7 ms·

Ask HN: How to be successful online without SEO bullshittery?

• patio11 16y ago
  There is a happy middle ground somewhere between "SEO douchebag" and "engineer scornful of effective marketing." Why should Google pick your review for e.g. Scott Pilgrim over every other review on the Internet? Is it better written? Who will attest to that? Is it from a better brand than Rotten Tomatoes or a more trusted voice than Roger Ebert? Is it better designed? Does it have a voice or perspective that speaks to an audience which Rotten Tomatoes and Ebert tragically ignore? If it does, why aren't people mentioning so? Go down the line for everything else you do: is this the best cat picture on the Internet? What attests to that? Is this the best Java framework tips on the Internet? What attests to that? More broadly, is there a market niche for someone who is a bit of a Java programmer, a bit of a film critic, and a bit of a cat photographer, and will it support you against the competition from people who make it their mission in life to do funny cat photos? Also, is it a good idea to get into these particular niches? LOLcats are are commodity business: any idiot can make them, many do. Reviews are a commodity business unless you are Roger Ebert: I can't name another reviewer in the entire world, and if you randomly pulled sentences from your review and the 15 other reviews of Scott Pilgrim that I read because I have far too much free time, I think it is highly unlikely that I will be able to identify your review. Or anyone else's, except Ebert. Java programming tips are, potentially, not a commodity business. You could either go StackOverflow (community, comprehensiveness, etc are value adds) or you could go Subject Domain Expert For Japanese Entrance Examination File Formats in Java. But, at the other end of the scale, "opinions about the new Java release from someone who is not Knuth, Gosling, or Alan Turing back from the dead" is a commodity business. Commodity businesses are bad places to be if you want quality to win out, because minute differentiations in quality are essentially unimportant in commodity businesses. There are many, many IP-based businesses where minute differentiations in quality mean 100x differences in returns. If you like quality, you probably want to be in one of those instead. "If I wrote it, they will come" is not a marketing strategy.
  • patio11 16y ago
    An elaboration: Maybe folks have never done this exercise before, and it is instructive and won't step on anyone's toes, so let's go over the rankings for [Scott Pilgrim review] and guess why they rank #1: Rotten Tomatoes. Megabrand in the movie review space, plenty of content, and they aggregate all the other reviews you could possibly want. #2: http://www.ugo.com/movies/comic-con-2010-scott-pilgrim-review http://www.ugo.com/movies/comic-con-2010-scott-pilgrim-revie... In a just world, this would be probably #1. They have a comic book design for the review. They have better images than most of the reviews, which just recycle the same publicity kit, and they integrate them better. They link to content readers will find quite compelling, such as "Every Video Game Reference in the Scott Pilgrim Comics." A random newspaper reviewer in Kansas isn't chasing that stuff down. #3: 1UP review of the video game. Three words: "query deserves diversity", which is Google's way of saying "Hey, maybe they actually didn't want a review of Scott Pilgrim the movie. That query was ambiguous. Maybe they meant the videogame instead. In that case, we should surface a few results on the front page so they don't get frustrated." It isn't a particularly compelling review, but it is a less competitive niche and a noted brand. #4: Internal Google callout for Google News results. This is their sop to a dying industry which has worse problems than you ever will, for similar reasons which are exacerbated by their cost structure. The current best ranked review from Google News is from the University of Dayton's school newspaper. It is as good as one would expect. #5: Wiki. More pagerank than God. Very, very internally optimized. Content is a poorly written but comprehensive plot summary. #6 ~ #10: ... you get the idea. Now, I'm not going to mention your site if you don't want to mention it, but I read your review. Do you have a sense of where a blind oracle with perfect knowledge of content quality would put it in these results? I have an opinion. Be that as it may, can you economically make your review look more like the #2 guys here? If not, why are you competing with them?
    • paraschopra 16y ago
      I wish I could upvote your indvidual descriptions. > #5: Wiki. More pagerank than God. This one would have got most Karma. Wikipedia is an excellent example of self-generating pagerank. More people link to it because anybody can edit it, hence would be "fair" and "comprehensive". And just because a particular Wiki article gets popular, it starts getting more attention (by experts) and hence becomes fair, comprehensive and detailed. The cycle repeats.
• sgman 16y ago
  First, calm down. Second, realize that the way people find their content online is through search engines like google. Adopt the attitude that by helping google find, index and highly rank your content, you are helping people who search for relevant content discover you and help themselves. Finally, figure out legitimate ways to do this from sites like seomoz.com and others. Good luck.
