Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SEO tricks from Patio11

melmiranda.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 124 posts

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#61

Post by rmc »

nikcub wrote: post #42

At Techcrunch when we removed the share buttons average traffic to each post dropped 20-25%. We saw no jump in number of blog links, or tumblr's, or anything else. The buttons suck - we knew that a lot of users hated them (it adds 4 * 20 additional HTTP requests to the main page), but they were worth too much traffic to do away with. Social network referrals likely surpass search engine referrals for a lot of blogs a…

At Techcrunch when we removed the share buttons average traffic to each post dropped 20-25%. We saw no jump in number of blog links, or tumblr's, or anything else.

One thing I'm learning about SEO, is that you have to know your audience. This means you should know what they are searching for, and optimise for that. Likewise if your audience is a big user of twitter (which TechCrunch's audience would be), then use that to your advantage.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#62

Post by orionlogic »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #54

>> Twitter links has no SEO juice Besides using Twitter to: - build your network and following, - Twitter can aid in brand/product mentions - Some reason to believe Twitter links are followed by the search engines, so help with indexation and discovery.[1] - Some reason to believe Author/Agent/Identity rank of social profiles will start playing a role.[2] - Finally, there are sites who add Twitterfeeds to the author…

I agree with Schema.org. Use that extensively in your website. You get more pixel space in Google SERP's by microformatting your content.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#63

Post by anjc »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #54

>> Twitter links has no SEO juice Besides using Twitter to: - build your network and following, - Twitter can aid in brand/product mentions - Some reason to believe Twitter links are followed by the search engines, so help with indexation and discovery.[1] - Some reason to believe Author/Agent/Identity rank of social profiles will start playing a role.[2] - Finally, there are sites who add Twitterfeeds to the author…

They never said it doesn't have marketing juice, they're just talking about link building i presume. So surely it'd be better to focus on more solid SEO strategies than link building on no-follow sites and hoping that somebody mirrors it somewhere. Do .edu links even have any ranking weight anymore? It's probably one of the most abused link building schemes there is.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#64

Post by anjc »

rmc wrote: post #52
irahul wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about this one http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ That doesn't look that good looking to me.

I think that page has been A/B tested up the whazoo. It's probably optimised as much as possible to sell that software. I'll bet patio11 can put dollar figures on the placements of certain buttons, or the value of certain words.

What does it mean that your comment is half gray? You're more than likely totally correct so i hope it doesn't signify 'downvotes' or something...

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#65

Post by hugorodgerbrown »

Am I alone in finding the following quote profoundly depressing: "It cost Patrick $8.95 to buy [halloweengiftcards], $100 for a writer to make 5 pages of content, and he made thousands in sales."

Ditto "If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on."

This kind of seo-engineering just seems so desparate, as if SEO is the be-all and end-all of running an online business.

Whatever happened to having a site that obeys all the normal 'rules', and provides valuable information / services / products to your target audience. They'll find it.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#66

Post by anjc »

irahul wrote: post #57
chc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, you are not Patrick's target audience. He didn't say it had to make the design community swoon; just that it has to convey professionalism and draw your intended users in. I would bet the Bingo Card Creator website accomplishes these goals just fine for his core audience of middle-aged schoolteachers. Also, that site has not gotten a lot of attention for a while. His focus nowadays is on the much more at…

> He didn't say it had to make the design community swoon; just that it has to convey professionalism and draw your intended users in. That is a "no true scottsman" fallacy. When someone says design matters, it means having a pleasant design. BCC's design is not something that can be considered good. It still does business - that's great, but "it does business -> hence it has good design" doesn't hold.

"""When someone says design matters, it means having a pleasant design"""

'Pleasant' to who? Myspace's design is/was pleasant to teenagers, for example. So surely design is tied closely to the audience. If the goal is, let's say, making money, and the site has been A/B tested extensively and this 'design' makes the most money from its audience, then it's presumably the best design. There are so many anomalously successful website designs that ye can't just say it's about 'pleasantness', unless your audience are graphic designers.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#67

Post by anjc »

randfish wrote: post #10
a5seo wrote: post #8

I agree with all these points, except with respect to Twitter. There is one case where I have seen Twitter impact SEO and that's in getting a new URL indexed fast, and in local SEO... Lots of tweets about a local-related page from people whose (legit) accounts are located in the same region seem to help for local keywords.

