7 ms·

Shortest SEO Guide

121 points by JonathanFields 16y ago

brk 16y ago
This is perfect. Yes, there are ways to game the SEO system, and lots of companies make this their reason for being. But for 98% of the common website-owning populace, SEO is most simply about publishing information that people want and find helpful. You can spend your time whoring for backlinks, or generating content. One is valuable to your target audience, the other isn't... IMO, the more advanced SEO tactics are for when you have built a foundation of content and can then concentrate on making some of the farther corners of the Internet aware of your content. Granted, I'm not someone who labels myself an SEO expert though.
- glenstansberry 16y ago
  Exactly. Great content gets you like 95% of the way. The advanced, fiddly tactics are for the other 5%.
  - patio11 16y ago
    Great content gets you like 95% of the way File this away next to "A good product is 95% of marketing" and other patently untrue things engineers like to believe. Quality content and linkable content, for example, are not coextensive sets. You could write the world's best guide ever to cross-stitching school uniforms (did I just make that up?) and you'd get less links than DHH gets for not cursing during a Rails keynote. If you're doing SEO and you haven't figured out that linking behavior is very different in different audiences, I'm as worried for your future as I would be for a salesman who was doing high-touch enterprise software sales for rooms full of third graders. There are also easy ways to shoot your great content foot off, and I really wish I could pull in examples from clients here. Hypothetical example: suppose a YC-style company is founded by a noted industry expert who has a great personal brand. They produce a ten-page guide to a particular new technology their startup uses. The guide is, far and away, the best quickstart guide on the Internet with regards to that technology. Q: Their startup benefits from this a) a lot, b) a little, c) virtually not at all? A: I don't know. Where did you post it? Q2: Come again? A: Like, physically, on which page does that best-in-class guide exist? Q3: Oh, our Posterous / Github account / etc. A: facepalm
    - glenstansberry 16y ago
      Not an engineer. You can't promote something that sucks.
      - apu 16y ago
        You can't promote something that sucks. Perhaps, but I think 'patio11's point was that even if the product is great, it could be worthless without the right marketing/promotion/SEO/etc. So you could be anywhere from 0% to 100% of the way there with just a great product.
      - chc 16y ago
        I'm pretty sure homeopaths and Microsoft would both disagree with you.
    - Poiesis 16y ago
      Pithy, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on whether a great product is necessary but not sufficient, or simply not necessary. By "great product" here I refer to one that solves a pain point--in other words, great in terms of the metric of customers willing to give you money rather than the metric of developers think it's cool. More succinctly: can a poor product succeed with good marketing? For the long term?
    - pnathan 16y ago
      Maybe, but your product markets itself when its sold. If it markets itself as bug-ridden excrement piled on refuse- Well then! you're hosed next time your customer goes looking for a solution.
    - pbreit 16y ago
      I didn't understand a word you wrote.
    - theycallmemorty 16y ago
      So this is why A/Bingo is hosted on bingocardcreator.com?
  - ddemchuk 16y ago
    clearly you've never actually ran an advanced SEO campaign. I can rank a shitty, spun article higher than most people's great articles with those "fiddly tactics" without ever touching the article itself.
valjavec 16y ago
Google itself stated something like: "build the best website and we'll change our algorithms if needed". It's an endless game between Matt Cutts his team and SEO spammers but I bet long term on the first one.
petervandijck 16y ago
Getting 50% of your traffic from search isn't a success, that's actually kind of bad (depending on the details of course, which weren't given).
- heyitsnick 16y ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - petervandijck 16y ago
    A typical site that does well in Google gets 70-80% of their traffic from search. No details were given about the other traffic sources, so getting only 50% of your traffic from search sounds like a failure to me (that, or a meaningless statistic).
    - acangiano 16y ago
      That is true if you don't promote your site on social media sites. If you do, and have interesting content, you'll regularly hit front pages and your analytics will look like a series of horse ears. When you get up to 100,000 page views in a single day from sites like Reddit, it's pretty hard to have 80% of your traffic coming from organic search.
    - bigiain 16y ago
      Keep in mind his technique is differentiating himself from "a typical site" - if your plan is to generate genuinely compelling content that other website owners will want to link too, you're automatically (assuming you execute well) going to get a higher percentage of your traffic from referrals than people who's idea of a link building strategy is to approach everybody in related-but-non-competitive-fields and ask them to add reciprocal links buried somewhere down in a "links" page that nobody ever visits, never mind actually floows links from... Not that those links aren't valuable - they'll add pagerank for you, and if you can use your own carefully chosen anchor text you don't need terribly many of them to make a page rank very highly for a very narrow "long tail" search query, but you don't acutally expect any inbound traffic from that sort of backlink. The sort of backlink the article is suggesting is different, it _is_ going to generate referral traffic - other websites aren't going to link to your "great content" unless they're expecting and intending their visitors follow those links to your site. Like you say, 80% of traffic from search _is_ "typical", that's because "typical sites" don't in general have compelling linkable content (except perhaps by accident or because some SEO sold them on "linkbait"). (like you say upthread "depending on the details", I'm not sure why the parent post to this is getting downvoted...)
