5 ms·

Recap: Every time you have trouble searching for something, make a page with the information you find. It makes sense, but I'm just wondering what's the end goa

by kanobo 6y ago

Recap: Every time you have trouble searching for something, make a page with the information you find. It makes sense, but I'm just wondering what's the end goal since I imagine the frequency of such searches is very low and your site will have to be a blog or some kind of site with disparate content.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
I've had that same fear myself but it hasn't been a problem so far. It might be a problem for an academic deep into a field that isn't a fast-growing one. My much larger site 10-15 years ago was primarily about language learning. It had some fairly niche topics I was concerned that virtually no English-language speakers would be looking for, and yet the traffic rolled in. It was a blog, though. Also, some of those topics became more popular over time. Extensive Reading and Spaced Repetition were two examples. My current site is in my profile and it's pretty tightly focused around Elixir (roughly the 50th most popular programming language).
- cubecul 6y ago
  In one way, this is essentially the "wedge". You start with a very specific long tail keyword, but you also cover related searches and topics, and the nice part is that your website analytics will then feed you more long tail keywords that are related but not exactly this page: those are ideas for other pages. This is one reason why you'll see a page with one topic as a title often branch off to cover many related but sort of unexpected topics throughout the page - it's to cover the main keyword but also grab coverage on the related ones that might be easier to rank for (by simply mentioning it in a page vs. dedicating a page to it). As the owner of that site, you might see that one of these pages could be getting traffic from hundreds of keywords, and 10 of them are on a distinct enough topic that warrants another page. So you build a page for that, etc.
pidg 6y ago
In my experience (marketing at a small tech company), you can get results even for reasonably competitive terms. The difference is in giving a quality answer to the query. Many (most?) tech companies fill their sites with low-quality, jargon-filled pages that don't actually answer questions - either becuase they're written by marketers with a poor grasp of the technology, or because they don't want to 'give away' their expertise. If you actually answer the question in a reasonably full way, there is nothing to stop you ranking highly. Google values valuable content.
tyingq 6y ago
I wouldn't discount backlinks. Google hasn't made much progress getting away from "page rank". Once you have that credible page/content, do focus on non-spammy ways to share it. Including grey area stuff like calling in favors, sharing it on HN, posting on Medium, etc. In the least spammy, most objective way you can. As a concrete example, I found a grey area way to get a somewhat popular hardware tinkerer interested in something I did. Maybe I even skirted the rules a bit by sending him a free sample of my cool toy and some rough code samples. He took it well beyond what I could. I didn't ask for anything. The investment paid off. Aside from his initial blog post, others took inspiration and posted their own variations. Google now thinks I'm the bomb for something very niche, but reasonably profitable. Likely because my efforts, plus other's work, netted some interesting backlinks. and backlinks to their posts. And maybe I am a badass in this very narrow niche, but I doubt Google would know if I hadn't pushed the envelope a little.
- Threeve303 6y ago
  > sharing it on HN Perhaps it is more of a grey area. Probably not so much the whole Show HN thing, more of the hustle seen in the comments. Usually you see someone comment on a post about some tech by saying "I am with X company and we are working on Y to solve this problem!". Personally, I think this stuff is great. You gotta respect the hustle.
  - tafurnace 6y ago
    Right, it seems like a ploy to expand the author's SEO footprint. I wasn't lost to the author/OP's comments being a part of the hustle. Given the content of the article, the ploy could almost be called something like "meta-hustle".
    - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      I do want to expand the SEO footprint of my Elixir tutorial site, but writing about my strategies for doing so on a separate site with negligible traffic isn't the way to do it. On the contrary, it might even help and encourage people to compete with me. The productive thing to do for that site to write Elixir tutorials or at the very least, write about things Elixir devs are looking for—instead of content marketing strategies—and to put it on the same site! Here's an example of piece I wrote which did move the needle a bit on the business side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20721433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20721433 So why am I writing "meta" stuff on a totally new blog and submitting it here instead of putting all my time into the business site? Here's my best understanding of my motivations: 1) Internet points are fun! Not something I feel should be a major motivator, but it is what it is. 2) Increase my luck surface area. Who knows what opportunity could emerge or who I can meet, just because I do things and write about them? 3) Provoke discussion and maybe learn more about the topics I'm writing about and thinking about from all of you! Lammy and TeMPOraL have each already given me an idea in this thread. 4) Generate some level of goodwill from people who have found my writing useful or interesting. It's difficult to quantify the effect, but I believe that it will translate into more help, retweets, etc for my projects in the long run.