Yeah. Have to agree with you here. I just tested this recently , getting a few hundred retweets of an obscure URL ranking on page 4 for an obscure term and it moved to page 2 within a few days. I suspect Google may not be getting Twitter data directly (or getting it as fast as when they had the direct relationship), but, at the very least, there's a strong second-order impact between pages earning lots of tweets and…

Is that 'second order impact' not tied to the public doing the link building for you, outside of twitter? E.g. blogs, reddit, etc, rather than Google actually putting ranking weight onto info in tweets?

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#68

Post by anjc »

danmaz74 wrote: post #50

Unfortunately, I have to agree on much of the advice. Especially, I just hate how much google gives credit to the terms which are in the domain name. Why is having been able to register a "good" domain first such an important signal about site relevance? On many searches the first page is full of "keyword.com" "keyword.net" "keyword.it" websites that were only made for SEO and Adwords and have no usefulness.

This is something Google are surely working on, or, i hope they are. As much as the topic of SEO fascinates me, when it's successful it can be so deleterious to the quality of results. Google search is practically useless, for many searches that i'd do which i'd imagine are common enough.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#69

Post by blauwbilgorgel »

patio11 wrote: post #26
wmf wrote: post #16

This part sounds like cargo cult black magic: "This works for .com (.edu, .org) domains, but not for non-US TLDs like .co or .ly." Does Google really discriminate based on TLDs?

Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: yes, Google certainly treats the Big Three differently than it does .co or .ly. I don't have specific evidence of them discriminating against .co/.ly, but the evidence that they discriminate for EMDs in the Big Three is overwhelming and undeniable.

Is this not a bias? As in: It only looks like Google discriminates for the Big Three, because they are so abundant?

I've heard from official sources like below that Google doesn't discriminate on TLD. There are my sites and Googlers who use ".info" TLD in a legit and well-ranking manner.

Where this "evidence" does play a role, is in spam/made for Adwords-sites. It is reasonable to assume that a .co or .ly will get more attention, to combat spam/made for Adwords sites that try to use Keyword-In-Domain tricks to outrank legit companies.

But if you are not making Keyword-In-Domain Made-For-Adwords sites, you have nothing to worry about (at least as for Google discrimination).

It is mostly _users_ who discriminate for a .com. If Google ranks website.ly in the top 5, but its users don't click on the result, in fear of spam or low-quality, then your rankings might suffer.

Matt Cutts interview on DomainRoundtable.

  "For example, do .com domains carry more weight than a 
  .net, .us, .info, etc. 

  He said that TLD doesn’t matter -- that’s the way Larry 
  and Sergey originally designed the Google algorithm. The 
  algorithm doesn’t care where the page is located, it’s 
  all about pagerank (LINKS) of the particular page. At the 
  end of answering this question he did admit that they 
  might have started to look at particularly cheap (and 
  spammy) TLDs differently than other TLDs or they might 
  start considering TLD in their algorithm if they’re not 
  already doing so."
So it is still good to advice against .io and witty domain names (portfol.io), but not for the reason of Google discrimination.

I am reminded by statements like: "For better ranking, claim your domain for 5+ years". Just because Google gives extra attention to domains with a low expiration date, because they correlate with spammy/get-rich-quick sites, doesn't mean that spam on a 5+ years registered domain is ok, or that simply claiming a domain for 10 years, somehow signals quality to Google.

You only have to worry about registration dates, when you know that you deliver low-quality content and you don't want to be found out soon.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#70

Post by anjc »

melissamiranda wrote: post #24
kevinburke wrote: post #21

Use Google Adword’s keyword tool to come up with keywords and write pages that speak to those topics. If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on. Rather than automating it or having the CEO or head marketing guy write everything, you want to define a process such that a freelancer or t…

The content should be high quality. This is why I mentioned the story of eHow and what a terrible thing it is, and why Patrick said "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create content in a fashion that scales while simultaneously ensuring that the user experience of consuming your content remains good" He specifically told us not to create crap content.

The amazingly high quality of your content will be irrelevant if the keyword density on your page is one that Google deems to be low quality.

"""If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on."""

^ That type of thing is pretty risky if it's one of your big strategies..

Post reply on HN