jonkelly 16y ago
It's interesting that in this post about "Simple SEO" he does a bunch of "advanced" things that aren't mentioned -- highly optimized page Title and URL (which appears intentional as it does not match the blog post title), post title optimized for social media sharing and CTR, a version that's too large for most blogs so that bloggers will link to it (with optimized mouse-over text to boot). When he references on-page factors and then says "I used to worry about these above factors" -- well, it feels a little dishonest to me.
- kgtm 16y ago
  Or, what he is saying is that the "advanced" things you notice pale in comparison to the real value of content.
  - bigiain 16y ago
    +1 - Notice he finishes with this: "Sure, optimizing page titles and header tags within posts can help your chances of ranking highly. But the biggest boost that you’ll get comes from getting links." This is something _everybody_ who's spent any time researching SEO knows, but way too many people ignore it - probably because it's time consuming and _hard_. All the on-page stuff is relatively straightforward. Inbound links are at least as important as anything you do on your own site. Like Ted Dzubya says: "Non-brain-damaged web design and link building are 100% of SEO."[1] It's much easier to tell your boss/client that you spent 25 hours doing keyword research and tweaking page titles, headings, the body copys keyword density, adding keyword targeted landing pages, and a/b testing the signup button colours, keyword optimising navigation and menu labels - instead of spending 3 days getting overwhelminghy rejected asking other people to put links to your "content" on their site. That's mostly why it works. "Page rank" is successful precisely because it's harder to game than any of the on-page stuff you can do (anyone remember the keyword meta tag? What a quaint idea! It's quite a nice reminder of what the internet used to be, back before spam was invented...) [1] http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack-science.html http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack-science.htm...
- flamingbuffalo 16y ago
  the file name for the image is along those lines too: https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.lifedev.net/media/images/Shortest+Guide+To+Seo+-+create+something+worth+linking+to.jpeg https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.lifedev.net/media/images/Sho...
brd 16y ago
I've only got one word for this guide: Refreshing
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Or you can just create. The beauty of just creating is that when you build something really, really good, the links will flow to your site. Thought experiment: Ok. I just wrote a page offering to give away 20 bucks to the first thousand people that read it. Let's say I am rich and can afford to give the money away. Can't get any more interesting and traffic-worthy than that, right? Heck, this is the kind of thing you'd want to send links to your friends, right? So tell me where it is. SEO is marketing, plain and simple. That means that there is an active component to it -- sharing links on HN, phoning some friends, making some posters for the dorm. Whatever. The value of what you output has nothing to do with some sort of inherent quality. It has to do with how many people you can expose your content to and what ratio of those people are going to like what they see enough to give you a link. SEO is not quality. It's popularity. People don't link to you because you wrote great stuff, they link to you because they like you, are a fan, want to look cool, etc. These are all things that you actively have to go out and cultivate. To say it's all passive is to miss the entire point and to pander to the audience. With all the keyword optimization going on with that page, and the fact that the entire tone of the article is pitched directly to HN and hacker-types, I can't help but feel that author knows better. (I don't mean that as a slam. Perhaps I am the guy in the audience that spoils how the magician's trick is done. If so, I apologize)
- Jabbles 16y ago
  "SEO is not quality. It's popularity" Search Engines' goals are (probably) to show people the way to the "best content". Whilst they use "popularity" as a metric at the moment, we don't know how that will change. As they adjust their algorithms they will find more ingenious ways of finding "the best content" (I can't define that), making so called "optimizations" useless. Your thought experiment works, but only in the absence of perfect (or futuristic) search engines. If Google's NLP power massively increased, and they'd indexed your site, I'm sure it would be found, even if no one had linked to it. It's the search engine's job to find it. Current methods of SEO are violating the encapsulation we usually have around the search engine (a black box function string -> URL[]). SEO is looking into how SEs work and trying to game the system. That's fine, but as SEs improves SEO will move more towards "Content is King".
cabinguy 16y ago
