9 ms·

SEO tricks from Patio11

409 points by dikbrouwer 15y ago

renraw 15y ago
Awesome! Thanks :)
tchae 15y ago
Patio11, thanks for coming!!!
melissamiranda 15y ago
Seriously Patrick, it was awesome to have you here. You were voted as the most helpful speaker at 500 we've had so far in the batch. Thanks!
- kschua 15y ago
  and thanks to you too for writing this so that those of us who don't have the benefit of being there can learn as well :)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
debasish83 15y ago
Nice article
- courtneypowell 15y ago
  Great talk Patrick! I love the pic from dinner in you blog Melissa!
mechanical_fish 15y ago
Ooh, look, an on-topic location to ask Patrick questions. ;) So, about that whole "subdomain" thing, as mentioned in this article. The problem in SEO is that separate subdomains accrue separate Google scores, correct? So if I was to serve my whole site from a third-tier domain, like "www.example.com", that would be okay? Provided I were not foolish enough to also put stuff on "example.com" and "other.example.com" and expect links to that content to contribute to the reputation of "www.example.com"? Basically I'm looking for confirmation that the classic old "www" prefix is okay, if used carefully. (Lots of people hate it for aesthetic reasons, and I used to agree with them, and then I had to dig into the rules for DNS CNAMEs, and the terrifying results have made me fall in love with "www" again. Unless you tell me it's bad, in which case I guess I'll just have to take to drink.)
- bmelton 15y ago
  I'm not Patrick, and hopefully he'll chime in to answer as well, but one thing to note is that you CAN specify the preferred URL (e.g., www.example.com or just example.com) in Google's Webmaster Tools[1] to let Google know which one you prefer. Obviously, if you set it to be just example.com, don't have all your promotional materials link to the other, and somewhat less obviously, please be aware that what you set as preferred for Google doesn't necessarily mean squat to Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista or whomever. I'm not as qualified to touch on the rest, but thought this might be at least a little useful. [1] - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
- randfish 15y ago
  Yes, you're totally cool to use either site.tld or www.site.tld. I'd recommend using a 301 redirect of one to the other (Google and Bing are pretty good at automatically canonicalizing these, but not perfect). The trouble comes when you segment content to subdomain.site.com. The domain authority engines assign to a root domain may not always pass to all the subdomains, so you end up with subpar rankings to what you could earn. As an example, we launched the Beginner's Guide to SEO on guides.seomoz.org and moved it after a few months to www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo (where it currently lives). It had earned tons of links prior to that move, but the day after the 301 back to the main domain (away from the guides subdomain), it jumped to #1 rankings for all sorts of terms, including "seo guide" (recently got beat out by Google's SEO guide and is now #2). This was a good illustration of the power of keeping content in a single sub/root domain location for us.
  - patio11 15y ago
    What Rand said. #include <ndaed_client_anecdote.h>
    - davidw 15y ago
      So you think it's worth the move to example.com/blog even if you already have an established blog.example.com?
joshu 15y ago
Whoa, patio11 is in Mountain View? Want to get lunch?
- melissamiranda 15y ago
  He's back in Japan now. He was here about a week ago.
  - louhong 15y ago
    Thanks for the summary and write up - incredibly useful. Thank you!
a5seo 15y ago
I agree with all these points, except with respect to Twitter. There is one case where I have seen Twitter impact SEO and that's in getting a new URL indexed fast, and in local SEO... Lots of tweets about a local-related page from people whose (legit) accounts are located in the same region seem to help for local keywords.
- randfish 15y ago
  Yeah. Have to agree with you here. I just tested this recently , getting a few hundred retweets of an obscure URL ranking on page 4 for an obscure term and it moved to page 2 within a few days. I suspect Google may not be getting Twitter data directly (or getting it as fast as when they had the direct relationship), but, at the very least, there's a strong second-order impact between pages earning lots of tweets and getting ranked. Our latest public post on this is here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings but we'll continue to test and try to get more definitive answers.
  - anjc 15y ago
    Is that 'second order impact' not tied to the public doing the link building for you, outside of twitter? E.g. blogs, reddit, etc, rather than Google actually putting ranking weight onto info in tweets?
- melissamiranda 15y ago
  I think Patrick was referring to traditional page rank and general search results as opposed to local or news.
- dools 15y ago
  Yeah Twitter absolutely rocks. I recently had a post tweeted by both @AndrewWarner and @smashingmag [1] and it's now on page one for the search term "testing website" (when done on google.com.au). While the Twitter links were fresh it was page 1 on google.com, too an showing up as "news". This is a relatively new post with virtually no other inbound link juice on a site with not much other link juice and only PR of 3. [1] http://www.decalcms.com/page/Testing_your_website_before_launching_how_to_let_content_drive_design http://www.decalcms.com/page/Testing_your_website_before_lau...
xpose2000 15y ago
This is pretty sound and basic SEO if you want to spend your time making dozens of very basic wordpress blogs about particular topics to grab some easy money. Nothing wrong with this if you have time on the weekends, heck this could even be a fulltime job as the income will slowly climb. However, this 'trick' is quite old, but probably new to some people...
