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SEO tricks from Patio11

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Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#71

Post by RP_Joe »

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.

Design for conversion matters. Not aesthetics.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#72

Post by anjc »

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.

Does Google still give weight to the .edu domain? It'd surely be unhelpful to proper meritorious rankings seeing as it's one of the first strategies SEOers will use?

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#73

Post by RP_Joe »

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 problem is, what is high quality content? That is never defined. I talked to SEO who though he had a great writer because it flowed so well. But the articles were all fluff. We really should define what great content is, because I think there are many different ideas about this.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#74

Post by blauwbilgorgel »

anjc wrote: post #63
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.

They are talking about Twitter having no link juice.

With my post I tried to show that Twitter has both SEO (indexation, ranking, discovery) and marketing value (visitors, network, following).

Using Twitter is so-so SEO strategy. But it is an invaluable online marketing strategy.

Just dumping your links on Twitter and calling that link building is silly, and he is right to shoot that down. But using Twitter a little more intelligently, would have you connecting with other webmasters and linkerati: People who can add (Twitter) links to their sites, for example when they blog about the topic of your tweet, or submit it to Hacker News.

There are valid reasons to ditch Twitter: if your produce content just for ranking, instead of your users, and you lack a brand, because you have a keyword-in-domain.net, then Twitter will be very ineffective. No one wants to follow or engage with a non-brand, with highly optimized content.

If you have a brand and produce interesting content, you'll shoot yourself in the foot, if you ignore Twitter.

>> Do .edu links have any ranking weight anymore?

I don't know, I am unable to measure their value (lack control groups with the exact same linking profiles)

There is good reason to believe there is something like "proximity to authority". Taking a seed set of quality websites (Stack overflow, Wikipedia, a lot of .edu domains) you can calculate the distance/similarity of your site to this seed set and measure your own quality and authority.

If this is a solid measure, then the .edu TLD alone might not give a free pass. It matters if the .edu is deemed authoritative or not and to what degree. A link from cnn.com can be more authoritative, relevant, contextual and so provide more ranking weight, than a link from a random university student page that happens to end in ".edu".

A nofollow link always caries mention-value. For a smart search engine just a relevant mention of, for example "SEOmoz", could attribute a vote to http://seomoz.org . Also an added benefit of mentions is the increased "search results estimate" for your brand or product. Some people give more trust to companies that have more results in the index, especially when comparing companies.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#75

Post by mechanical_fish »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #6

Ooh, look, an on-topic location to ask Patrick questions. ;) So, about that whole "subdomain" thing, as mentioned in this article. The problem in SEO is that separate subdomains accrue separate Google scores, correct? So if I was to serve my whole site from a third-tier domain, like "www.example.com", that would be okay? Provided I were not foolish enough to also put stuff on "example.com" and "other.example.com" and…

Thanks to everyone for the excellent replies.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#76

Post by anjc »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #74
anjc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are talking about Twitter having no link juice. With my post I tried to show that Twitter has both SEO (indexation, ranking, discovery) and marketing value (visitors, network, following). Using Twitter is so-so SEO strategy. But it is an invaluable online marketing strategy. Just dumping your links on Twitter and calling that link building is silly, and he is right to shoot that down. But using Twitter a little…

I wasn't disagreeing with you, but so far as i can see, nearly all of the benefits you listed are marketing ones, which twitter is practically essential for these days.

In terms of marketing a product, indexation and discovery aren't critical issues, even if it's nice SEO to be able to control it in such a fashion, but i can't see evidence of ranking being affected by tweets.

Thanks for the info re .edu and mention-values, makes total sense.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#77

Post by mattmanser »

anjc wrote: post #66
irahul wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 succe…

You're morphing the meaning of design that was conveyed in the article:

A good looking, well designed website will convey credibility and professionalism. Even if you’re just two guys coding at a Starbucks, you can look like a big, well-known brand. Invest in design.

BCC does not convey credibility and professionalism and is not good looking. It doesn't look like a Starbucks brand, it looks like some guy in his bedroom put it together.

appointmentreminder.org, on the other hand, does follow that advice.

So either Patio11's ignoring his own advice, the author misinterpreted it or Patio11forgot to add 'tailor to your market', which BCC might be.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#78

Post by rmc »

anjc wrote: post #64
rmc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, it means downvotes. When you start going below 0 it starts greying out. I dunno why people were downvoting that comment, but it's been upvoted now and is non-grey.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#79

Post by _delirium »

hugorodgerbrown wrote: post #65

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 seem…

I find that pretty annoying when I'm looking for tools, but I do think it works, with varying degrees of shadiness. Some companies completely rebrand a product as if it were custom-designed for an area, taking their Foo Software and making it Foo Software for Healthcare, when in fact that's a lie and it wasn't customized for healthcare at all (and certainly not based on any knowledge of the area or research into its practices). Maybe users don't notice, and even if they do, sometimes you can mitigate it by just giving refunds freely to the users who complain, and keeping the money of those who don't.

An even scammier version of that is to rebrand software you didn't even make, like take VLC and rebrand it as customized video software for $whatever, when indeed you've done no customization for anything.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#80

Post by anjc »

mattmanser wrote: post #77
anjc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""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 succe…

You're morphing the meaning of design that was conveyed in the article: A good looking, well designed website will convey credibility and professionalism. Even if you’re just two guys coding at a Starbucks, you can look like a big, well-known brand. Invest in design. BCC does not convey credibility and professionalism and is not good looking. It doesn't look like a Starbucks brand, it looks like some guy in his bedro…

Sorry you're right, i did change the meaning (even though i read the article :S).

In that sense you're totally right, BCC doesn't convey credibility, it looks like a landing page, and personally, i'd immediately go off the site if it was a product i was looking for because it looks scammy to me. It works though, apparently, is all i meant.

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