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How I Would Do SEO for Rap Genius (2012)

46 points by cocoflunchy 13y ago

josh2600 13y ago
Great article full of helpful info. The main takeaway for marketers who don't have the scale of content that RapGenius has should be this: content is king. Long form content is back and making stuff people want to read is more important than ever. Great content + the semantic web is something everyone can leverage to increase their site visibility.
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  How would you determine how to write engaging content your followers would enjoy reading? Things like asking your audience, etc are not scalable.
  - tomharari 13y ago
    Good question and it's the one everyone asks. There's a couple ways you can figure this out. Scrapebox lets you scale the process of looking at google suggest. You could probably build a scraper of quora suggestions. Anywhere people are asking questions about topics related to your business will help you figure out what content. There's a google docs tool made by a guy named Richard Baxter that does something similar I'll see if I can find it and post the link here.
tomharari 13y ago
Hey all I'm the author of the post. Glad to see the post get on HN - happy to answer any questions ya'll have.
pearjuice 13y ago
What does Mozilla have to do wit- oh wait.
andymcsherry 13y ago
Domain and page authority in this case is relatively useless. The problem with lyrics SEO is rampant duplicate content. Every site has the same content and since Rap Genius is relatively new to the game, the way to climb the rankings is to do exactly what they've excelled at: getting their users to submit unique content. It's the same reason songmeanings.net has succeeded as well. Your comment about storing each comment in a separate URL seems to be the true value here. Then each landing page can distinguish itself from the dozens of other lyric clone sites. Disclaimer: used to work for Tunewiki, another lyric site
- tomharari 13y ago
  Yup you hit the nail on the head. Great strategy for starting out an driving traffic quickly. I think the value add long term comes from being an authority in decoding hip hop, not just lyrics per se.

46 points by cocoflunchy 13y ago

Great article full of helpful info. The main takeaway for marketers who don't have the scale of content that RapGenius has should be this: content is king. Long form content is back and making stuff people want to read is more important than ever. Great content + the semantic web is something everyone can leverage to increase their site visibility.

AznHisoka 13y ago
How would you determine how to write engaging content your followers would enjoy reading? Things like asking your audience, etc are not scalable.
- tomharari 13y ago
  Good question and it's the one everyone asks. There's a couple ways you can figure this out. Scrapebox lets you scale the process of looking at google suggest. You could probably build a scraper of quora suggestions. Anywhere people are asking questions about topics related to your business will help you figure out what content. There's a google docs tool made by a guy named Richard Baxter that does something similar I'll see if I can find it and post the link here.

tomharari 13y ago

Hey all I'm the author of the post. Glad to see the post get on HN - happy to answer any questions ya'll have.

pearjuice 13y ago

What does Mozilla have to do wit- oh wait.

andymcsherry 13y ago

Domain and page authority in this case is relatively useless. The problem with lyrics SEO is rampant duplicate content. Every site has the same content and since Rap Genius is relatively new to the game, the way to climb the rankings is to do exactly what they've excelled at: getting their users to submit unique content. It's the same reason songmeanings.net has succeeded as well. Your comment about storing each comment in a separate URL seems to be the true value here. Then each landing page can distinguish itself from the dozens of other lyric clone sites. Disclaimer: used to work for Tunewiki, another lyric site

tomharari 13y ago
Yup you hit the nail on the head. Great strategy for starting out an driving traffic quickly. I think the value add long term comes from being an authority in decoding hip hop, not just lyrics per se.