- melvinram 15y ago
  Doing the basics extraordinarily well is usually what makes all the difference.
- patio11 15y ago
  The motivation for the audience at 500 Startups is less "In your spare time, start blogging about [red men's shoes] and try to sell $0.50 a day of AdWords clicks about it" and more "As one thing in your marketing arsenal, create systems and processes to mass-produce quality content about the market addressed by your SaaS application, scaling your userbase from the few hundred people you had at launch to something closer to the 200,000 your friendly neighborhood bingo sideproject has, show your user adoption graph to investors, create lots of value, and ideally end up rich."
wmf 15y ago
This part sounds like cargo cult black magic: "This works for .com (.edu, .org) domains, but not for non-US TLDs like .co or .ly." Does Google really discriminate based on TLDs?
- kevinburke 15y ago
  yes - some TLD's are known spam havens. see co.cc, for example.
- patio11 15y ago
  Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: yes, Google certainly treats the Big Three differently than it does .co or .ly. I don't have specific evidence of them discriminating against .co/.ly, but the evidence that they discriminate for EMDs in the Big Three is overwhelming and undeniable.
  - blauwbilgorgel 15y ago
    Is this not a bias? As in: It only looks like Google discriminates for the Big Three, because they are so abundant? I've heard from official sources like below that Google doesn't discriminate on TLD. There are my sites and Googlers who use ".info" TLD in a legit and well-ranking manner. Where this "evidence" does play a role, is in spam/made for Adwords-sites. It is reasonable to assume that a .co or .ly will get more attention, to combat spam/made for Adwords sites that try to use Keyword-In-Domain tricks to outrank legit companies. But if you are not making Keyword-In-Domain Made-For-Adwords sites, you have nothing to worry about (at least as for Google discrimination). It is mostly _users_ who discriminate for a .com. If Google ranks website.ly in the top 5, but its users don't click on the result, in fear of spam or low-quality, then your rankings might suffer. Matt Cutts interview on DomainRoundtable. "For example, do .com domains carry more weight than a .net, .us, .info, etc. He said that TLD doesn’t matter -- that’s the way Larry and Sergey originally designed the Google algorithm. The algorithm doesn’t care where the page is located, it’s all about pagerank (LINKS) of the particular page. At the end of answering this question he did admit that they might have started to look at particularly cheap (and spammy) TLDs differently than other TLDs or they might start considering TLD in their algorithm if they’re not already doing so." So it is still good to advice against .io and witty domain names (portfol.io), but not for the reason of Google discrimination. I am reminded by statements like: "For better ranking, claim your domain for 5+ years". Just because Google gives extra attention to domains with a low expiration date, because they correlate with spammy/get-rich-quick sites, doesn't mean that spam on a 5+ years registered domain is ok, or that simply claiming a domain for 10 years, somehow signals quality to Google. You only have to worry about registration dates, when you know that you deliver low-quality content and you don't want to be found out soon.
afunguy24 15y ago
Umm...I was expecting more. I really was.
ghayes 15y ago
"Github, Slideshare, Tumblr are fantastic, but don’t give them your link juice. Put your content on your own domain. " Love this. There's no reason you can't host the write-up for your github projects / gems on your own domain, and make a much prettier and more intuitive documentation for your code than what you can do with markdown and no pictures. As an example, look how nice VowsJS (http://vowsjs.org/ http://vowsjs.org/) does this. It makes me excited to clone their module and use it in my project. More people should be doing this!
- handzhiev 15y ago
  But you can get one-way dofollow links by placing some of your code on Github. It can make sense, just needs some carful planning.
kevinburke 15y ago
Use Google Adword’s keyword tool to come up with keywords and write pages that speak to those topics. If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on. Rather than automating it or having the CEO or head marketing guy write everything, you want to define a process such that a freelancer or team member can create content responsive to those keywords with a consistent level of quality. This is really cutting it close to violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines for quality and originality on each page.
- melissamiranda 15y ago
  The content should be high quality. This is why I mentioned the story of eHow and what a terrible thing it is, and why Patrick said "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create content in a fashion that scales while simultaneously ensuring that the user experience of consuming your content remains good" He specifically told us not to create crap content.
  - anjc 15y ago
    The amazingly high quality of your content will be irrelevant if the keyword density on your page is one that Google deems to be low quality. """If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on.""" ^ That type of thing is pretty risky if it's one of your big strategies..
  - RP_Joe 15y ago
    The problem is, what is high quality content? That is never defined. I talked to SEO who though he had a great writer because it flowed so well. But the articles were all fluff. We really should define what great content is, because I think there are many different ideas about this.
eps 15y ago
