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Minimum Viable SEO

blog.priceonomics.com

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Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#51

Post by weeksie »

danneu wrote: post #46
weeksie wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Backlinks are everything. Nowadays, I think you have to try pretty hard to produce markup that Googlebot can't interpret. I rocketed my forum community to the top of Google by generating backlinks. Some people consider it grunt labor, but I found it a lot of fun, especially if you get a program that keeps track of your rankings. It's addictive. And this is forum software that is rife with duplicate content, has URLs…

That's sort of my point. I mean, getting links to your site isn't exactly a secret, this has been key since Google first came on the scene. Sure, it's hard work to have a reputable site and to promote it correctly, but it's not rocket science. In fact, it's pretty typical common sense.

I get the point about duplicate content, that's something I had heard but not really delved into because, well, decent architecture usually means not having that sort of stuff around.

The more I hear SEO "experts" go on about things, the more I think it's a bit of a scam. Scam is probably the wrong word, as I'm sure many SEO people are well meaning, but the more I look the more it all seems like snake oil.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#52

Post by TomGullen »

xander54 wrote: post #41
TomGullen wrote: post #33

We'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…

2x search traffic over 6 months? That is not something to be proud of. A real SEO would have got 6x easy on a site with no existing SEO.

All depends where you are measuring from doesn't it! Where do you think I was measuring from when I said 2x? A site with 0 traffic? That would be quite easy to x6 sure.

Also your post smells exactly like the sort of sales pitch people seeking SEO should try to avoid. Big grandiose speculative statements.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#53

Post by TomGullen »

ddemuth wrote: post #40
TomGullen wrote: post #33

We'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…

Most startups as far as I know don't have much money, but if they do have money then fair enough they can spend it on SEO if they think it would be beneficial. As you say though it's going to be hard to find someone decent and honest.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#54

Post by brc »

TomGullen wrote: post #33

We'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…

For me, spending money on SEO doesn't make much sense.

However, spending time does.

Most of the big wins on SEO are a combination of strategy and time. As in : have a strategy to get links, and spend time on that strategy.

Sure, you can pay someone to do this for you, but anyone who is smart enough to develop software is more than smart enough to do SEO.

The big mistake people make is thinking it exists outside of marketing. In fact your SEO strategy and your marketing strategy are just two dishes on the overall meal of gaining customers.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#55

Post by thenextcorner »

weeksie wrote: post #51
danneu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backlinks are everything. Nowadays, I think you have to try pretty hard to produce markup that Googlebot can't interpret. I rocketed my forum community to the top of Google by generating backlinks. Some people consider it grunt labor, but I found it a lot of fun, especially if you get a program that keeps track of your rankings. It's addictive. And this is forum software that is rife with duplicate content, has URLs…

That's sort of my point. I mean, getting links to your site isn't exactly a secret, this has been key since Google first came on the scene. Sure, it's hard work to have a reputable site and to promote it correctly, but it's not rocket science. In fact, it's pretty typical common sense. I get the point about duplicate content, that's something I had heard but not really delved into because, well, decent architecture u…

You might be looking at the wrong places or listening to the wrong people...

There are plenty of great search resources out there. I would suggest to start at http://searchengineland.com to get a better sense of the landscape, especially everything Danny Sullivan writes

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#56

Post by melc »

In addition to the 3 minimal actions I would also add, to use relevant keywords in each page's content. Often I notice clients creating content without actually using the keywords, by which they want the specific pages to be found. Also check the grammar, especially when creating multi-language content.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#57

Post by semanticist »

jsm386 wrote: post #50
blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #38

I 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 fr…

On point 1 - if you do have your blog already stuck on a subdomain (blog.site.com) this a neat solution to serve it through site.com/blog that might work for you: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-c...

Reverse proxying an external application isn't always as trivial as just proxy_pass in vhost.conf and go - we recently moved our company blog from blog.picklive.com to picklive.com/blog and it caused issues with WordPress relating to cookies for the admin control panel and invalid cookies set by WordPress caused us huge problems with our actual app.

These issues were fixed by doing slightly more complicated proxying rules and by filtering the cookies as part of the proxying.

Reverse proxying is a really powerful technique (you could sit things like mod_security in front of your relatively vulnerable WordPress install, for example), but unless you have an experienced sysadmin on hand to help if it all goes wrong it's probably not something you want to try based solely on an infographic.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#58

Post by jaredmck »

davidw wrote: post #43
trevin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think many SEO type people have done a terrible job of marketing their field, because the place they occupy in most people's minds is not a particularly nice one. I think emphasizing statistics and analysis would make a bit better impression on some of us. It turns on a light that says "aha, there is something real there!".

the problem is there are so many hacky, cold-calling SEOs that the majority of people you're likely to run into in SEO suck. when you really get into it (obviously biased) i think the combination of statistics, data mining, creative content and competitive analysis of your position in a perpetually changing market is a fascinating blend and you can learn as much as you want and take your skills and strategies in a ton of different directions.

it'd be nice if we could be completely transparent with analytics while iterating a search strategy for a large site, because the learning experience would be great whether you're a big-name, experienced SEO, looking to get further into SEO, or an anti-SEO hacker looking to just call us all out for being full of shit :) it'd be cool. too bad the economic reality of releasing complete analytics data to the entire internet makes this an impossible dream.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#59

Post by jaredmck »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #38

I 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 fr…

Agree entirely with your summary - lots of good advice.

The amount of actual content on the priceonomics product pages is super thin. google is not going to be a big fan of throwing out every page of search results into the index - you're pretty much ONLY creating duplicate content at this point. also the taxonomy has a ton of copies of what is actually the same item, depending on how it was written in the listing. http://priceonomics.com/headphones/sennheiser/hd-595/ http://priceonomics.com/headphones/sennheiser/hd595/ Sorting the taxonomy into distinct products and then adding some sort of content to beef up at least the category pages, which right now are 100% navigation, would be a big step forward. Lots of things you can do going forward, in thinking about this vertical, it's an interesting market space for SEO, lots of challenges and possible strategies.

I'm assuming eventually some sort of comparable product cross-linking will be built into the system?

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#60

Post by prawn »

weeksie wrote: post #51
danneu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backlinks are everything. Nowadays, I think you have to try pretty hard to produce markup that Googlebot can't interpret. I rocketed my forum community to the top of Google by generating backlinks. Some people consider it grunt labor, but I found it a lot of fun, especially if you get a program that keeps track of your rankings. It's addictive. And this is forum software that is rife with duplicate content, has URLs…

That's sort of my point. I mean, getting links to your site isn't exactly a secret, this has been key since Google first came on the scene. Sure, it's hard work to have a reputable site and to promote it correctly, but it's not rocket science. In fact, it's pretty typical common sense. I get the point about duplicate content, that's something I had heard but not really delved into because, well, decent architecture u…

I think what you're getting at is that the majority of SEO is pretty straightforward - I know what you mean about rarely discovering something new from SEO sites. The final x% is a bit more challenging.

At one point I put together a pretty basic site with one backlink and barely any attention to content and accidentally ranked #1 in Australia for "make money". One particular page on that site is four paragraphs I threw together and it's made $24k in four years for no effort since. I've had a few other events along those lines too, mostly leveraging the past property I built up and using that as a backlink.

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