Great discussion, thanks. Now im off to the urology forum to ask about my sore elbow. Theyre all doctors, right? They all went to med school. A body part is a body part...skin and bones and theyre all connected anyway.
Minimum Viable SEO
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: Minimum Viable SEO
#32I 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!
Do you know what keywords are generating the most traffic for your competitors, what keywords you'll most likely be able to rank for, what keywords have the highest conversion ratio, are you using video sitemaps, etc.
It sounds like your just constantly reading material aimed at beginners rather than diving in depth into the subject.
Re: Minimum Viable SEO
#33We've spent a lot of time doing whitehat SEO on our website, and it's paying off (2x search traffic in 6 months). I really would recommend most startups spend a few days reading up on it from good quality sources. Nearly 40% of all our traffic comes from search so it makes sense to pay it some attention.
It's not hard. What is hard is navigating your way through the crooks/spammers/quacks who will try every trick in the book to try and sell you something you don't need. Startups do not need to hire experts to do it for them. What they need to do is solve problems like they solve other problems, with no money.
People who sell SEO usually:
- Have the gift of the gab
- Prey on peoples ignorance
- Prey on peoples greed
There are good SEO people out there, but they are rare. Also I struggle to imagine a situation where smart people just can't read up on it themselves and execute it themselves.
As a startup you should be focusing on good quality content and sustainable growth. So play to your strengths and don't pay a lot of money for magic potions that offer short term benefits. Play the long term game.
SEOMoz is a good place to start (their free blogs etc). Executing good technical SEO on your own website is pretty easy.
Tibbon made a good point, 'dont do SEO do accessibility`. I'm not sure I'd go to that extreme, but it's a good way of looking at it. Google is your most disabled user, it can't see very well, it can't really understand things very well either. If you make your site highly accessible you're well on your way to good SEO.
Re: Minimum Viable SEO
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, but what the hell does that have to do with building the site. Inbound links are obvious. Wow, really, is that all? And there are entire communities devoted to this? Seriously, I really want to know what I'm missing because I feel like I must be whiffing pretty hard here not to see it.
It's a lot more complicated than you are letting on. What you are saying is like saying architecture is just drawing diagrams or good journalism is just writing about stuff. Like many industries, there's an art to SEO and plenty of nuances far beyond clean coding and user friendly design.
It's not easy getting links. More importantly, if you have a great product where everyone else has great products, the marginal benefit of having the best product with the most amount of authoritative links is huge, because the # of clicks that come from the top result over #2 is monumental. So even if you get thousands upon thousands of links, like those that rank for "cheap flights", it's the site that gets thousands and thousands +1 that will win the day, and make millions more on a long enough timeline.
Re: Minimum Viable SEO
#35The 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...
The post is not intended to be a SEO guide. It is priceonomics's doing their SEO (getting inbound links, etc.).
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Re: Minimum Viable SEO
#36A 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?
who recommends highly nested folder trees? i've not heard this and have certainly seen it hurt sites. all things equal, flatter is better. my rule of thumb is go as flat as you can while still having an organized, navigable URL structure.
Re: Minimum Viable SEO
#37Don't do SEO. Do accessibility. Seriously, don't worry a single bit about SEO. Yet, if you make it so that your site's content, navigation and URLs are screen-reader friendly, then you've probably made a site that has solid SEO and is accessible to people with vision problems. Yet, just doing SEO doesn't make for a very accessible site all the time. Once this is done, make good content, be real and responsive humans…
I absolutely agree... that this is how it should be.
The only problem is that it isn't currently this way (despite what Google and Matt Cutt's might say). It is naive to think that this approach is going work.
Furthermore, you're competitors are going to do accessibility + SEO, and they are going to trounce you. randfish said this better than I could, so I'll leave it at that.
You can get away with what you are suggesting if you have staggeringly awesome content, but even then - why risk it. If you integrate SEO into your culture from the start, and have the right process then it doesn't have to be that hard.