> Design Matters. A lot. This is a common sense, but I have hard time reconciling patio11 saying that with an actual appearance of his projects. Preaching without practicing takes away a lot credibility from a preacher even if the advice is reasonable.
- melissamiranda 15y ago
  Look at his main site: http://www.kalzumeus.com/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/. It's quite good looking and well designed.
  - irahul 15y ago
    What about this one http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ That doesn't look that good looking to me.
    - melissamiranda 15y ago
      Right, but he made that years ago. He clearly invested a lot in design for kalzumeus.com, which he made much later. If anything, this is a case for figuring out that design does matter.
      - patio11 15y ago
        He clearly invested a lot in design for kalzumeus.com I love that it gives that impression. $99 logo, $70 wordpress template. Anyhow, as folks have noted, I'm not historically known for high-quality Web 2.0 design. I have vanishingly little design skill and poor taste, so I tend to do the minimum necessary to not scare away credit cards. I hope that the refresh on AR makes a positive impression on people, but making a positive impression on people who are not my customers is not super-high on my todo list.
        eps 15y ago
        > I love that it gives that impression It doesn't, that's just your fan club talking. It looks like a run-of-the-mill WordPress theme. > Anyhow... What you just said translates into "Design doesn't really matter." There is a difference between doing minimum needed not to scare away customers, and refining the design to appeal to both existing and future audiences. Latter is the case of why design matters, former is not. Former is just the same common business sense that dictates to not be rude to your customers or not use green on red text.
frankacter 15y ago
@dikbrouwer: Was the talk recorded, if so is there a youtube link? @patio11: could you make your presentation / slide deck available for those of us who were not fortunate enough to attend in person.
- melissamiranda 15y ago
  No recording that I'm aware of.
  - frankacter 15y ago
    Thanks. Any idea if the deck is available anywhere?
nikcub 15y ago
At Techcrunch when we removed the share buttons average traffic to each post dropped 20-25%. We saw no jump in number of blog links, or tumblr's, or anything else. The buttons suck - we knew that a lot of users hated them (it adds 4 * 20 additional HTTP requests to the main page), but they were worth too much traffic to do away with. Social network referrals likely surpass search engine referrals for a lot of blogs and web sites. They have steadily become an important web traffic navigator. If somebody can figure out how to make those share buttons prettier and more efficient there is probably a product in that. I would guess that most blogs would love to drop the grid of share buttons that can be found on every post. Otherwise I totally agree with not going for subdomains. We setup each property on a separate domain and initially had some on subdomains. The subdomains didn't rank at all and didn't help our PR or SEO. As soon as we switched each property to a separate domain our search referrals rocketed. For eg. you can now find a crunchbase link within the first 5 results for the name of a startup, while similar records for posts that lived on subdomains wouldn't rank at all. We had around a dozen different domains and frequently linked between them (for eg. each post would have multiple crunchbase links), and it worked really well for search ranking (search engines are ~40% of crunchbase traffic, IIRC) It shouldn't be like that, but it is.
- mkuhn 15y ago
  Its nice how the 4*20 requests problem has been solved during the redesign. Now the individual Buttons are only loaded if someone really wants to use them and is hovering over the dummy buttons. I found that quite nifty and unobtrusive. A smart solution to the problem.
  - nikcub 15y ago
    It is much better than having two clicks (which I had prototyped), but the prob is that a lot of portable devices don't have 'hover' - so I don't know if it falls back on anything in that case. There is a product here - package the buttons together so they only load once, hide them in some way by default, and provide a bunch of analytics. Lots of blogs and websites would pay for that - the current solutions for social button analytics are really bad, or non-existant (you need to know things like click-through rates, which share options are most popular, autohiding some for users who never use them, detect if the user is logged in for each service, how many followers/likes/retweets etc. each user gets from a share so you can identify 'power sharers' etc.) - I don't think that exists. You can't just keep adding more and more buttons for each social service, and there are some people who will only use, for eg. delicious or pinboard and there are no buttons for them.
iaskwhy 15y ago
On the subdomains topic, on one of my sites I went the subdomain way for languages. Example: www is for english, de is for german, fr is for french and so on. The reason I did this is because I wanted Google to index the sites properly, in the right language. So if you go to google.fr and search for some of its keywords you would see the french version and not the english one. I'm just not sure how Google behaves but my feeling is that if all your languages are on the same domain (without any difference on the URL) then it will always display the english one by default (assuming it's the default one, obviously). Can anyone enlighten me? It's been working for me but I notice the english version (which is the default one, www, but not the one with most visits) is not working as good as the other languages so I'd say juice is not shared between subdomains, like Patrick said. Still trying to figure out what's the best solution...
danmaz74 15y ago