My little site (regional) gets 150k visitors & 2-3M page views per month on average. About 70% of those visitors find us through search. Our goal is to lower that number, but at this point it does not bother us. We know that it is in all search engines best interests to keep us at the top of the search results because we are the most relevant website for our topic/services...all of the search engines recognize this and one of the search engines knows this because they count our page views for us. We SEO our site to make it easier for the engines to know what we are about...but we do not bother with much of the deeper stuff (all the onsite relational linking strategies). The goal of every search engine is to deliver relevance. Be relevant.
blauwbilgorgel 16y ago
Not controversial at all. "Content is king" is almost an SEO standard (with EGOL as its herald). Meta: The proof is the article itself. It's some age-old tested SEO wisdom in a controversial/trollish linkbait sauce. In the world of SEO this article is but an annoying splash. "Make sites primarily for users, not search engines". Anyway, it is a point that really needs to be repeated over and over again, so for that the article maybe has some merit. Yet I fear it may inspire another rash of linkbaitish articles linked on sites like these, where the purpose behind the content isn't to inform the user (about doing whitehat SEO), but to get the user to link to it. If these fastfood social links were all that counted for determining quality and authority on the web, icanhazcheeseburger and top 10 lists would outrank us all.
flamingbuffalo 16y ago
a couple years old, but still the best guide to seo: http://powazek.com/posts/2090 http://powazek.com/posts/2090 "The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work"
gohat 16y ago
I've done a lot of SEO and this really nails it. But my own form of the very most important rule of SEO is slightly different. It is, "Build links to content that people will want to link to." The reason for this different wording is that in my experience, you can have highly linkable material, but without a critical mass of attention, it will get limited results.
ffumarola 16y ago
At the ecommerce company I work for, I keep repeating this in terms of SEO: "Even though this guide's title contains the words "search engine", we'd like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what's best for the visitors of your site. They're the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work." Does creating a link farm hidden in the sitemap create value for users? What about spamming articles on ezines with no valuable content? Ha.
joshmanders 16y ago
I've always been one of those "Field of Dreams" SEO guys. "Build it and they will come."
ssharp 16y ago
This seems exceptionally misguided and short-sighted. The example the author cites is for his blog. 50% of his blog traffic comes from search engines; he doesn't do SEO, therefore SEO is a waste of time. Has the author ever attempted to land competitive keywords in competitive markets? Has he tried bringing in direct sales leads through organic search-engine results? People who are really good at SEO can show legitimate improvements in sales from their SEO tactics. It's not simply a matter of "if you build it, they will come". Yes, maybe they will, but when? Does it make more sense to write awesome content about, let's say, vitamin supplements, for four years, get a nice following and hope that some people buy from you? Or does it make sense to try to jam your site onto the first couple of results for "vitamin suppliments" on Google by employing some of the SEO tactics the author considers a waste of time?
bauchidgw 16y ago
awesome, then i just create the createst magazine ever and make it language header dependend. oh, googlebot does not use language headers? well an seo could have told you that........
PaulHoule 16y ago
I wouldn't say that this is complete advice, but it's the most important principle. Many of the people who have the worst trouble with SEO have sites that nobody would care about, such as real estate agents.
MicahSeff 16y ago
I run a site (gamexplain.com) and have had a fair amount of problems getting our SEO up to snuff. We've followed a whole lot of the fundamentals espoused by people like the author of this article, but we still struggle with the incoming links, and that has hurt us somewhat. We don't really want to spam our articles to every aggregator and blogger under the sun, though maybe that's what we should have been spending our time on rather than trying to write informative articles that stray from the norm of what you might see from other gaming sites. Quite honestly, the best way for us to get incoming links in this industry, is to write articles that I would not consider "quality content," but rather inflammatory, misguided, or just plain offensive. In the past, articles that fell into these categories have even garnered us attention in the academic community, so take that as you will.
dkokelley 16y ago
An analogy to this guide's strategy: Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Which parallels YC's golden rule: Make something people want. In general, I agree with both of the statements as solid business advice. After all, nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing. Make a good product first, and then market it. Although I do have to slightly disagree on one point. If you've built a better mousetrap, or made something people want, how do you let them know? The general strategy seems to be "let the product speak for itself." The same advice is prescribed in the article: write good content and let it speak for itself. Well, good content is critical, I agree. Gunning for rankings on crap content is a sure way to fail. But it's lazy to leave it at that. You must let people know that your content is there to link to. Post it to newsboards and forums. Gather a following on Twitter and let them know. Market it. The real gem from the article is that the difficulty of the sale and the quality of the content are inversely related. Make quality content and the sale will be easier... but you still have to sell.