• aresant 16y ago
  Much of SEO is built around authority - eg people referencing your site back on specific topics / subjects. This is where the human element really comes in, and from your description it sounds like your site's non-specific focus could be the root of the problem: jack of all trades, master of none. In my experience white-hat SEO is a hard fought battle of link-trading, guest posting, methodically submitting to social media & search, and building an audience around a specific topic. Beyond that, you've got to embrace the fundamentals - a very solid (free) guide was posted @ SEOMOZ back in June -> http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-op... and more specifically: http://guides.seomoz.org/chapter-7-growing-popularity-and-links http://guides.seomoz.org/chapter-7-growing-popularity-and-li...
  • rkalla 16y ago
    aresant, That has been the common theme in everyone's reply and I think you are right with the "jack of all, master of none" comment. Not sure if what I want is to really drill down on a specific topic though, so now it's an issue of re-evaluating what I want out of all of this with what it will take to be successful and I don't think those two lines intersect unfortunately. What a friggin waste...
    • heinel 16y ago
      I actually do not see SEO as the be-all and end-all to success. I actually had thought about this same problem myself, though I am not nearly as invested as you are. It looks like everyone agrees that in order for people to visit, they need to know what to expect. Like when people visit a physical store, the store itself might not be particularly interesting, but the goods it carry is of interest to the visitor at a particular moment. However, people visit more than stores. We visit our friend's homes too, for instance. What do we get out of that? Why of course it's a relationship. It doesn't really matter what you do together at home. Maybe you do not even offer water to them when they come (bad). They come because they have an interest in you as a person in one way or another. Blogs are the same. If you depend on search engine traffic then yes, you need to be an authority on some subjects. Do remember, however, that everyone is an authority about him/herself. Does Google Bot care? Maybe not (yet). Do people care? Yes! Why fight with a robot when your goal is to be read by people? For this reason I think it is not helpful to rely on SEO if you are running a personal blog. Find where people are, like online communities, social networks, and engage with real people. I'm sure you can find a circle that can be your starting point. From there, you may even get feedback that help you gauge just how popular or interesting you truly are, and build your character up so eventually, even Google Bot will love you.
• samh 16y ago
  I am amazed at how google has created a virtuous incentive cycle in which experts are competing with each other to give away the best information and gather the most interest. Compare that to television, radio or print advertising, do you get the impression anyone is competing to provide the most useful information ? Lying and misleading people is wrong, but that doesn't seem to be a huge part of most SEO activity. The most common activity I see is people saying "hmm what can I put out there that other people will be interested in", that's an absolutely amazingly positive result. My 2 cents.
  • _delirium 16y ago
    I'm not sure that Google or the SEO motivation is the driver. The web prior to Google and prior to most monetization also had experts competing to put as much free stuff online as they could, and to let people know about it, with the main motivation being either people who had things they wanted to say, or some variety of social prestige. There's more total information these days, of course, but I think the proportion that's legitimate (versus content-farm) is also lower.
  • cperciva 16y ago
    I am amazed at how google has created a virtuous incentive cycle in which experts are competing with each other to give away the best information and gather the most interest. Seems to me that it's more like a vicious cycle in which people compete to stuff pages full of the right keywords at the expense of content.
  • lsc 16y ago
    Some people suggest that with their adsense product, they encourage you to write pages that look like what people want, that turn up high on a query, something good enough that people don't immediately hit 'back' but that don't answer the question. If you answer the user's question, they are much less likely to click on your adsense ads. Now, sometimes it kinda works okay; I know one guy who writes a fair bit of technical documentation; documentation that he promotes the hell out of, and that gives him fairly high pagerank. The problem is, programmers don't click ads. So what did the guy do? he threw in some pages about 'free MP3 downloads' with some free mp3s on there... of legal, free music that nobody wants, of course, but he makes orders of magnitude more money from the ads on that page, that page that ranks highly (because it's on a high pagerank site, and because it's got all the keywords) but that has no content that anyone actually wants. I mean, personally, I don't have a problem with making money misdirecting people who search for "free MP3s" - but it does make google objectively worse.
• moultano 16y ago
  Since you've gotten us all reading this, how about a link to your site?
  • cubicle67 16y ago
    I'm guessing it's thebuzzmedia.com For what it's worth, it seems to be a fairly decent site
    • rkalla 16y ago
      yes that is it... used to be breakitdownblog.com Thanks for the kind words.