Re: Minimum Viable SEO
#38I did a quick SEO analysis on priceonomics.com. Most of these tips fall into the 20% category. Maybe they can use some of these tips to perfect their SEO strategies.
1. Blog on a subdomain.
Though sometimes easier for administration, subdomains might dilute your SEO efforts. Links to a subdomain don't count 100% as links to your main domain. A /blog/ could help with the generation of incoming links and addition of fresh content to the domain you want indexed a lot.
2. Employ Canonical
www. redirects to non-www. Trailing slashes get added automatically. So far so good. But it is still easy to create duplicate URL's by adding random dynamic variables.
Without Canonical an URL like /boats/?dupe=content will point to the same resource as /boats/. Here you might introduce a canonical problem. (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...)
3. Optimize your site for speed
Though not that many search queries are affected by the site-speed algo, site speed remains very important for your visitors, and so indirectly for your SEO/marketing efforts. Google Site Speed plugin, Yslow or these guidelines (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) might help you fix some of these issues and gain a few seconds.
Mostly loading javascript just before , turning on caching, and compressing and combining resources.
4. Robots.txt vs meta robots
/search is disallowed in robots.txt. If you disallow it on a page basis, with meta robots, you can specify: "noindex, follow". That way if people link to your search results, link juice will keep flowing through your site.
5. Breadcrumbs
Add rich snippets mark-up. For product information and reviews, but an obvious contender is the breadcrumb. Link to your twitter (and future Google+ profile) with 'rel=me' to signify ownership of your graph.
6. Images
Add an alt-attribute to the site logo. Specify the dimensions for faster rendering.
7. Don't critique ehow.com if you fill Google's index with 245.000+ automated results.
Or put less bluntly: Write more unique content to introduce bigger categories. Add more relevant content to your listings (reviews, search/trend data, price watch).
8. Make clear if an item is "already sold".
If I click on 10 entries and I get 10 times "item already sold" I start to doubt the usefulness of the application. I compare this to a job site, where the jobs are mostly filled: You happen upon such a site through Google, because Google still thinks these listings are relevant.
9. Quality
The site is mostly void of trust factors. Due to some listings being in ALL-CAPS, some result pages can look a bit spammy. Add more trust factors, and try to repair spammy listings.
Re: Minimum Viable SEO
#39Don't do SEO. Do accessibility. Seriously, don't worry a single bit about SEO. Yet, if you make it so that your site's content, navigation and URLs are screen-reader friendly, then you've probably made a site that has solid SEO and is accessible to people with vision problems. Yet, just doing SEO doesn't make for a very accessible site all the time. Once this is done, make good content, be real and responsive humans…
I read this, and all I can see is: "Don't do marketing." "Just make a good product and people will find it." I think this is the downfall of many great products. The current startup world has an idealistic belief that better products always win and if you build something people want, they'll find it, when in fact, this has never been true. The "best" politicians consistently lose to those better at marketing and bran…
I believe parent was trying to express the sentiment that search engines inherently favor sites that are well-structured and present the relevant keywords in a format that is easily parsed by web crawlers.
Re: Minimum Viable SEO
#40We've spent a lot of time doing whitehat SEO on our website, and it's paying off (2x search traffic in 6 months). I really would recommend most startups spend a few days reading up on it from good quality sources. Nearly 40% of all our traffic comes from search so it makes sense to pay it some attention. It's not hard. What is hard is navigating your way through the crooks/spammers/quacks who will try every trick in…
There's no question that whitehat SEO pays off. And referring to startups, you mention "I struggle to imagine a situation where smart people just can't read up on it themselves and execute it themselves."
It has everything to do with your opening line: "We've spent a lot of time doing whitehat SEO on our website".
It always comes down to TIME. If you're a new startup, you're trying to work on your business, not in it.
Then you need to find someone who can help you with whitehat organic SEO. And as you mentioned, the hard part is navigating your way through the 'quacks'