121 points by JonathanFields 16y ago

brk 16y ago

This is perfect. Yes, there are ways to game the SEO system, and lots of companies make this their reason for being. But for 98% of the common website-owning populace, SEO is most simply about publishing information that people want and find helpful. You can spend your time whoring for backlinks, or generating content. One is valuable to your target audience, the other isn't... IMO, the more advanced SEO tactics are for when you have built a foundation of content and can then concentrate on making some of the farther corners of the Internet aware of your content. Granted, I'm not someone who labels myself an SEO expert though.

glenstansberry 16y ago
Exactly. Great content gets you like 95% of the way. The advanced, fiddly tactics are for the other 5%.
- patio11 16y ago
  Great content gets you like 95% of the way File this away next to "A good product is 95% of marketing" and other patently untrue things engineers like to believe. Quality content and linkable content, for example, are not coextensive sets. You could write the world's best guide ever to cross-stitching school uniforms (did I just make that up?) and you'd get less links than DHH gets for not cursing during a Rails keynote. If you're doing SEO and you haven't figured out that linking behavior is very different in different audiences, I'm as worried for your future as I would be for a salesman who was doing high-touch enterprise software sales for rooms full of third graders. There are also easy ways to shoot your great content foot off, and I really wish I could pull in examples from clients here. Hypothetical example: suppose a YC-style company is founded by a noted industry expert who has a great personal brand. They produce a ten-page guide to a particular new technology their startup uses. The guide is, far and away, the best quickstart guide on the Internet with regards to that technology. Q: Their startup benefits from this a) a lot, b) a little, c) virtually not at all? A: I don't know. Where did you post it? Q2: Come again? A: Like, physically, on which page does that best-in-class guide exist? Q3: Oh, our Posterous / Github account / etc. A: facepalm
  - glenstansberry 16y ago
    Not an engineer. You can't promote something that sucks.
    - apu 16y ago
      You can't promote something that sucks. Perhaps, but I think 'patio11's point was that even if the product is great, it could be worthless without the right marketing/promotion/SEO/etc. So you could be anywhere from 0% to 100% of the way there with just a great product.
    - chc 16y ago
      I'm pretty sure homeopaths and Microsoft would both disagree with you.
  - Poiesis 16y ago
    Pithy, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on whether a great product is necessary but not sufficient, or simply not necessary. By "great product" here I refer to one that solves a pain point--in other words, great in terms of the metric of customers willing to give you money rather than the metric of developers think it's cool. More succinctly: can a poor product succeed with good marketing? For the long term?
  - pnathan 16y ago
    Maybe, but your product markets itself when its sold. If it markets itself as bug-ridden excrement piled on refuse- Well then! you're hosed next time your customer goes looking for a solution.
  - pbreit 16y ago
    I didn't understand a word you wrote.
  - theycallmemorty 16y ago
    So this is why A/Bingo is hosted on bingocardcreator.com?
- ddemchuk 16y ago
  clearly you've never actually ran an advanced SEO campaign. I can rank a shitty, spun article higher than most people's great articles with those "fiddly tactics" without ever touching the article itself.

