Minimum Viable SEO • Hacker News Board

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#11

Post by jpzeni » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:16 PM UTC

tlack wrote: post #2

A bit off topic, but relevant to the suggestions in this post: a few of my friends are finding it more effective with Google to use a flat file structure rather than the highly nested folder trees that are usually recommended. Anyone have any thoughts/experience with this?

From my experience it all depends on the size of the site. If you have less than 200 pages on your site I'd recomment that you try and stick to no more than domain.com/folder/page whenever possible.

But, one other thing I would strongly recommend is to never create extra or redundant folders unless they really add a lot of value to your site usability. And, never, ever, create empty folders ... it seems like a no-brainer but it happens a lot more frequently then you might think with people using them to force a specific heirarchy on their site or for the sake of stuffing keywords into their URLs or just because they think the final URL looks 'nicer' that way.

Last thought on why flat is normally better, homepages are likely to accumulate more links than any other page on your site and often more links than the rest of the site combined. So the closer an interior page is to the homepage the more benefit it will derive from the inbound links pointing to the homepage.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#12

Post by rhizome » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:21 PM UTC

helipad wrote: post #9

The article mentions the beginner's SEO guide, but coming in at 2 pages, the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet from SEOmoz is my go-to resource: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...

I'm seeing only bad links to the PDF on that page.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#13

Post by brador » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:30 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #12

helipad wrote: post #9

The article mentions the beginner's SEO guide, but coming in at 2 pages, the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet from SEOmoz is my go-to resource: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...

I'm seeing only bad links to the PDF on that page.

Yep, same here. Google isn't helping either. Anyone want to upload the pdf for all?

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#14

Post by dsrikanth » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:37 PM UTC

I have to agree that most people ignore SEO because of the lack of understanding. May be they are intimidated by the very word. The three steps mentioned in the article: URL, Navigation, Page title go a long way. This is were content management systems like WordPress really help as these three things are taken care by design. In addition to this, internal linking structure is important to. Again, a proper CMS makes it way easy to get a decent SEO going to begin with.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#15

Post by dsrikanth » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:43 PM UTC

helipad wrote: post #9

The article mentions the beginner's SEO guide, but coming in at 2 pages, the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet from SEOmoz is my go-to resource: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...

http://seoeducation.in/pdfs/SEO_Web_Developer_Cheat_Sheet.pd... - this should work

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#16

Post by chocoheadfred » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:46 PM UTC

It's not what you say, it's what people say about you. Kinda like a popularity contest in high school. If you are quarterback screwing the hot cheerleader, most people are looking/following you (whether they "like" you or not). So, get links. Lots of 'em. source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Yes, setting up your site based on broad or long tail terms is good foundation...but you can rank your site for words that aren't even on your site. Why do you think disney ranks for 'exit' and 'leave'? http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution-of...

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#17

Post by weeksie » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:47 PM UTC

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I read something about SEO. I keep expecting there to be more to it or that I'm missing something. Other than that, SEO is just making sure you have reasonably semantic markup and clean URLS. Isn't that just plain old best practice anyway? What am I missing? I swear there must be something!

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#18

Post by pinchyfingers » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:52 PM UTC

If you working on an Internet startup and you're not thinking about SEO from day one: you suck.

Any decent marketing strategy is at least going to give a nod to SEO. Is your team is so consumed by your awesome product that you think it's more important than marketing and distribution?

I really hope that isn't true of anyone here. If championing product over marketing and distribution does sound like your team, I have GOOD NEWS! — you'll be too busy jerking each other off to notice that you're not making any money.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#19

Post by WillyF » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:53 PM UTC

weeksie wrote: post #17

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I read something about SEO. I keep expecting there to be more to it or that I'm missing something. Other than that, SEO is just making sure you have reasonably semantic markup and clean URLS. Isn't that just plain old best practice anyway? What am I missing? I swear there must be something!

You're definitely missing the incoming links part.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#20

Post by pinchyfingers » Fri, Jan 06, 2012, 7:53 PM UTC

weeksie wrote: post #17

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I read something about SEO. I keep expecting there to be more to it or that I'm missing something. Other than that, SEO is just making sure you have reasonably semantic markup and clean URLS. Isn't that just plain old best practice anyway? What am I missing? I swear there must be something!

uh... in-bound links?