5 ms·

It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. Some of them will definitely be an improvement. For example, it's not really valuable for

by getsat 15y ago

It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. Some of them will definitely be an improvement. For example, it's not really valuable for someone to land on one of your tag pages. Putting all your links to your content pages inside H2 tags tells search engines that they're more important that other links on the page. The /title one is big. Google likes short URLs without a lot of extra cruft. You're using rails from what I can see, so the change is trivial. :) Add a route, throw an index on your slug field, and have requests to the old URLs do a 301 redirect to the short version. Page load time is also a SEO factor now. http://yakkstr.com/tags/7-Politics http://yakkstr.com/tags/7-Politics takes 4.25s to load according to your X-Runtime header. That's really bad. You're not paginating, and you're only loading a few entries, so I think you're missing an index. :) Here's some tips: http://madhatted.com/2009/8/12/faster-sites-done-faster http://madhatted.com/2009/8/12/faster-sites-done-faster Check this out: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yakkstr.com http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yakkstr.com Lots of empty/valueless results. Maybe you can noindex blogs that have no posts in them so they don't pollute the search results? Your slug generator is generating bad slugs: http://yakkstr.com/posts/1793-Climate-Change--- http://yakkstr.com/posts/1793-Climate-Change--- You should look at using String#to_url from https://github.com/rubypanther/stringex https://github.com/rubypanther/stringex instead of whatever you're using currently. Google text ads may convert better than the image-based ads since they're usually more relevant to the topic at hand. Try experimenting with them.

jshen 15y ago
You didn't really answer the question. I can do all of that work, how much do you think it will increase organic google traffic? 10%? 20%? This is an experiment I'm trying to do ;) My hypothesis is that these things won't make a significant difference.
- slouch 15y ago
  Your question wasn't very good. The changes suggested need to be made one time in order to affect your site's traffic many times. The changes might make the site more attractive in search results based on improved snippets. The H tags change could help google better understand the content and rank it for more appropriate searches. If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them. If the end result is 10%, how do you know it wasn't because your users started writing more popular content 4 months after you made the changes?
  - jshen 15y ago
    First, let me reiterate that my site is for fun, and nothing more. But let's assume that it were a business, and I'll explain how my question is not only good, but the most important question a you should ask. We have finite resources and time, and we have to decide what to use those resources and time for. How do we do that? I could implement all of these changes in a 2 days let's say, or I could use that same time and money to add some feature my users have been asking for. Which should I do? To answer that we have to estimate in some way the impact of each. Saying it "might make the site more attractive", "could help google", etc isn't a good answer. "If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them." No it wouldn't, and what I'm offering here is to do the changes and measure the change.
    - slouch 15y ago
      I would love to know how you intend to isolate variables during your measurement so that your tests are accurate.
      - jshen 15y ago
        You could never isolate it completely with only a single site, but that doesn't mean you conclude that you can't measure anything, or estimate at all. If I made all the changes in a few days, gave it a few weeks for google to notice the changes, and organic search traffic didn't increase in any noticeable way ... that's strong evidence that it didn't have much of an effect. Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Their gut? Or did they do these things in the past, and measure an improvement, even when they didn't isolate all the variables as you are demanding of me! Why not demand the same from the person making the suggestion?
        getsat 15y ago
        > Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Fair question. I would say these things are current, accepted "best practices". I'd liken it to suggesting you use a version control system instead of emailing code back and forth. Your existing system might work, but many other people who were also emailing code back and forth are seeing gains using this new-fangled VCS thing, so it's almost definitely worth doing. You might try searching for "SEO before and after" or "SEO case study" to see how on-site changes have worked (or haven't worked!) for other sites. At any rate, many of the current "best practices" are trivial, under the hood changes so it doesn't really cost anything to put them into place. Most of them simply help search engines understand how your content is structured and benefit both you and your users.
- getsat 15y ago
  I did answer it: > It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. The answer is that there is no definite answer. :)
  - jshen 15y ago
    Well you'd want something more to go on to prioritize a roadmap ;) Like I said, I'm happy to do this as an experiment and see what impact it has if you're interested. email me at yakkstr at yakkstr.com

by getsat 15y ago

jshen 15y ago

You didn't really answer the question. I can do all of that work, how much do you think it will increase organic google traffic? 10%? 20%? This is an experiment I'm trying to do ;) My hypothesis is that these things won't make a significant difference.

slouch 15y ago
Your question wasn't very good. The changes suggested need to be made one time in order to affect your site's traffic many times. The changes might make the site more attractive in search results based on improved snippets. The H tags change could help google better understand the content and rank it for more appropriate searches. If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them. If the end result is 10%, how do you know it wasn't because your users started writing more popular content 4 months after you made the changes?
- jshen 15y ago
  First, let me reiterate that my site is for fun, and nothing more. But let's assume that it were a business, and I'll explain how my question is not only good, but the most important question a you should ask. We have finite resources and time, and we have to decide what to use those resources and time for. How do we do that? I could implement all of these changes in a 2 days let's say, or I could use that same time and money to add some feature my users have been asking for. Which should I do? To answer that we have to estimate in some way the impact of each. Saying it "might make the site more attractive", "could help google", etc isn't a good answer. "If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them." No it wouldn't, and what I'm offering here is to do the changes and measure the change.
  - slouch 15y ago
    I would love to know how you intend to isolate variables during your measurement so that your tests are accurate.
    - jshen 15y ago
      You could never isolate it completely with only a single site, but that doesn't mean you conclude that you can't measure anything, or estimate at all. If I made all the changes in a few days, gave it a few weeks for google to notice the changes, and organic search traffic didn't increase in any noticeable way ... that's strong evidence that it didn't have much of an effect. Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Their gut? Or did they do these things in the past, and measure an improvement, even when they didn't isolate all the variables as you are demanding of me! Why not demand the same from the person making the suggestion?
      - getsat 15y ago
        > Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Fair question. I would say these things are current, accepted "best practices". I'd liken it to suggesting you use a version control system instead of emailing code back and forth. Your existing system might work, but many other people who were also emailing code back and forth are seeing gains using this new-fangled VCS thing, so it's almost definitely worth doing. You might try searching for "SEO before and after" or "SEO case study" to see how on-site changes have worked (or haven't worked!) for other sites. At any rate, many of the current "best practices" are trivial, under the hood changes so it doesn't really cost anything to put them into place. Most of them simply help search engines understand how your content is structured and benefit both you and your users.
getsat 15y ago
I did answer it: > It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. The answer is that there is no definite answer. :)
- jshen 15y ago
  Well you'd want something more to go on to prioritize a roadmap ;) Like I said, I'm happy to do this as an experiment and see what impact it has if you're interested. email me at yakkstr at yakkstr.com