Unfortunately, I have to agree on much of the advice. Especially, I just hate how much google gives credit to the terms which are in the domain name. Why is having been able to register a "good" domain first such an important signal about site relevance? On many searches the first page is full of "keyword.com" "keyword.net" "keyword.it" websites that were only made for SEO and Adwords and have no usefulness.
- anjc 15y ago
  This is something Google are surely working on, or, i hope they are. As much as the topic of SEO fascinates me, when it's successful it can be so deleterious to the quality of results. Google search is practically useless, for many searches that i'd do which i'd imagine are common enough.
blauwbilgorgel 15y ago
>> Twitter links has no SEO juice Besides using Twitter to: - build your network and following, - Twitter can aid in brand/product mentions - Some reason to believe Twitter links are followed by the search engines, so help with indexation and discovery.[1] - Some reason to believe Author/Agent/Identity rank of social profiles will start playing a role.[2] - Finally, there are sites who add Twitterfeeds to the author profiles. Not all these feeds have the "nofollow" property. The last one is also relevant to the statement: "Wikipedia doesn't matter for link juice". There are many copies of Wikipedia on university domains, where they don't employ nofollow (For study about web crawling or natural language processing). Or people rewriting Wikipedia articles and adding the references without nofollow. A nofollow link can transform into a dofollow link. >> Don’t use the keyword meta tag. Exactly, but do use its fine on-page alternative: Microdata keywords: http://schema.org/WebPage http://schema.org/WebPage If only for internal usage: Writing down the keywords for a page, keeps you focussed. If you don't mind giving this information to your competitors (there are tools to find out these keywords anyway, if not already obvious), do experiment with microdata keywords. [1] http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-indexation http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-index... [2] http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus-as-an-identity-service-or-digital-signature/ http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus...
- orionlogic 15y ago
  I agree with Schema.org. Use that extensively in your website. You get more pixel space in Google SERP's by microformatting your content.
- anjc 15y ago
  They never said it doesn't have marketing juice, they're just talking about link building i presume. So surely it'd be better to focus on more solid SEO strategies than link building on no-follow sites and hoping that somebody mirrors it somewhere. Do .edu links even have any ranking weight anymore? It's probably one of the most abused link building schemes there is.
  - blauwbilgorgel 15y ago
arthurgibson 15y ago
People should realize he is just telling you how to build a good website, remove any mention of SEO from this article and you will see my point.
- yesbabyyes 15y ago
  Build a good website, as in adding lots of "content" with [your product] for [Healthcare|Pets|Education|Halloween]? That doesn't sound like building a good website -- to me, it sounds more like spam.
hugorodgerbrown 15y ago
Am I alone in finding the following quote profoundly depressing: "It cost Patrick $8.95 to buy [halloweengiftcards], $100 for a writer to make 5 pages of content, and he made thousands in sales." Ditto "If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on." This kind of seo-engineering just seems so desparate, as if SEO is the be-all and end-all of running an online business. Whatever happened to having a site that obeys all the normal 'rules', and provides valuable information / services / products to your target audience. They'll find it.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I find that pretty annoying when I'm looking for tools, but I do think it works, with varying degrees of shadiness. Some companies completely rebrand a product as if it were custom-designed for an area, taking their Foo Software and making it Foo Software for Healthcare, when in fact that's a lie and it wasn't customized for healthcare at all (and certainly not based on any knowledge of the area or research into its practices). Maybe users don't notice, and even if they do, sometimes you can mitigate it by just giving refunds freely to the users who complain, and keeping the money of those who don't. An even scammier version of that is to rebrand software you didn't even make, like take VLC and rebrand it as customized video software for $whatever, when indeed you've done no customization for anything.
- dpritchett 15y ago
  This seems incredibly idealistic. Patrick is providing relevant and valuable products to people. If this $110 investment in a halloween-themed variant to his site brought thousands in sales, then clearly not everyone was "finding it" where it was seasonal bingo content.
- chc 15y ago
  People were looking for Halloween bingo cards, Patrick provided them in the most obvious place. In what way is that not providing valuable information/services/products?
JeffL 15y ago
Where is a good place to hire someone to write 5 pages of content for $100?
- barry-cotter 15y ago
  Email me and I'll get back to you. Or elance.com, vworker.com or odesk.com
macoughl 15y ago
As someone who has been in the SEO industry a long time I can tell you that some of this is terrible/spammy advice... Buy KW rich domains and pay some copywriter to crank out 4-5 pages?! Are you serious? Twitter has no SEO Value?...just so you know...the SE's came out and said that authoritative tweets absolutely have value....While they don't pass "juice", they can help you in the SERPs I'd hold off on that hug if I were you...
- muyuu 15y ago
  There is nothing about SEO (and SEO only) that isn't spammy.