• minouye 16y ago
  I think it's a balance. The content generation mills focus on generating keyword dense, SEO friendly articles at the expense of quality. It sounds like you have generated vast amounts of quality content at the expense of any sort of marketing. Keep in mind that 2000 articles is nearly 6 posts a day for an entire year. If I assume each article took roughly 20 minutes to write, that is 666 hours or writing (coincidence I swear!). Again, to balance that writing time out, let's say you devote a mere 2% of that writing time to marketing. That would come to about 13 hours. A 98/2 split seems fair enough to me, and I would imagine that 13 hours spent marketing your writings would result in significant and sustained traffic increases. If you feel that white-hat SEO isn't your thing (which I think is highly inadvisable), just spend that time sending emails or reaching out to friends. If you write it, and you don't market it, they won't come.
• jallmann 16y ago
  Not defending the content mills (I do think they're a pain too), but one thing is for sure: they know how the system works, are not afraid to game it, and are successful at it. Play their game for a little, and maybe you'll discover less repugnant ways to use SEO to your own advantage. To win big, you can't be afraid to play a a little dirty.
• michaelfairley 16y ago
  If you believe that your content is better than the content ranking for the words you want to people to find you with, then you engaging in SEO actually improves the quality of the internet. SEO is not an inherently unethical activity, even though many use it to in such a way. Check out SEOmoz's beginner's guide[1] to see how you can actually improve your search rankings by making your site more accessible and improving your content. [1] http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-op...
• andre3k1 16y ago
  I've always wondered if there is a directory where Hacker News' finest could share their blogs with each other. I wouldn't mind following the blogs of quite a few of you guys as you seem well-educated on a multitude of issues (and I hope at least a couple of you feel that way towards me!).
  • martey 16y ago
    The guidelines say: If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile. A lot of HN users have used the "About" field in the profile to link to their websites.
  • steveklabnik 16y ago
    This has been discussed before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1442056 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1442056
    • andre3k1 16y ago
      This was more of the discussion I was looking to have. Thanks! Will check it out and read through everyone else's thoughts.
• MichaelApproved 16y ago
  I think the fist problem is your point of view. Consider your choice of words "SEO-douche bag." and look at the title, you think SEO is bullshit. It's such a hostle point of view. Instead you should embrace seo strategies and find some that you can implement. Another problem is the "if I build it they will come" idea. The Internet isn't a store front that people are forced to walk by. Without a marketing strategy your site does not exist. What did you do after you posted an article? Just sit back and pat yourself on the back? Writing the article is half the job, if that. You've got to let people know it exists. Simply having google index it doesn't mean shit.
  • rkalla 16y ago
    Michael, I should have clarified; I don't have a problem with SEO... I always try and choose titles well, keywords, categories and write findable copy. It's the SEO shenanigans that get my blood angry. The info graphics that point back to a bullshit affiliate-laden webpage like onlineeducation.net that actually serves no REAL purpose. What you said here: ==================== The Internet isn't a store front that people are forced to walk by. Without a marketing strategy your site does not exist. ==================== Is really damn spot on... I write and treat it like it is... like Google or whoever will find the content. I just assumed it would, but I can't compete with the noise level created by other sources blasting links to their own articles on the same topics. I do submit bigger/more detailed pieces to the social news sites. I got banned from reddit for doing it, then an admin reviewed all my links and unbanned me... that was awesome, really endeared me to that community. Digg I'm auto-buried on for doing it for no reason... again, no spam crap links, just stuff I've been writing. Slashdot I've been fortunate with about 10 times in the last few years which I'm hugely thankful for... but at the end of the month I don't think it really changed much except for the temporary spikes in traffic. I believe my biggest problem is I just want to write. I don't want to have to have those marketing problems that the current state of the web is forcing me to have... I'm resistant to it because I'm resentful of it. It is the whole "get good grades in school and you will be a success!" crap all over again. Then you see the kid that kept failing do 10x better than you and you are so damn mad about focusing on your grades the whole time that your ego won't let you see 10 feet infront of you. I think that is where I am right now. No ETA yet on when I'll be coming out the other site :)
• mkramlich 16y ago
  be so good they can't ignore you. be so good people naturally tell others about you. rinse, repeat.
