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SEO tricks from Patio11

melmiranda.com

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Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#91

Post by chc »

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.

It's not a "no true Scotsman" fallacy — I'm saying that you're using entirely too high a bar. BCC's design is excellent compared to most sites for small businesses run by non-designers. It is not a work of art, but it is professionally designed, reasonably attractive and does not look obviously hacky. (By contrast, the old design actually was pretty crap.) Patrick's audience is not known to have discriminating design taste, so IMO it is fine. Take a look at, say, the website for a local bike shop to see what what bad design looks like.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#92

Post by tolas »

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…

I completely agree that /blog was better than blog subdomain in the past, but this article has me convinced that google now treats them the same.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganiz...

Am I wrong?

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#95

Post by eps »

irahul wrote: post #56
eps wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love that it gives that impression It doesn't, that's just your fan club talking. It looks like a run-of-the-mill WordPress theme. > Anyhow ... What you just said translates into "Design doesn't really matter." There is a difference between doing minimum needed not to scare away customers, and refining the design to appeal to both existing and future audiences. Latter is the case of why design matters, former is…

> It doesn't, that's just your fan club talking. I think hostility(fan club) will only derail the conversation. Irrespective of whether the posters are fan boys or not, they are going to take offence, and then everything goes south.

It's not hostility, it's stating the obvious. patio11 as well as few other HN high-karmers get their most trivial comments routinely up voted to the top of every thread. It is reasonable to assume that this happens because a large number of people take triviality as revelations or insight because it comes from a person they really like. That's fanboyism. May not be the most neutral term, but it captures the essence of the problem - the lack of critical thinking. The comment about the website design (the one I took an issue with) had the exact same problem - if one removes the positive bias, the website looks bland at best.

With regards to being an anonymous jerk - I like my privacy, but should it have been an in-person conversation I would've said the same thing and probably then some.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#96

Post by blacksmythe »

zacharycohn wrote: post #90
anjc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. To be honest, one of the things i liked most about HN was the lack of downvoting (I never realised it was possible...i thought the grey posts were caused by mods or something). I know in effect there's no real difference...but the whole place felt more 'community' like. Ah well.

The min threshhold I think is now 500 karma. It's a way to ensure that only people who have been around for a while and understand the community have the ability to downvote, and the rule is only downvote contentless posts (like memes, "+1"'s, etc).

Rudeness gets downvoted pretty aggressively.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#97

Post by melissamiranda »

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.

Right. Twitter is great for distributing a link, but having your link on twitter.com is not going to help you rank for Google search results.

What does work is people seeing your link on Twitter and posting it around the internet.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#98

Post by melissamiranda »

patio11 wrote: post #41
melissamiranda wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but he made that years ago. He clearly invested a lot in design for kalzumeus.com, which he made much later. If anything, this is a case for figuring out that design does matter.

He clearly invested a lot in design for kalzumeus.com I love that it gives that impression. $99 logo, $70 wordpress template. Anyhow, as folks have noted, I'm not historically known for high-quality Web 2.0 design. I have vanishingly little design skill and poor taste, so I tend to do the minimum necessary to not scare away credit cards. I hope that the refresh on AR makes a positive impression on people, but making…

It's still a good looking site, and his copy is spot on. No one said design has to be very expensive or custom made, it just has to work. Ask anyone on the street if kalzumeus.com looks professional, and they'll say yes. That's what matters.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#99

Post by anjc »

zacharycohn wrote: post #90
anjc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. To be honest, one of the things i liked most about HN was the lack of downvoting (I never realised it was possible...i thought the grey posts were caused by mods or something). I know in effect there's no real difference...but the whole place felt more 'community' like. Ah well.

The min threshhold I think is now 500 karma. It's a way to ensure that only people who have been around for a while and understand the community have the ability to downvote, and the rule is only downvote contentless posts (like memes, "+1"'s, etc).

Jasus, i'll never get to 500. Those rules make sense, but the parent comment in this thread had been downvoted despite being correct. Fairly Redditish (the one thing that puts me off Reddit). Thanks anyway.

Re: SEO tricks from Patio11

#100

Post by melissamiranda »

eps wrote: post #47
patio11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He clearly invested a lot in design for kalzumeus.com I love that it gives that impression. $99 logo, $70 wordpress template. Anyhow, as folks have noted, I'm not historically known for high-quality Web 2.0 design. I have vanishingly little design skill and poor taste, so I tend to do the minimum necessary to not scare away credit cards. I hope that the refresh on AR makes a positive impression on people, but making…

> I love that it gives that impression It doesn't, that's just your fan club talking. It looks like a run-of-the-mill WordPress theme. > Anyhow ... What you just said translates into "Design doesn't really matter." There is a difference between doing minimum needed not to scare away customers, and refining the design to appeal to both existing and future audiences. Latter is the case of why design matters, former is…

There's two kinds of design: 1) visual design that's about aesthetics. 2) UX design which is how well something works.

A usable site that is a bit ugly will win over a great looking one that confuses the user. Craigslist is the best example of this, it doesn't look great, but millions of people use it. Foursquare wasn't as pretty as Gowalla, but it won because it was a better game - becoming mayor was more engaging than dropping teddy bears.

BCC was well designed in that it delivered exactly what people were looking for. Sure, it may convert better if it looked better, but it was successful nonetheless. But the whole point is that Patrick has learned that visual design also matters, which is why appointment reminder looks better.

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