409 points by dikbrouwer 15y ago

renraw 15y ago

Awesome! Thanks :)

tchae 15y ago

Patio11, thanks for coming!!!

melissamiranda 15y ago

Seriously Patrick, it was awesome to have you here. You were voted as the most helpful speaker at 500 we've had so far in the batch. Thanks!

kschua 15y ago
and thanks to you too for writing this so that those of us who don't have the benefit of being there can learn as well :)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

debasish83 15y ago

Nice article

courtneypowell 15y ago
Great talk Patrick! I love the pic from dinner in you blog Melissa!

mechanical_fish 15y ago

Ooh, look, an on-topic location to ask Patrick questions. ;) So, about that whole "subdomain" thing, as mentioned in this article. The problem in SEO is that separate subdomains accrue separate Google scores, correct? So if I was to serve my whole site from a third-tier domain, like "www.example.com", that would be okay? Provided I were not foolish enough to also put stuff on "example.com" and "other.example.com" and expect links to that content to contribute to the reputation of "www.example.com"? Basically I'm looking for confirmation that the classic old "www" prefix is okay, if used carefully. (Lots of people hate it for aesthetic reasons, and I used to agree with them, and then I had to dig into the rules for DNS CNAMEs, and the terrifying results have made me fall in love with "www" again. Unless you tell me it's bad, in which case I guess I'll just have to take to drink.)

bmelton 15y ago
I'm not Patrick, and hopefully he'll chime in to answer as well, but one thing to note is that you CAN specify the preferred URL (e.g., www.example.com or just example.com) in Google's Webmaster Tools[1] to let Google know which one you prefer. Obviously, if you set it to be just example.com, don't have all your promotional materials link to the other, and somewhat less obviously, please be aware that what you set as preferred for Google doesn't necessarily mean squat to Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista or whomever. I'm not as qualified to touch on the rest, but thought this might be at least a little useful. [1] - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
randfish 15y ago
Yes, you're totally cool to use either site.tld or www.site.tld. I'd recommend using a 301 redirect of one to the other (Google and Bing are pretty good at automatically canonicalizing these, but not perfect). The trouble comes when you segment content to subdomain.site.com. The domain authority engines assign to a root domain may not always pass to all the subdomains, so you end up with subpar rankings to what you could earn. As an example, we launched the Beginner's Guide to SEO on guides.seomoz.org and moved it after a few months to www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo (where it currently lives). It had earned tons of links prior to that move, but the day after the 301 back to the main domain (away from the guides subdomain), it jumped to #1 rankings for all sorts of terms, including "seo guide" (recently got beat out by Google's SEO guide and is now #2). This was a good illustration of the power of keeping content in a single sub/root domain location for us.
- patio11 15y ago
  What Rand said. #include <ndaed_client_anecdote.h>
  - davidw 15y ago
    So you think it's worth the move to example.com/blog even if you already have an established blog.example.com?

joshu 15y ago

Whoa, patio11 is in Mountain View? Want to get lunch?

melissamiranda 15y ago
He's back in Japan now. He was here about a week ago.
- louhong 15y ago
  Thanks for the summary and write up - incredibly useful. Thank you!

a5seo 15y ago

I agree with all these points, except with respect to Twitter. There is one case where I have seen Twitter impact SEO and that's in getting a new URL indexed fast, and in local SEO... Lots of tweets about a local-related page from people whose (legit) accounts are located in the same region seem to help for local keywords.

randfish 15y ago
Yeah. Have to agree with you here. I just tested this recently , getting a few hundred retweets of an obscure URL ranking on page 4 for an obscure term and it moved to page 2 within a few days. I suspect Google may not be getting Twitter data directly (or getting it as fast as when they had the direct relationship), but, at the very least, there's a strong second-order impact between pages earning lots of tweets and getting ranked. Our latest public post on this is here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings but we'll continue to test and try to get more definitive answers.
- anjc 15y ago
  Is that 'second order impact' not tied to the public doing the link building for you, outside of twitter? E.g. blogs, reddit, etc, rather than Google actually putting ranking weight onto info in tweets?
melissamiranda 15y ago
I think Patrick was referring to traditional page rank and general search results as opposed to local or news.
dools 15y ago
Yeah Twitter absolutely rocks. I recently had a post tweeted by both @AndrewWarner and @smashingmag [1] and it's now on page one for the search term "testing website" (when done on google.com.au). While the Twitter links were fresh it was page 1 on google.com, too an showing up as "news". This is a relatively new post with virtually no other inbound link juice on a site with not much other link juice and only PR of 3. [1] http://www.decalcms.com/page/Testing_your_website_before_launching_how_to_let_content_drive_design http://www.decalcms.com/page/Testing_your_website_before_lau...