• mikeyur 16y ago
  SEO for most startups isn't about doing all sorts of trickery to rake in tons of traffic, it's about letting people find you easily. The most important part of the SEO process is keyword research, figuring out what people are searching for. This is the stuff you build and optimize your copy around. Figure out what the most searched phrases are and look at the competition for those results. Why would you use the term 'get a blog' repeatedly in your copy if 'start a blog' had 20x the search volume? If your site includes embeddable widgets for users you probably give yourself some kind of back link. Why would you waste that link anchor text on just your domain 'ManageProject.ly' instead of a term you want to rank for, like 'Online Project Management'? If you totally ignore SEO and call it 'bullshittery' then you can't complain when your site doesn't rank well. Google primarily focuses around a site's authority. You get authority by incoming links from reputable sources, for a startup these would be places like Techcrunch, Mashable, RWW, etc. And it's not a numbers game, it's a quality game. Your site needs to be authoritative, people need to like what you do and recommend it before good search rankings will even be possible. But when Google's trying to figure out which blogging platform to rank for the term 'start a blog', given two sites with similar authority, they're going to rank the one that is optimized a bit more for that term than the competitor.
• swombat 16y ago
  SEO is the least of your worries at this point. You need three things to have a successful blog/platform/whatever. 1) Something worth saying 2) The ability to say it in an intelligible manner 3) The ability to promote it to the right audience Looking at thebuzzmedia.com, I think you lack 1 - it's not quite clear what you're trying to communicate with your blog, other than an expression of your opinion on a wide range of things. No case is made for why anyone else should care about that. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but no one gives a shit about your opinion about various events. Moreover, the site seems to do a bit of everything rather than focus on a clear topic, which is probably why you don't get many subscribers. People looking for movie reviews won't subscribe to your site because of the geeky articles. People looking for geeky articles won't follow you because they don't want to be spammed with your movie reviews. And neither of those two groups of people will be interested in your cat pictures. You also appear to have a severe disdain for 3. Well, there, once again, this may sound harsh, but get real, dude. Cases where some undiscovered genius suddenly gets famous through no fault of his own are one in a billion. Almost every success comes with some amount of self-promotion. Post your articles on social news sites. Get feedback. Improve. Connect with the community. Relentlessly put your site out there, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere. Post comments on other people's blogs. Submit your articles to Slashdot. Keep at it until you get through. It might take months, or even years. If you don't actively do it, though, it will never happen. You need to answer the following questions. If you can answer them satisfactorily, your blog readership will increase substantially: 1) Why should anyone care about my blog? 2) Who should care about my blog? 3) Will these people be annoyed by any part of my blog? 4) How am I promoting my blog to get to these people? 5) How am I connecting with these people as human beings rather than just readers? Good luck!
  • perlgeek 16y ago
    In case it isn't obvious, a likely result from answering these questions is to split up the site. I have made good experiences with having a programming blog, a personal blog (which parts of my family and non-geek friends tend to read), and a few sitest that specialize in some very narrow topics (like, Sudoku). It's OK to cross-link between those sites, as far as there are relations - but don't expect the movie audience to read your Java and Digg stuff.
• 1tw 16y ago
  I know how you feel - I wrote an 'anything and everything I've ever found interesting' type blog for ten years, and hardly anyone read it (despite a pagerank of 4, and certain individual posts on obscure topics getting decent traffic via Google). This year I set up a tightly-focussed, single topic blog and committed to writing three posts every week day - it took off, I have lots of enthusiastic readers (and this month I paid the mortgage with a single Amazon affiliate link, if that matters). I did no SEO beyond writing clean, simple HTML, and actively ignored some standard SEO advice (eg. one-word titles, no repetition of keywords). In other words: in my experience you're never going to become the next Kottke with a general interest weblog, but if you find a niche you're passionate about, you don't need to do any SEO douchebag stuff to attract readers.
  • rkalla 16y ago
    1tw, Could you share a URL to your new site? You paid your mortgage with an Amazon affiliate link... damn! What kind of traffic are you getting now?
    • 1tw 16y ago
      The link's in my profile (not sure what the rules on self-linking are here!) I get between 45 and 50k page views a month, which isn't exactly crazy traffic - I think the affiliate link in question did well because it was a) part of a very enthusiastic review of a pretty obscure product and b) the post was linked to/reblogged on Tumblr by much more popular sites. It's certainly made me rethink my plan to put adverts on the site - hard to say without testing, but past experience with Google Ads makes me think the occasional hardware review/affiliate link would be better for me, in terms of earning some cash for all the work I put in, and better for my readers (no intrusive ads, and a good post is a good post whether it has an affiliate link in it or not).
