4 ms·

Really? People don't get that (white hat) SEO is, at its heart, simply make interesting content?

patio11 17y ago
That's like saying marketing is making remarkable products. It is true but incomplete and doesn't tell you anything actionable to get working on today. I'm sort of hoping my blog post said something that was true and non-vacuous.
- sachinag 17y ago
  Right, my point is that making good content may not be sufficient, but it is necessary. If you aren't making interesting content, the other stuff amounts to a rounding error. There are all sorts of people who will fiddle with tags and whatnot to try to perfectly shape their site because they're scared/lazy to not make good content. But there is nothing that has a higher ROI on time than making interesting content. Sure, try to make interesting content around the long tail terms that you can optimize for, but at the end of the day, you have to make interesting content.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
    - tumult 17y ago
      A webshop selling airline tickets won't rank better if you add "interesting content", thats just not the way it works. What? Yes it will. More recent links from people will give it more page rank score. If it's a new algorithm that helps find cheaper tickets and beats out the major competitors, for example, it'll get tons of links really quick from blogs talking about it. Ask the developers in the appstore whats more important, interesting content or a position in the top 5. I don't think you get how this works.
      - tomh- 17y ago
        "What? Yes it will. More recent links from people will give it more page rank score. If it's a new algorithm that helps find cheaper tickets and beats out the major competitors, for example, it'll get tons of links really quick from blogs talking about it." Right..so if e-commerce businesses just hired smart people to build algorithms and hope for viral effects they will rank high. You make it sound so easy.. unfortunately I would say this is unrealistic in most cases. In a realistic world you have to admit that it is very hard for businesses in saturated markets to just add "interesting content". Having a budget for online marketing, including seo, adds measurable ways to achieve sales. Spending a fortune on technology might be out of proportion compared to your business size. Having a sale, good customer service, coupon codes will give the same kind of buzz in the blog scene around your product. It is still part of the puzzle and you need more than one part to solve the puzzle. "I don't think you get how this works." Then tell me whats wrong with my statement about the appstore. Just telling someone he doesn't get it has no added value. You can make your statement more useful by, for example, adding some links to blog posts from people who write about the process of gaining a steady income stream using interesting content. edit: oops deleted the original post, had to repost it :/
  - tomh- 17y ago
    There are more types of websites than just content based websites and sometimes websites who have to compete for the exact same content. The one who understands internet marketing the best will have better rankings than the ones that don't. A webshop selling airline tickets won't rank better if you add "interesting content", thats just not the way it works. Also the "interesting content" might distract people from what they have to do, order tickets. People have to realize that internet marketing is here to stay and it is something you have to think about. Also your statement about spending time on interesting content gives your the highest ROI is not true. Hollywood and the game industry prove from time to time that they can create hypes and market B quality productions and still make tons of money. This also counts on the internet. Content is evaluated by machines (Google, Bing etc) who determine if it is interesting or not. Doing A/B testing to test which landing page works best is better time spent than spending your time hiring people to create interesting content. Just changing your button can increase sales by over 100%. Ask the developers in the appstore whats more important, interesting content or a position in the top 5.
bengebre 17y ago
I think we all want to believe that because building interesting things is so much more fun than marketing them. Unfortunately, I think we're all wrong. White hat SEO and analytics seem like the most amenable techniques to the coder's way of thinking. Avoiding them because a large component of that world (marketing) is out of line with our view of how things should work will only hurt us.
- FreeRadical 17y ago
  +1, I couldn't agree more. I would argue that gaining and sustaining traffic is the hardest part of doing a start-up.
  - patio11 17y ago
    I'm not picking on you here: I think one of the reasons this issue gives us fits is that we think about it in terms of "gaining and sustaining traffic", which is somewhere in the general vicinity of an actual business goal, but not quite there. "Traffic" is not valuable per se and often people optimize for it in ways which are counterproductive for the business. For example, if you get featured on TechCrunch, you will certainly get a lot of "traffic", but what does that get you, really? A few dozen comments saying the design of your front page would look better in blue, your VPS chugs under load, and "didn't Taxi.derm.me already do this last year"? And then tomorrow they'll have forgotten about you. But people spend insane amounts of time and effort trying to get on TechCrunch, when they could spend that time writing pitches to blogs whose owners will melt to know anyone who is reading them, or writing systems to make pillar content which will be attract qualified, interested prospects for the next decade. And even for those few (arguably) lucky folks who make it onto Techcrunch, they might assume that if getting a big splash "gains" traffic then subsequent big splashes are needed to "sustain" it, throwing an increasing amount of resources to further pessimize their business to fit the preferences of a narrow, fickle audience who does not spend money on the stuff they have to sell.
    - sachinag 17y ago
      Let's talk about TC for a minute: 1) they send less traffic than they did back in, say, 2006. It's only 3,000-4,000 uniques. 2) one backlink from them doesn't appear to be worth crap any more in Google. Google (as far as I can tell) looks much more at the heterogeneity of your linkbase than it does any individual link from a high PR site (maybe Wikipedia's excluded here, but I don't know). Patrick and Peldi's advice to target 40 smaller blogs with personalized pitches (there's that interesting content thing again - interesting to an audience of one each time) is probably better than TechCrunch traffic in every single way you slice it.
vaksel 17y ago
interesting content doesn't mean a thing if it doesn't get linked to. And to get linked to, you need to become some sort of an authority/celebrity. A good example is Jason complaining about ComScore and getting posted about on Techcrunch. If you or I wrote that same post, we wouldn't get a single link out of it. But when you are a celebrity, every little tidbit gets your more coverage. Granted sometimes you do get some recognition. i.e. I got linked to from LA Times for my post comparing Techcrunch to Kid's Choice Awards....but that was because the post got some recognition by being on HN front page for a day.
bigiain 17y ago
In my experience it's more like "make interesting content and don't make all the stupid and/or not-all-that-obvious mistakes many web designers make." Mo matter _how_ good your "interesting content" is, if your web design has it hidden behind a flash splash page or your entire site navigation is in some dynamic javascript menu system with no regular html links for spiders to find, you will not get traffic. Good content is the number 1 best thing you can do for your website. Not wasting the potential of that good content is, however, equally important.

