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Minimum Viable SEO

blog.priceonomics.com

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61–68 of 68 posts

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#61

Post by chunkyslink »

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…

Are you saying DO blog on a subdomain or DONT blog on a subdomain. Sorry it wasnt clear for me.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#62

Post by smtm »

chunkyslink wrote: post #61
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…

Are you saying DO blog on a subdomain or DONT blog on a subdomain. Sorry it wasnt clear for me.

Do it in a subdirectory, the links to your blogpost will count as links for the various ranking indicators. Your blogs role is to feed traffic to your main site.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#63

Post by notatoad »

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!

SEO fundamentals: google is smarter than you are, and has invested a lot of effort into discovering the sort of websites that their users want to visit. If you make the sort of website that users want to visit (relevant content with clear navigation), google will send their users to it.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#64

Post by ljf »

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.

where did you read that they had no SEO before?

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#65

Post by quicksilver03 »

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!

What's the point of clean URLs? Everybody parrots this "clean URLs" meme, but do we have a definitive proof that clean URLs help and that unclean URLs penalise a site?

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#67

Post by rmc »

rmc wrote: post #48
tibbon wrote: post #21

Don'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…

This is a simplification. Yes, I agree that making your site accessible improves SEO, but there are lots of things that fall under SEO, and not accessibility that you should do. E.g. "What am I ranking for?" will tell you what the wider internet thinks your site is good at. "What search terms are bringing people to my site?" will tell you what your visitors really want. "How many people are searching for X and Y?" wi…

Another SEO non-accessibility advantage, you get to learn what your customers call your product/service.

e.g. I like going on motorbike holidays, like "Long Way Round" (but not as extreme) that's called "motorbike touring". Not motorbike holidays, or trips, or travelling, but touring. One step of SEO is to see what people are searching for, which will tell you what your customers call your service.

Re: Minimum Viable SEO

#68

Post by tibbon »

danneu wrote: post #42
tibbon wrote: post #21

Don'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…

Climbing search engine rankings has less to do with on-site SEO perfection yet much more to do with backlinks. Look at what porn and gambling kings are doing to compete with eachother. Too many posts about SEO get everyone obsessing over marginal website tweaks/details when a single backlink to their webite doesn't even exist outside of their HN account.

I don't mean to say that you shouldn't be doing PR, Marketing and Social Media efforts; because you should. Yet, I don't think of press releases, making awesome products and participating on social networks to be SEO. But if you do them right, you'll get link backs as well.
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