• ThomPete 16y ago
  The problem in my mind seems to be this: t's just anything and everything I've ever found interesting written in a slightly more professional manner than "stream of thought" with a small amount of attention paid to titles and internal links only when appropriate and valuable (I HATE how sites like Engadget inner-link every keyword for Google sake). Blogs that write just about everything NEED to do SEO. People who write very targeted get's traffic without SEO because they will hit a specific interest group which is much more likely to share your stories. If you have just about everything you are doing 3 things. 1. You are commodifying the value of your content. 2. People won't know what you are all about thus won't relate to you or take you serious. 3. you haven't really written 2000 articles but perhaps a couple of hundred maybe less on each specific subject. There is nothing wrong with writing just about everything that you find interesting, but if it spans over to broad a spectrum you won't reap the benefits of accumulated linking, thus you will have to increase your SEO to compensate. Just my two cents.
• jyothi 16y ago
  I understand the frustration with most search results today. It is not fair. And in a competitive space few not so good sites outsmart the genuinely good ones. But.. >> My understanding was always that "If I wrote it, they will come". Its never the case neither on web nor in the offline world. There probably have been many great artists, actors and writers who never saw appreciation from critical mass. Presenting right and getting others speak high of you is critical for success of a person, a product, a concept or just about anything especially when you are dealing with masses. Presenting right - the finder should understand - make it right or make believe that you are right, I know the latter is not fair but the end result people see value in what you have. Hence yes you need to take care of things they understand, the title, keywords in text, alt on images etc Getting others to speak of you - works as a fairly good starting point to evaluate anything new. As one understands better can always correct. Links, context & authority define this on web. As in the offline world either you proactively get people to vouch or the quality is exceptional that people talk about it. Sadly post the initial assessment based on reference, a later correction based on content is very hard due to the limitation of technology - it can take months to years to conclude your site is a blog talking about wooden furniture (say) and you can be trusted not to be something else overnight. Its good to question the status quo but if you aren't building a better widely adopted search engine, its better to be found by the current one. Edit: format, removed unnecessary quote.
• ahoyhere 16y ago
  Okay. "Everything from fixing your MTU settings on your Q1000 modem to Java framework tips I find handy to years worth of game and movies reviews to hilarious cat pictures." Two words: brand consistency. People like to know what to expect. You aren't giving them that. Instead, you're offering an undifferentiated mishmash, not unlike a KFC Bowl. Only less edible. SEO is not your problem. No matter how good your individual articles are, you have failed at a core part of product-making. "If you build it, they will come" has always been wrong. If, in addition to having a fragmented and un-classifiable product, you aren't out there busting your hump trying to guest post, make connections, and whatnot, you're still gonna fail. If you want to succeed, look at all the genuinely successful sites. They all have a thread of personality, a pattern, a rhythm, and a predictable-ness -- that doesn't mean boring, it means they are graspable.
  • rkalla 16y ago
    ahoyhere, Of course I agree with you, seeing things written out from a 3rd party perspective. I argue frequently with people about how the #1 thing resturaunts can suffer from is lack of consistency. When you walk in that door, you want to know exactly what your $10 is going to get you, yet I'm violating the sin out of that. Yet when it comes to my own tunnel-visioned quest for success, I missed the goddamn boat by a mile. I think this could also be a bad case of ego... suffering from the assumption that I thought I was so interesting people would inherently want to listen to absolutely everything I had to say. This post has been a lot like getting kicked in the ego-nuts, but it will be for the better. I appreciate the truthful reply... now just to figure out if I want to even keep doing this or not.
    • ahoyhere 16y ago
      I applaud you for taking it so well! Most people given advice like that tend to argue why they should do it their way, even though all evidence points to the contrary. Even if you decide to not keep going on this blog, you'll remember that you need to apply the consistency thing to yourself for everything you do from now on :) Good luck! (And, if it makes you feel better, I recently had the same epiphany about my own writing projects. I figured it out by assessing what the blogs I love did, and realizing I did almost none of those things.)
• sushi 16y ago
  I will chip in with my finding of an experiment I did few months back. * bought a 7 year old domain name. * wrote 5 pages of content on it. * then made it live, linked it from a very relevant article on wikipedia. * Soon got few links. * The hyper linked text of the incoming link starts to rank within a month. tl;dr: SEO is just recommendation from other sites. Everything else are micro-details that you can afford to ignore.