That's like saying marketing is making remarkable products. It is true but incomplete and doesn't tell you anything actionable to get working on today. I'm sort of hoping my blog post said something that was true and non-vacuous.

sachinag 17y ago
Right, my point is that making good content may not be sufficient, but it is necessary. If you aren't making interesting content, the other stuff amounts to a rounding error. There are all sorts of people who will fiddle with tags and whatnot to try to perfectly shape their site because they're scared/lazy to not make good content. But there is nothing that has a higher ROI on time than making interesting content. Sure, try to make interesting content around the long tail terms that you can optimize for, but at the end of the day, you have to make interesting content.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - tumult 17y ago
    A webshop selling airline tickets won't rank better if you add "interesting content", thats just not the way it works. What? Yes it will. More recent links from people will give it more page rank score. If it's a new algorithm that helps find cheaper tickets and beats out the major competitors, for example, it'll get tons of links really quick from blogs talking about it. Ask the developers in the appstore whats more important, interesting content or a position in the top 5. I don't think you get how this works.
    - tomh- 17y ago
      "What? Yes it will. More recent links from people will give it more page rank score. If it's a new algorithm that helps find cheaper tickets and beats out the major competitors, for example, it'll get tons of links really quick from blogs talking about it." Right..so if e-commerce businesses just hired smart people to build algorithms and hope for viral effects they will rank high. You make it sound so easy.. unfortunately I would say this is unrealistic in most cases. In a realistic world you have to admit that it is very hard for businesses in saturated markets to just add "interesting content". Having a budget for online marketing, including seo, adds measurable ways to achieve sales. Spending a fortune on technology might be out of proportion compared to your business size. Having a sale, good customer service, coupon codes will give the same kind of buzz in the blog scene around your product. It is still part of the puzzle and you need more than one part to solve the puzzle. "I don't think you get how this works." Then tell me whats wrong with my statement about the appstore. Just telling someone he doesn't get it has no added value. You can make your statement more useful by, for example, adding some links to blog posts from people who write about the process of gaining a steady income stream using interesting content. edit: oops deleted the original post, had to repost it :/
- tomh- 17y ago
  There are more types of websites than just content based websites and sometimes websites who have to compete for the exact same content. The one who understands internet marketing the best will have better rankings than the ones that don't. A webshop selling airline tickets won't rank better if you add "interesting content", thats just not the way it works. Also the "interesting content" might distract people from what they have to do, order tickets. People have to realize that internet marketing is here to stay and it is something you have to think about. Also your statement about spending time on interesting content gives your the highest ROI is not true. Hollywood and the game industry prove from time to time that they can create hypes and market B quality productions and still make tons of money. This also counts on the internet. Content is evaluated by machines (Google, Bing etc) who determine if it is interesting or not. Doing A/B testing to test which landing page works best is better time spent than spending your time hiring people to create interesting content. Just changing your button can increase sales by over 100%. Ask the developers in the appstore whats more important, interesting content or a position in the top 5.