valjavec 16y ago

Google itself stated something like: "build the best website and we'll change our algorithms if needed". It's an endless game between Matt Cutts his team and SEO spammers but I bet long term on the first one.

petervandijck 16y ago

Getting 50% of your traffic from search isn't a success, that's actually kind of bad (depending on the details of course, which weren't given).

heyitsnick 16y ago
Could you elaborate?
- petervandijck 16y ago
  A typical site that does well in Google gets 70-80% of their traffic from search. No details were given about the other traffic sources, so getting only 50% of your traffic from search sounds like a failure to me (that, or a meaningless statistic).
  - acangiano 16y ago
    That is true if you don't promote your site on social media sites. If you do, and have interesting content, you'll regularly hit front pages and your analytics will look like a series of horse ears. When you get up to 100,000 page views in a single day from sites like Reddit, it's pretty hard to have 80% of your traffic coming from organic search.
  - bigiain 16y ago
    Keep in mind his technique is differentiating himself from "a typical site" - if your plan is to generate genuinely compelling content that other website owners will want to link too, you're automatically (assuming you execute well) going to get a higher percentage of your traffic from referrals than people who's idea of a link building strategy is to approach everybody in related-but-non-competitive-fields and ask them to add reciprocal links buried somewhere down in a "links" page that nobody ever visits, never mind actually floows links from... Not that those links aren't valuable - they'll add pagerank for you, and if you can use your own carefully chosen anchor text you don't need terribly many of them to make a page rank very highly for a very narrow "long tail" search query, but you don't acutally expect any inbound traffic from that sort of backlink. The sort of backlink the article is suggesting is different, it _is_ going to generate referral traffic - other websites aren't going to link to your "great content" unless they're expecting and intending their visitors follow those links to your site. Like you say, 80% of traffic from search _is_ "typical", that's because "typical sites" don't in general have compelling linkable content (except perhaps by accident or because some SEO sold them on "linkbait"). (like you say upthread "depending on the details", I'm not sure why the parent post to this is getting downvoted...)

jonkelly 16y ago

It's interesting that in this post about "Simple SEO" he does a bunch of "advanced" things that aren't mentioned -- highly optimized page Title and URL (which appears intentional as it does not match the blog post title), post title optimized for social media sharing and CTR, a version that's too large for most blogs so that bloggers will link to it (with optimized mouse-over text to boot). When he references on-page factors and then says "I used to worry about these above factors" -- well, it feels a little dishonest to me.