• iamelgringo 16y ago
  Google _loves_ sites that are tightly focused on a specific niche that update frequently containing well written text. I found this out by accident when Newsley's page dedicated to articles from preview.bloomberg.com[1] (Bloomberg's new look and feel beta ) started getting a bunch of organic search traffic. Turns out, I'm on the front page of Google's results for that search term [2]. By rights, I have no reason to be on that front page. There's 9 Million other results in Google's index for that search term, and my site soft launched last November. My SEO for that page was a complete fluke. Newsley started out as a social news site, and I simply created a page for articles from a particular source. Google really liked the page, and apparently there weren't too many other sites like that. So, I'm on the front page. I'm leaving social news behind, and turning Newsley into a search engine for economic and social news. But, even though I'm neck deep in writing the Newsley_bot, a bunch of web scrapers and learning out how to build a real time index of financial news, I'm releasing individual results pages as I have them. I also created a tagging system so the Google_bot has a way to reach those pages as well as I included those pages in my site map. Since I started doing those things 3 weeks ago, the number of pages from Newsley.com in Google's index has gone from 200 to 17,000, my organic traffic has gone from 3-4 hits a day to 80 hits a day, and My total traffic has more than tripled in the last week. I'm also hitting the first two pages of Google results for 40 long tail search terms, including "What's Popular" [3]. All that really means to me, however is that when I release basic search functionality in a month or two, I should have a decent stream of traffic to use the search features, so I can work on improving it. Whether it's SEO bullshittery or not, this is how Google (and consequently most of the interweb) works. And, like it or not, that's what you have to do if you're going to get organic search traffic: have to have a page or site tightly focused on a specific topic, with decent text that updates frequently. Well crafted urls, titles and meta tags also help a lot too. ref: [1] http://newsley.com/by_source/preview.bloomberg.com/ http://newsley.com/by_source/preview.bloomberg.com/ [2] http://www.google.com/search?q=preview.bloomberg.com http://www.google.com/search?q=preview.bloomberg.com [3] http://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+popular&hl=en&ei=3tt8TLGZOZG-sQPms8GDBw&start=10&sa=N http://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+popular&hl=en&#3... [4] clickable: http://Newsley.com http://Newsley.com
• PaulJoslin 16y ago
  Think about it in the context of if your business was an offline shop. Think about the SEO / Organic search as being how busy the highstreet is that your shop resides. Then think about the amount of transport links (roads / trains / airports) that are nearby being the incoming links. Finally, think about the competition for the keywords on search, as being similar shops on the high street. Currently you may have a great shop with lots to offer, but it's stuck out in the middle of no where, with no transport links and hardly any passing traffic. What's worse, is that you have many shops just like yours in the area and no unique selling point. You wouldn't expect that shop to thrive. The technique many use these days, is to work on the keywords / SEO from the start - placing their shop in a busy place with existing traffic passing through. Looking for a niche which doesn't have too much competition. Then they contact similar blogs / media providers and try to get as many links as possible coming in. They now have the traffic, they just need to provide a good service and convert it to revenue somehow. 'SEO bullshitery' - is the wrong way to think of it. Along with 'SEO' being black art or magic. Ok, there are people out there that are 'gaming' the system, but it doesn't change the fact that for a web product SEO / market competition online for the niche is an extremely important thing to consider.
• luigi 16y ago
  It's important to know that as developers, there's a lot we should be doing to ensure that Google crawls and indexes our web pages properly: http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-web-development-lone-star-ruby-conference-2010 http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-web-d...
• c00p3r 16y ago
  The problem is that so many people understood the basic ideas about micro-niches and about placing appropriate keywords where it is possible or not - domain names, uris, tirles, headers, internal links, div names - every element you could imagine. There are very strong competition in, say, tour agencies in a small region. Type Sikkim, or Ladakh or Nepal - hundreds of sites with almost the same content - buy our tours. And of course, first 3 got a shitload of money, while rest got nothing. SEO is just a part of the rules of the game, and it is really big. Micro-niches, like putting misspelled keywords (no one knows how to write Kanchenjunga or Unawatuna) helps a little. So, just accept that SEO became mainstream thing and 8 of 10 trying to take advantage of it, with the almost the same crappy content. Content of a really good quality is really costly, especially periodic one.