threeseed 6y ago
Recap: It's a pretty useless idea. Almost all people are producing content for a company, product etc in which they are not the target customer and hence are not doing searches for. It would have been useful had they explained how to methodically discover long tail keywords that aren't being satisfied with good content for any subject.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- namanyayg 6y ago
  In the first few paragraphs, he explains that this advice applies only to solo niche writers and not companies or products.
jachee 6y ago
This is exactly what I did with rlhitboxes.com. I'm still the most-up-to-date source for the info, even though Epic née Psyonix put up a page with the same info after I launched. They haven't kept it updated as they release new cars. It's just a pet project, but it's consistently in the top 5 of any given relevant search phrase.
Spooky23 6y ago
No, not at all. Your perspective and style has value. I answered a fairly simple question on Stackoverflow many years ago that has a bunch of upvotes, and still generates a few dozen a week. I didn’t do anything magical, just wrote a response in a way that resonates with people. I have not repeated that feat either, so I possess no unusual skill. If you write every day, you’ll do the same thing eventually with something.
- emmelaich 6y ago
  Agreed. I have a few answers on the StackExchange network that have upvotes tricking in year after year. Sometimes I think I should have made a blog and added some pics. Then those upvotes might have been ad revenue.
anonytrary 6y ago
Even more concise: If you don't see a flag on some land, plant your flag there. The problem with this approach is that it only works if you want to create content for the things you searched for. Just because I'm googling obscure shit doesn't mean I want to write an article with ads about it. I could see this technique work for someone who wants to start a technical blog -- make your posts the first result on a bunch of obscure issues you run into.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  It worked very well for my old blog about language learning and teaching, too. That blog later lead to me partnering in a brick and mortar language school and it was also extremely helpful for recruiting. I'd say the question is, "Do your in-depth searches cluster around a general topic?"
hellweaver666 6y ago
I did this recently, a new microcontroller claimed to support circuitpython but had no instructions on how to actually get it up and running. I eventually figured it out and documented it on my site (and shared a link in the official forum to help people if they looked there for it as it was the first place I looked). Few days later, their wiki had been updated with documentation that was almost identical to what I had written. I was mad at first, but it's not a huge deal - what I set out to accomplish was to ensure people could find the instructions. Ironically I still outrank their official wiki on Google :D
puranjay 6y ago
A better tactic, one that I've employed with fantastic results, is to interview your company's current customers. Get a very strong understanding of their pain points and discovery process. Then create content that addresses these pain points very specifically. SEOs tend to get blinded by search metrics and keyword data. There are countless long tail queries that might show negligible results in your keyword tool, but are very pertinent to your target market. You won't get much traffic from such "pain point SEO", but whatever queries do come your way will be highly targeted. In general, unless you rely on ad revenue, you should never use traffic as a success metric for SEO. It tends to blind your decision making. I've ranked for a single keyword that got me 80k visitors a month, but I've made more money from keywords that got me 10 visitors a month.
jakub_g 6y ago
Whenever this happens to me, I create a StackOverflow self-q&a or a GitHub Gist synthesizing the knowledge. Then I use google to find my own content because I more or less remember the keywords of what I wrote. Also, many times, my coworkers find my answer on SO and get amused :) (I could probably write some of those stuff on my personal blog, but SO has an added advantage of soliciting comments and alternative answers; people on blogs are less keen to do that IMO). Fun fact: when I was interviewing for my last job, I got stuck on an unexpected issue when coding. I could use google, and found my gist from few years before with similar problem which got me unstuck (I totally forgot about having it written) as #1 item in Google. IME, SO and gist index really well in Google and often end in top of results. HN, less do (unless you explicitly put hackernews or site:... in query).