xpose2000 15y ago

This is pretty sound and basic SEO if you want to spend your time making dozens of very basic wordpress blogs about particular topics to grab some easy money. Nothing wrong with this if you have time on the weekends, heck this could even be a fulltime job as the income will slowly climb. However, this 'trick' is quite old, but probably new to some people...

melvinram 15y ago
Doing the basics extraordinarily well is usually what makes all the difference.
patio11 15y ago
The motivation for the audience at 500 Startups is less "In your spare time, start blogging about [red men's shoes] and try to sell $0.50 a day of AdWords clicks about it" and more "As one thing in your marketing arsenal, create systems and processes to mass-produce quality content about the market addressed by your SaaS application, scaling your userbase from the few hundred people you had at launch to something closer to the 200,000 your friendly neighborhood bingo sideproject has, show your user adoption graph to investors, create lots of value, and ideally end up rich."

wmf 15y ago

This part sounds like cargo cult black magic: "This works for .com (.edu, .org) domains, but not for non-US TLDs like .co or .ly." Does Google really discriminate based on TLDs?

kevinburke 15y ago
yes - some TLD's are known spam havens. see co.cc, for example.
patio11 15y ago
Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: yes, Google certainly treats the Big Three differently than it does .co or .ly. I don't have specific evidence of them discriminating against .co/.ly, but the evidence that they discriminate for EMDs in the Big Three is overwhelming and undeniable.
- blauwbilgorgel 15y ago
  Is this not a bias? As in: It only looks like Google discriminates for the Big Three, because they are so abundant? I've heard from official sources like below that Google doesn't discriminate on TLD. There are my sites and Googlers who use ".info" TLD in a legit and well-ranking manner. Where this "evidence" does play a role, is in spam/made for Adwords-sites. It is reasonable to assume that a .co or .ly will get more attention, to combat spam/made for Adwords sites that try to use Keyword-In-Domain tricks to outrank legit companies. But if you are not making Keyword-In-Domain Made-For-Adwords sites, you have nothing to worry about (at least as for Google discrimination). It is mostly _users_ who discriminate for a .com. If Google ranks website.ly in the top 5, but its users don't click on the result, in fear of spam or low-quality, then your rankings might suffer. Matt Cutts interview on DomainRoundtable. "For example, do .com domains carry more weight than a .net, .us, .info, etc. He said that TLD doesn’t matter -- that’s the way Larry and Sergey originally designed the Google algorithm. The algorithm doesn’t care where the page is located, it’s all about pagerank (LINKS) of the particular page. At the end of answering this question he did admit that they might have started to look at particularly cheap (and spammy) TLDs differently than other TLDs or they might start considering TLD in their algorithm if they’re not already doing so." So it is still good to advice against .io and witty domain names (portfol.io), but not for the reason of Google discrimination. I am reminded by statements like: "For better ranking, claim your domain for 5+ years". Just because Google gives extra attention to domains with a low expiration date, because they correlate with spammy/get-rich-quick sites, doesn't mean that spam on a 5+ years registered domain is ok, or that simply claiming a domain for 10 years, somehow signals quality to Google. You only have to worry about registration dates, when you know that you deliver low-quality content and you don't want to be found out soon.

afunguy24 15y ago

Umm...I was expecting more. I really was.

ghayes 15y ago

"Github, Slideshare, Tumblr are fantastic, but don’t give them your link juice. Put your content on your own domain. " Love this. There's no reason you can't host the write-up for your github projects / gems on your own domain, and make a much prettier and more intuitive documentation for your code than what you can do with markdown and no pictures. As an example, look how nice VowsJS (http://vowsjs.org/ http://vowsjs.org/) does this. It makes me excited to clone their module and use it in my project. More people should be doing this!

handzhiev 15y ago
But you can get one-way dofollow links by placing some of your code on Github. It can make sense, just needs some carful planning.

kevinburke 15y ago

Use Google Adword’s keyword tool to come up with keywords and write pages that speak to those topics. If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on. Rather than automating it or having the CEO or head marketing guy write everything, you want to define a process such that a freelancer or team member can create content responsive to those keywords with a consistent level of quality. This is really cutting it close to violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines for quality and originality on each page.

melissamiranda 15y ago
The content should be high quality. This is why I mentioned the story of eHow and what a terrible thing it is, and why Patrick said "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create content in a fashion that scales while simultaneously ensuring that the user experience of consuming your content remains good" He specifically told us not to create crap content.
- anjc 15y ago
  The amazingly high quality of your content will be irrelevant if the keyword density on your page is one that Google deems to be low quality. """If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on.""" ^ That type of thing is pretty risky if it's one of your big strategies..
- RP_Joe 15y ago
  The problem is, what is high quality content? That is never defined. I talked to SEO who though he had a great writer because it flowed so well. But the articles were all fluff. We really should define what great content is, because I think there are many different ideas about this.