kgtm 16y ago
Or, what he is saying is that the "advanced" things you notice pale in comparison to the real value of content.
- bigiain 16y ago
  +1 - Notice he finishes with this: "Sure, optimizing page titles and header tags within posts can help your chances of ranking highly. But the biggest boost that you’ll get comes from getting links." This is something _everybody_ who's spent any time researching SEO knows, but way too many people ignore it - probably because it's time consuming and _hard_. All the on-page stuff is relatively straightforward. Inbound links are at least as important as anything you do on your own site. Like Ted Dzubya says: "Non-brain-damaged web design and link building are 100% of SEO."[1] It's much easier to tell your boss/client that you spent 25 hours doing keyword research and tweaking page titles, headings, the body copys keyword density, adding keyword targeted landing pages, and a/b testing the signup button colours, keyword optimising navigation and menu labels - instead of spending 3 days getting overwhelminghy rejected asking other people to put links to your "content" on their site. That's mostly why it works. "Page rank" is successful precisely because it's harder to game than any of the on-page stuff you can do (anyone remember the keyword meta tag? What a quaint idea! It's quite a nice reminder of what the internet used to be, back before spam was invented...) [1] http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack-science.html http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack-science.htm...
flamingbuffalo 16y ago
the file name for the image is along those lines too: https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.lifedev.net/media/images/Shortest+Guide+To+Seo+-+create+something+worth+linking+to.jpeg https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.lifedev.net/media/images/Sho...

brd 16y ago

I've only got one word for this guide: Refreshing

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Or you can just create. The beauty of just creating is that when you build something really, really good, the links will flow to your site. Thought experiment: Ok. I just wrote a page offering to give away 20 bucks to the first thousand people that read it. Let's say I am rich and can afford to give the money away. Can't get any more interesting and traffic-worthy than that, right? Heck, this is the kind of thing you'd want to send links to your friends, right? So tell me where it is. SEO is marketing, plain and simple. That means that there is an active component to it -- sharing links on HN, phoning some friends, making some posters for the dorm. Whatever. The value of what you output has nothing to do with some sort of inherent quality. It has to do with how many people you can expose your content to and what ratio of those people are going to like what they see enough to give you a link. SEO is not quality. It's popularity. People don't link to you because you wrote great stuff, they link to you because they like you, are a fan, want to look cool, etc. These are all things that you actively have to go out and cultivate. To say it's all passive is to miss the entire point and to pander to the audience. With all the keyword optimization going on with that page, and the fact that the entire tone of the article is pitched directly to HN and hacker-types, I can't help but feel that author knows better. (I don't mean that as a slam. Perhaps I am the guy in the audience that spoils how the magician's trick is done. If so, I apologize)

Jabbles 16y ago
"SEO is not quality. It's popularity" Search Engines' goals are (probably) to show people the way to the "best content". Whilst they use "popularity" as a metric at the moment, we don't know how that will change. As they adjust their algorithms they will find more ingenious ways of finding "the best content" (I can't define that), making so called "optimizations" useless. Your thought experiment works, but only in the absence of perfect (or futuristic) search engines. If Google's NLP power massively increased, and they'd indexed your site, I'm sure it would be found, even if no one had linked to it. It's the search engine's job to find it. Current methods of SEO are violating the encapsulation we usually have around the search engine (a black box function string -> URL[]). SEO is looking into how SEs work and trying to game the system. That's fine, but as SEs improves SEO will move more towards "Content is King".

cabinguy 16y ago

My little site (regional) gets 150k visitors & 2-3M page views per month on average. About 70% of those visitors find us through search. Our goal is to lower that number, but at this point it does not bother us. We know that it is in all search engines best interests to keep us at the top of the search results because we are the most relevant website for our topic/services...all of the search engines recognize this and one of the search engines knows this because they count our page views for us. We SEO our site to make it easier for the engines to know what we are about...but we do not bother with much of the deeper stuff (all the onsite relational linking strategies). The goal of every search engine is to deliver relevance. Be relevant.