bengebre 17y ago

I think we all want to believe that because building interesting things is so much more fun than marketing them. Unfortunately, I think we're all wrong. White hat SEO and analytics seem like the most amenable techniques to the coder's way of thinking. Avoiding them because a large component of that world (marketing) is out of line with our view of how things should work will only hurt us.

FreeRadical 17y ago
+1, I couldn't agree more. I would argue that gaining and sustaining traffic is the hardest part of doing a start-up.
- patio11 17y ago
  I'm not picking on you here: I think one of the reasons this issue gives us fits is that we think about it in terms of "gaining and sustaining traffic", which is somewhere in the general vicinity of an actual business goal, but not quite there. "Traffic" is not valuable per se and often people optimize for it in ways which are counterproductive for the business. For example, if you get featured on TechCrunch, you will certainly get a lot of "traffic", but what does that get you, really? A few dozen comments saying the design of your front page would look better in blue, your VPS chugs under load, and "didn't Taxi.derm.me already do this last year"? And then tomorrow they'll have forgotten about you. But people spend insane amounts of time and effort trying to get on TechCrunch, when they could spend that time writing pitches to blogs whose owners will melt to know anyone who is reading them, or writing systems to make pillar content which will be attract qualified, interested prospects for the next decade. And even for those few (arguably) lucky folks who make it onto Techcrunch, they might assume that if getting a big splash "gains" traffic then subsequent big splashes are needed to "sustain" it, throwing an increasing amount of resources to further pessimize their business to fit the preferences of a narrow, fickle audience who does not spend money on the stuff they have to sell.
  - sachinag 17y ago
    Let's talk about TC for a minute: 1) they send less traffic than they did back in, say, 2006. It's only 3,000-4,000 uniques. 2) one backlink from them doesn't appear to be worth crap any more in Google. Google (as far as I can tell) looks much more at the heterogeneity of your linkbase than it does any individual link from a high PR site (maybe Wikipedia's excluded here, but I don't know). Patrick and Peldi's advice to target 40 smaller blogs with personalized pitches (there's that interesting content thing again - interesting to an audience of one each time) is probably better than TechCrunch traffic in every single way you slice it.

vaksel 17y ago

interesting content doesn't mean a thing if it doesn't get linked to. And to get linked to, you need to become some sort of an authority/celebrity. A good example is Jason complaining about ComScore and getting posted about on Techcrunch. If you or I wrote that same post, we wouldn't get a single link out of it. But when you are a celebrity, every little tidbit gets your more coverage. Granted sometimes you do get some recognition. i.e. I got linked to from LA Times for my post comparing Techcrunch to Kid's Choice Awards....but that was because the post got some recognition by being on HN front page for a day.

bigiain 17y ago

In my experience it's more like "make interesting content and don't make all the stupid and/or not-all-that-obvious mistakes many web designers make." Mo matter _how_ good your "interesting content" is, if your web design has it hidden behind a flash splash page or your entire site navigation is in some dynamic javascript menu system with no regular html links for spiders to find, you will not get traffic. Good content is the number 1 best thing you can do for your website. Not wasting the potential of that good content is, however, equally important.