eps 15y ago

> Design Matters. A lot. This is a common sense, but I have hard time reconciling patio11 saying that with an actual appearance of his projects. Preaching without practicing takes away a lot credibility from a preacher even if the advice is reasonable.

melissamiranda 15y ago
Look at his main site: http://www.kalzumeus.com/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/. It's quite good looking and well designed.
- irahul 15y ago
  What about this one http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ That doesn't look that good looking to me.
  - melissamiranda 15y ago
    Right, but he made that years ago. He clearly invested a lot in design for kalzumeus.com, which he made much later. If anything, this is a case for figuring out that design does matter.
    - patio11 15y ago
      He clearly invested a lot in design for kalzumeus.com I love that it gives that impression. $99 logo, $70 wordpress template. Anyhow, as folks have noted, I'm not historically known for high-quality Web 2.0 design. I have vanishingly little design skill and poor taste, so I tend to do the minimum necessary to not scare away credit cards. I hope that the refresh on AR makes a positive impression on people, but making a positive impression on people who are not my customers is not super-high on my todo list.
      - eps 15y ago
        > I love that it gives that impression It doesn't, that's just your fan club talking. It looks like a run-of-the-mill WordPress theme. > Anyhow... What you just said translates into "Design doesn't really matter." There is a difference between doing minimum needed not to scare away customers, and refining the design to appeal to both existing and future audiences. Latter is the case of why design matters, former is not. Former is just the same common business sense that dictates to not be rude to your customers or not use green on red text.

frankacter 15y ago

@dikbrouwer: Was the talk recorded, if so is there a youtube link? @patio11: could you make your presentation / slide deck available for those of us who were not fortunate enough to attend in person.

melissamiranda 15y ago
No recording that I'm aware of.
- frankacter 15y ago
  Thanks. Any idea if the deck is available anywhere?

nikcub 15y ago

At Techcrunch when we removed the share buttons average traffic to each post dropped 20-25%. We saw no jump in number of blog links, or tumblr's, or anything else. The buttons suck - we knew that a lot of users hated them (it adds 4 * 20 additional HTTP requests to the main page), but they were worth too much traffic to do away with. Social network referrals likely surpass search engine referrals for a lot of blogs and web sites. They have steadily become an important web traffic navigator. If somebody can figure out how to make those share buttons prettier and more efficient there is probably a product in that. I would guess that most blogs would love to drop the grid of share buttons that can be found on every post. Otherwise I totally agree with not going for subdomains. We setup each property on a separate domain and initially had some on subdomains. The subdomains didn't rank at all and didn't help our PR or SEO. As soon as we switched each property to a separate domain our search referrals rocketed. For eg. you can now find a crunchbase link within the first 5 results for the name of a startup, while similar records for posts that lived on subdomains wouldn't rank at all. We had around a dozen different domains and frequently linked between them (for eg. each post would have multiple crunchbase links), and it worked really well for search ranking (search engines are ~40% of crunchbase traffic, IIRC) It shouldn't be like that, but it is.

mkuhn 15y ago
Its nice how the 4*20 requests problem has been solved during the redesign. Now the individual Buttons are only loaded if someone really wants to use them and is hovering over the dummy buttons. I found that quite nifty and unobtrusive. A smart solution to the problem.
- nikcub 15y ago
  It is much better than having two clicks (which I had prototyped), but the prob is that a lot of portable devices don't have 'hover' - so I don't know if it falls back on anything in that case. There is a product here - package the buttons together so they only load once, hide them in some way by default, and provide a bunch of analytics. Lots of blogs and websites would pay for that - the current solutions for social button analytics are really bad, or non-existant (you need to know things like click-through rates, which share options are most popular, autohiding some for users who never use them, detect if the user is logged in for each service, how many followers/likes/retweets etc. each user gets from a share so you can identify 'power sharers' etc.) - I don't think that exists. You can't just keep adding more and more buttons for each social service, and there are some people who will only use, for eg. delicious or pinboard and there are no buttons for them.

iaskwhy 15y ago

On the subdomains topic, on one of my sites I went the subdomain way for languages. Example: www is for english, de is for german, fr is for french and so on. The reason I did this is because I wanted Google to index the sites properly, in the right language. So if you go to google.fr and search for some of its keywords you would see the french version and not the english one. I'm just not sure how Google behaves but my feeling is that if all your languages are on the same domain (without any difference on the URL) then it will always display the english one by default (assuming it's the default one, obviously). Can anyone enlighten me? It's been working for me but I notice the english version (which is the default one, www, but not the one with most visits) is not working as good as the other languages so I'd say juice is not shared between subdomains, like Patrick said. Still trying to figure out what's the best solution...

