), Google have modified their search engine crawler over many, many iterations so that what it values is the same as what a user would value. When people would keyword stuff, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working. When people would work on backlink farms, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working. When price comparison search e…

Now the first eight results are articles like: Title: How to poach an egg that's easy for everyone Content: Are you looking for a way to poach an egg? We have found the easiest recipes for poached eggs anywhere and compiled them for you here. Don't worry, if you want the cleanest, mess-free way to simply poach an egg, this is how to poach an egg. ## Why would you want to poach an egg? Poaching eggs is a delicious way…

This is particularly bad in the food/recipe space. I've wondered if it's for SEO or if it's to stretch the content length of a short recipe and allow more spots for ads.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#75

Post by technion »

tilolebo wrote: post #12

> The main issue was that the writers weren’t SEO specialists: they knew how to write good content, but good content is NOT always the same as SEO content. > The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword. Then, you create content based on that inte…

I keep in mind when seeing these statements that the entire SEO industry is built around convincing people web developers shouldn't develop websites (it can't rank without an SEO expert), mechanics shouldn't write guides on cars (an SEO is better qualified) and so on. The fact half the SEO guides out there either contradict Google's advice, or rate most top search sites horribly should also be considered.

I'm not saying there's no truth in this do consider it critically.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#77

Post by untoreh »

codingdave wrote: post #53

Keep in mind that this is posted on the site of an organization that provides SEO services. In my experience, the SEO game is a waste of time if you are looking for long-term traffic. Not that it doesn't work in the short-term - it does. And there are good practices in how to structure your pages, and making sure they perform well on multiple devices. But all of my personal and work-related sites have gotten their lo…

there is a minimum basket of SEO optimizations that are worth keeping track of and are 'natural', like proper site hierarchy, meta tagging, linking out to connected social accounts, the rest of the time is better spent on what the site is actually about.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#78

Post by aklemm »

noelceta wrote: post #37
rchaud wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these are still current SEO practice, however: > Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. - FB, Twitter and Reddit may not mark external links as "nofollow" explictly (which would kill their backlink value), but searc engines are smart enough to reduce the power of these links as these are "user-gene…

Yep, the impact of social links is pretty low on their own. You do, however, get these 2 benefits: - If your content gets a ton of views, people will start Googling for it and clicking your result, specifically. This will increase your CTR, which is a known ranking factor. - People who LOVE your content on Reddit or wherever will link to your website from their blog (hence, more backlinks).

I'll never forget the SEO consultant who, when I told him I wanted to focus on CTR, told me it was not a factor in ranking. This was many years ago, but it was obvious Google would use it, and it should have been obvious to him too.

Re: SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

#79

Post by rawoke083600 »

aklemm wrote: post #78
noelceta wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the impact of social links is pretty low on their own. You do, however, get these 2 benefits: - If your content gets a ton of views, people will start Googling for it and clicking your result, specifically. This will increase your CTR, which is a known ranking factor. - People who LOVE your content on Reddit or wherever will link to your website from their blog (hence, more backlinks).

I'll never forget the SEO consultant who, when I told him I wanted to focus on CTR, told me it was not a factor in ranking. This was many years ago, but it was obvious Google would use it, and it should have been obvious to him too.

In his defence Google is on record saying they DON'T use it.
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