by kanobo 6y ago

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

I've had that same fear myself but it hasn't been a problem so far. It might be a problem for an academic deep into a field that isn't a fast-growing one. My much larger site 10-15 years ago was primarily about language learning. It had some fairly niche topics I was concerned that virtually no English-language speakers would be looking for, and yet the traffic rolled in. It was a blog, though. Also, some of those topics became more popular over time. Extensive Reading and Spaced Repetition were two examples. My current site is in my profile and it's pretty tightly focused around Elixir (roughly the 50th most popular programming language).

cubecul 6y ago
In one way, this is essentially the "wedge". You start with a very specific long tail keyword, but you also cover related searches and topics, and the nice part is that your website analytics will then feed you more long tail keywords that are related but not exactly this page: those are ideas for other pages. This is one reason why you'll see a page with one topic as a title often branch off to cover many related but sort of unexpected topics throughout the page - it's to cover the main keyword but also grab coverage on the related ones that might be easier to rank for (by simply mentioning it in a page vs. dedicating a page to it). As the owner of that site, you might see that one of these pages could be getting traffic from hundreds of keywords, and 10 of them are on a distinct enough topic that warrants another page. So you build a page for that, etc.

pidg 6y ago

In my experience (marketing at a small tech company), you can get results even for reasonably competitive terms. The difference is in giving a quality answer to the query. Many (most?) tech companies fill their sites with low-quality, jargon-filled pages that don't actually answer questions - either becuase they're written by marketers with a poor grasp of the technology, or because they don't want to 'give away' their expertise. If you actually answer the question in a reasonably full way, there is nothing to stop you ranking highly. Google values valuable content.

tyingq 6y ago

I wouldn't discount backlinks. Google hasn't made much progress getting away from "page rank". Once you have that credible page/content, do focus on non-spammy ways to share it. Including grey area stuff like calling in favors, sharing it on HN, posting on Medium, etc. In the least spammy, most objective way you can. As a concrete example, I found a grey area way to get a somewhat popular hardware tinkerer interested in something I did. Maybe I even skirted the rules a bit by sending him a free sample of my cool toy and some rough code samples. He took it well beyond what I could. I didn't ask for anything. The investment paid off. Aside from his initial blog post, others took inspiration and posted their own variations. Google now thinks I'm the bomb for something very niche, but reasonably profitable. Likely because my efforts, plus other's work, netted some interesting backlinks. and backlinks to their posts. And maybe I am a badass in this very narrow niche, but I doubt Google would know if I hadn't pushed the envelope a little.

Threeve303 6y ago
> sharing it on HN Perhaps it is more of a grey area. Probably not so much the whole Show HN thing, more of the hustle seen in the comments. Usually you see someone comment on a post about some tech by saying "I am with X company and we are working on Y to solve this problem!". Personally, I think this stuff is great. You gotta respect the hustle.
- tafurnace 6y ago
  Right, it seems like a ploy to expand the author's SEO footprint. I wasn't lost to the author/OP's comments being a part of the hustle. Given the content of the article, the ploy could almost be called something like "meta-hustle".
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    I do want to expand the SEO footprint of my Elixir tutorial site, but writing about my strategies for doing so on a separate site with negligible traffic isn't the way to do it. On the contrary, it might even help and encourage people to compete with me. The productive thing to do for that site to write Elixir tutorials or at the very least, write about things Elixir devs are looking for—instead of content marketing strategies—and to put it on the same site! Here's an example of piece I wrote which did move the needle a bit on the business side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20721433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20721433 So why am I writing "meta" stuff on a totally new blog and submitting it here instead of putting all my time into the business site? Here's my best understanding of my motivations: 1) Internet points are fun! Not something I feel should be a major motivator, but it is what it is. 2) Increase my luck surface area. Who knows what opportunity could emerge or who I can meet, just because I do things and write about them? 3) Provoke discussion and maybe learn more about the topics I'm writing about and thinking about from all of you! Lammy and TeMPOraL have each already given me an idea in this thread. 4) Generate some level of goodwill from people who have found my writing useful or interesting. It's difficult to quantify the effect, but I believe that it will translate into more help, retweets, etc for my projects in the long run.