danmaz74 15y ago

Unfortunately, I have to agree on much of the advice. Especially, I just hate how much google gives credit to the terms which are in the domain name. Why is having been able to register a "good" domain first such an important signal about site relevance? On many searches the first page is full of "keyword.com" "keyword.net" "keyword.it" websites that were only made for SEO and Adwords and have no usefulness.

anjc 15y ago
This is something Google are surely working on, or, i hope they are. As much as the topic of SEO fascinates me, when it's successful it can be so deleterious to the quality of results. Google search is practically useless, for many searches that i'd do which i'd imagine are common enough.

blauwbilgorgel 15y ago

>> Twitter links has no SEO juice Besides using Twitter to: - build your network and following, - Twitter can aid in brand/product mentions - Some reason to believe Twitter links are followed by the search engines, so help with indexation and discovery.[1] - Some reason to believe Author/Agent/Identity rank of social profiles will start playing a role.[2] - Finally, there are sites who add Twitterfeeds to the author profiles. Not all these feeds have the "nofollow" property. The last one is also relevant to the statement: "Wikipedia doesn't matter for link juice". There are many copies of Wikipedia on university domains, where they don't employ nofollow (For study about web crawling or natural language processing). Or people rewriting Wikipedia articles and adding the references without nofollow. A nofollow link can transform into a dofollow link. >> Don’t use the keyword meta tag. Exactly, but do use its fine on-page alternative: Microdata keywords: http://schema.org/WebPage http://schema.org/WebPage If only for internal usage: Writing down the keywords for a page, keeps you focussed. If you don't mind giving this information to your competitors (there are tools to find out these keywords anyway, if not already obvious), do experiment with microdata keywords. [1] http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-indexation http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-index... [2] http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus-as-an-identity-service-or-digital-signature/ http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus...

orionlogic 15y ago
I agree with Schema.org. Use that extensively in your website. You get more pixel space in Google SERP's by microformatting your content.
anjc 15y ago
They never said it doesn't have marketing juice, they're just talking about link building i presume. So surely it'd be better to focus on more solid SEO strategies than link building on no-follow sites and hoping that somebody mirrors it somewhere. Do .edu links even have any ranking weight anymore? It's probably one of the most abused link building schemes there is.
- blauwbilgorgel 15y ago

arthurgibson 15y ago

People should realize he is just telling you how to build a good website, remove any mention of SEO from this article and you will see my point.

yesbabyyes 15y ago
Build a good website, as in adding lots of "content" with [your product] for [Healthcare|Pets|Education|Halloween]? That doesn't sound like building a good website -- to me, it sounds more like spam.

hugorodgerbrown 15y ago

Am I alone in finding the following quote profoundly depressing: "It cost Patrick $8.95 to buy [halloweengiftcards], $100 for a writer to make 5 pages of content, and he made thousands in sales." Ditto "If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on." This kind of seo-engineering just seems so desparate, as if SEO is the be-all and end-all of running an online business. Whatever happened to having a site that obeys all the normal 'rules', and provides valuable information / services / products to your target audience. They'll find it.

_delirium 15y ago
I find that pretty annoying when I'm looking for tools, but I do think it works, with varying degrees of shadiness. Some companies completely rebrand a product as if it were custom-designed for an area, taking their Foo Software and making it Foo Software for Healthcare, when in fact that's a lie and it wasn't customized for healthcare at all (and certainly not based on any knowledge of the area or research into its practices). Maybe users don't notice, and even if they do, sometimes you can mitigate it by just giving refunds freely to the users who complain, and keeping the money of those who don't. An even scammier version of that is to rebrand software you didn't even make, like take VLC and rebrand it as customized video software for $whatever, when indeed you've done no customization for anything.
dpritchett 15y ago
This seems incredibly idealistic. Patrick is providing relevant and valuable products to people. If this $110 investment in a halloween-themed variant to his site brought thousands in sales, then clearly not everyone was "finding it" where it was seasonal bingo content.
chc 15y ago
People were looking for Halloween bingo cards, Patrick provided them in the most obvious place. In what way is that not providing valuable information/services/products?

JeffL 15y ago

Where is a good place to hire someone to write 5 pages of content for $100?

barry-cotter 15y ago
Email me and I'll get back to you. Or elance.com, vworker.com or odesk.com

macoughl 15y ago

As someone who has been in the SEO industry a long time I can tell you that some of this is terrible/spammy advice... Buy KW rich domains and pay some copywriter to crank out 4-5 pages?! Are you serious? Twitter has no SEO Value?...just so you know...the SE's came out and said that authoritative tweets absolutely have value....While they don't pass "juice", they can help you in the SERPs I'd hold off on that hug if I were you...

muyuu 15y ago
There is nothing about SEO (and SEO only) that isn't spammy.