blauwbilgorgel 16y ago

Not controversial at all. "Content is king" is almost an SEO standard (with EGOL as its herald). Meta: The proof is the article itself. It's some age-old tested SEO wisdom in a controversial/trollish linkbait sauce. In the world of SEO this article is but an annoying splash. "Make sites primarily for users, not search engines". Anyway, it is a point that really needs to be repeated over and over again, so for that the article maybe has some merit. Yet I fear it may inspire another rash of linkbaitish articles linked on sites like these, where the purpose behind the content isn't to inform the user (about doing whitehat SEO), but to get the user to link to it. If these fastfood social links were all that counted for determining quality and authority on the web, icanhazcheeseburger and top 10 lists would outrank us all.

flamingbuffalo 16y ago

a couple years old, but still the best guide to seo: http://powazek.com/posts/2090 http://powazek.com/posts/2090 "The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work"

gohat 16y ago

I've done a lot of SEO and this really nails it. But my own form of the very most important rule of SEO is slightly different. It is, "Build links to content that people will want to link to." The reason for this different wording is that in my experience, you can have highly linkable material, but without a critical mass of attention, it will get limited results.

ffumarola 16y ago

At the ecommerce company I work for, I keep repeating this in terms of SEO: "Even though this guide's title contains the words "search engine", we'd like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what's best for the visitors of your site. They're the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work." Does creating a link farm hidden in the sitemap create value for users? What about spamming articles on ezines with no valuable content? Ha.

joshmanders 16y ago

I've always been one of those "Field of Dreams" SEO guys. "Build it and they will come."

ssharp 16y ago

This seems exceptionally misguided and short-sighted. The example the author cites is for his blog. 50% of his blog traffic comes from search engines; he doesn't do SEO, therefore SEO is a waste of time. Has the author ever attempted to land competitive keywords in competitive markets? Has he tried bringing in direct sales leads through organic search-engine results? People who are really good at SEO can show legitimate improvements in sales from their SEO tactics. It's not simply a matter of "if you build it, they will come". Yes, maybe they will, but when? Does it make more sense to write awesome content about, let's say, vitamin supplements, for four years, get a nice following and hope that some people buy from you? Or does it make sense to try to jam your site onto the first couple of results for "vitamin suppliments" on Google by employing some of the SEO tactics the author considers a waste of time?

bauchidgw 16y ago

awesome, then i just create the createst magazine ever and make it language header dependend. oh, googlebot does not use language headers? well an seo could have told you that........

PaulHoule 16y ago

I wouldn't say that this is complete advice, but it's the most important principle. Many of the people who have the worst trouble with SEO have sites that nobody would care about, such as real estate agents.

MicahSeff 16y ago

I run a site (gamexplain.com) and have had a fair amount of problems getting our SEO up to snuff. We've followed a whole lot of the fundamentals espoused by people like the author of this article, but we still struggle with the incoming links, and that has hurt us somewhat. We don't really want to spam our articles to every aggregator and blogger under the sun, though maybe that's what we should have been spending our time on rather than trying to write informative articles that stray from the norm of what you might see from other gaming sites. Quite honestly, the best way for us to get incoming links in this industry, is to write articles that I would not consider "quality content," but rather inflammatory, misguided, or just plain offensive. In the past, articles that fell into these categories have even garnered us attention in the academic community, so take that as you will.

dkokelley 16y ago

An analogy to this guide's strategy: Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Which parallels YC's golden rule: Make something people want. In general, I agree with both of the statements as solid business advice. After all, nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing. Make a good product first, and then market it. Although I do have to slightly disagree on one point. If you've built a better mousetrap, or made something people want, how do you let them know? The general strategy seems to be "let the product speak for itself." The same advice is prescribed in the article: write good content and let it speak for itself. Well, good content is critical, I agree. Gunning for rankings on crap content is a sure way to fail. But it's lazy to leave it at that. You must let people know that your content is there to link to. Post it to newsboards and forums. Gather a following on Twitter and let them know. Market it. The real gem from the article is that the difficulty of the sale and the quality of the content are inversely related. Make quality content and the sale will be easier... but you still have to sell.