threeseed 6y ago

Recap: It's a pretty useless idea. Almost all people are producing content for a company, product etc in which they are not the target customer and hence are not doing searches for. It would have been useful had they explained how to methodically discover long tail keywords that aren't being satisfied with good content for any subject.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
namanyayg 6y ago
In the first few paragraphs, he explains that this advice applies only to solo niche writers and not companies or products.

jachee 6y ago

This is exactly what I did with rlhitboxes.com. I'm still the most-up-to-date source for the info, even though Epic née Psyonix put up a page with the same info after I launched. They haven't kept it updated as they release new cars. It's just a pet project, but it's consistently in the top 5 of any given relevant search phrase.

Spooky23 6y ago

No, not at all. Your perspective and style has value. I answered a fairly simple question on Stackoverflow many years ago that has a bunch of upvotes, and still generates a few dozen a week. I didn’t do anything magical, just wrote a response in a way that resonates with people. I have not repeated that feat either, so I possess no unusual skill. If you write every day, you’ll do the same thing eventually with something.

emmelaich 6y ago
Agreed. I have a few answers on the StackExchange network that have upvotes tricking in year after year. Sometimes I think I should have made a blog and added some pics. Then those upvotes might have been ad revenue.

anonytrary 6y ago

Even more concise: If you don't see a flag on some land, plant your flag there. The problem with this approach is that it only works if you want to create content for the things you searched for. Just because I'm googling obscure shit doesn't mean I want to write an article with ads about it. I could see this technique work for someone who wants to start a technical blog -- make your posts the first result on a bunch of obscure issues you run into.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
It worked very well for my old blog about language learning and teaching, too. That blog later lead to me partnering in a brick and mortar language school and it was also extremely helpful for recruiting. I'd say the question is, "Do your in-depth searches cluster around a general topic?"

hellweaver666 6y ago

I did this recently, a new microcontroller claimed to support circuitpython but had no instructions on how to actually get it up and running. I eventually figured it out and documented it on my site (and shared a link in the official forum to help people if they looked there for it as it was the first place I looked). Few days later, their wiki had been updated with documentation that was almost identical to what I had written. I was mad at first, but it's not a huge deal - what I set out to accomplish was to ensure people could find the instructions. Ironically I still outrank their official wiki on Google :D

puranjay 6y ago

A better tactic, one that I've employed with fantastic results, is to interview your company's current customers. Get a very strong understanding of their pain points and discovery process. Then create content that addresses these pain points very specifically. SEOs tend to get blinded by search metrics and keyword data. There are countless long tail queries that might show negligible results in your keyword tool, but are very pertinent to your target market. You won't get much traffic from such "pain point SEO", but whatever queries do come your way will be highly targeted. In general, unless you rely on ad revenue, you should never use traffic as a success metric for SEO. It tends to blind your decision making. I've ranked for a single keyword that got me 80k visitors a month, but I've made more money from keywords that got me 10 visitors a month.

jakub_g 6y ago

Whenever this happens to me, I create a StackOverflow self-q&a or a GitHub Gist synthesizing the knowledge. Then I use google to find my own content because I more or less remember the keywords of what I wrote. Also, many times, my coworkers find my answer on SO and get amused :) (I could probably write some of those stuff on my personal blog, but SO has an added advantage of soliciting comments and alternative answers; people on blogs are less keen to do that IMO). Fun fact: when I was interviewing for my last job, I got stuck on an unexpected issue when coding. I could use google, and found my gist from few years before with similar problem which got me unstuck (I totally forgot about having it written) as #1 item in Google. IME, SO and gist index really well in Google and often end in top of results. HN, less do (unless you explicitly put hackernews or site:... in query).