• chopsueyar 16y ago
  Put each niche in its own subdomain. The main domain aggregates the subdomains. Never post on the main domain first, only the subdomains. Also, try to get some active commenting. Google loves to see users engaged on a blog page. You do have a 4 year old domain, so that should lend some authority to your site. But, yeah, I agree with you. Google has rewarded and incentivized the dilution of information. Many of your blog posts could be split up into multiple parts. To a visitor, that experience sucks, but to Google, it looks like you have so much more content, because it has it's own page. If you want traffic from Google, you have to play the game.
• josefresco 16y ago
  What kind of traffic does your site get rkalla? Amazing to me that you could have 2000 posts over 4 years and not be doing 'well'. Does "make it" for you mean Internet celebrity/millionaire or simply pay-your-bills and a little extra money?
  • rkalla 16y ago
    Jose, Right now the site does about 500-600k pageviews a month and I make just enough from Adsense to cover hosting costs... that's it. "make it" would be enough income to support family with some extra to take trips occasionally. "super make it" would be enough to do that and pay 3 or 4 authors that love their job to write. That was always my goal and it just hasn't happened.
• pkenjora 16y ago
  This article is dear and near to my heart. I've spent the last 3 years working on solving the issue of the SEO crap chute. The problem with SEO is that it requires content and links. Content should be the only metric. Unfortunately then we'd have no way to distinguish crap from gold. So links are needed as a popularity gauge. Unfortunately links have become a currency more important than content. If we somehow had the ability to build our own community of bloggers? People from our blog roll, or colleagues we write with, like building relationships on Twitter. Then we could take the focus of links and put it back on content. We'll thats now possible, like I said, I've spent the last 3 years working on this. The answer to your SEO problems is something called Arkayne. Here is what you can do with it: Arkayne: http://www.arkayne.com/arkayne http://www.arkayne.com/arkayne 1. Register, create your profile. 2. Create your own community of fellow bloggers. 3. Outrank any of the SEO Gods in days. 4. Live life as a happy blogger writing good content. Absolutely leave me and my team a comment, now that we can, shifting this game is fun.
• ddemchuk 16y ago
  why is it the "seo-douchebag"'s fault that Google decides to rank crap on the front page? Shouldn't that be Google's fault? If you want to leverage the high volume of traffic Google can provide, you must at least try and pay attention to SEO tactics in order to popup anywhere near the top. Writing good content and praying doesn't work nearly as much as people say it does.
• Mc_Big_G 16y ago
  You're probably suffering from an extreme lack of inbound links, not outbound links. The web is a popularity contest and you're seen by Google as the guy over in the corner talking to himself. Inbound links are like saying, "Hey, look at this guy, he's great.". You can do a simple inbound link check in google like this: http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=yoururlhere.com&btnG=Search http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=yoururlhere.com&btnG=... Are there any results? Probably not many. Now try the same thing with ycombinator.com. Inbound links are 80% of the battle as far as I can tell.
  • rkalla 16y ago
    Using "link" on Google's search shows something like 38 and Yahoo Website Explorer shows like 7... but going from Google's Webmaster Tools shows 2.9 million http://imgur.com/cTaKE.png http://imgur.com/cTaKE.png I have no idea what is up with that discrepancy...
• Votetocracy 16y ago
  No it is not the only way to succeed. I launched a site 1 year ago for a medical publisher. They received 1st page ranking for about 800 of 3500 pages. Got about 3000 visits a month. It is not a huge number - but in this niche it was very good. And we did it only with SEO. No SEM.
• losethos 16y ago
  How about tons of downloads and only 2 emails, both with that annoying feel of not-a-real-person to them, FBI or some crazy ass CIA or enemy company or God knows what. It kinda sucks when your mathmatical model of reality is out of whack. Ironically, I once suggested spreading love on the Internet by randomly visiting people to make hits. They're gonna be confused when reality comes apparent. Hit and download generating searchy things probably make a lot of people delusional and completely out-of-touch with reality. When numbers are low, it's especially an issue. One thing you immediately discover( I hope!) is that software reporting hits on downloadable files is way different than full-file downloads. There's a crazy thing where a hundered hits will be generated but is for pieces of just ONE download. Source forge stats are worthless -- I know they just multiply hits by file size and make bandwidth--completely bogus! I just know there's lots of people deluded by hit numbers. Then you see crazy things on source forge, like thousands of hits in a day, that are obviously phoney. Are they doing it or is it robots who are probing for file changes or something.