I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I read something about SEO. I keep expecting there to be more to it or that I'm missing something. Other than that, SEO is just making sure you have reasonably semantic markup and clean URLS. Isn't that just plain old best practice anyway? What am I missing? I swear there must be something!
Do you know what keywords are generating the most traffic for your competitors, what keywords you'll most likely be able to rank for, what keywords have the highest conversion ratio, are you using video sitemaps, etc.
It sounds like your just constantly reading material aimed at beginners rather than diving in depth into the subject.
Semantic mark up and clean URLs are a big part of SEO. But there's a lot more to it. There is obviously the whole incoming links thing as a few other comments have mentioned.
The biggest issue that I see on client's sites is site architecture, organization and internal linking. Most commonly that means multiple pages with the same content and different URLs. Amazon is a good example of this:
Amazon is essentially passing internal link juice around to non-canonical URLs, then "fixing" it with a rel canonical hack. Not that amazon needs the link authority, it's just an example.
Another good one is folks who append things like ?ref=category to a URL to track visitors through the site. That's a unique URL to google, though you can specify what url parameters are legit in webmaster tools. If you really need to do something like that, use onclick events and keep the href attribute to a pretty, canonical URL.
Those don't seem like big issues individually, but imagine a 3,000,000 page site that never links to a canonical URL anywhere internally (this happens).
Internal anchor text can also play a roll in what you rank for. If you happened to make it through all that stuff up there, here's an SEO gem: use breadcrumbs, but your home link doesn't need to have the anchor text "home". Instead use a keyword that's relevant to your site's purpose. If you sell dog food, use "dog food" as the anchor text of "home" breadcrumb link.
An example: do a search for "online shopping" on Google. You'll probably see overstock.com in the top results. Why? Are they really more well known and authoritative than Amazon in that arena? Every home breadcrumb on overstock.com has the anchor text "online shopping". Millions of internal links with perfectly optimized anchor text pointing to a single page.
What's the point of clean URLs? Everybody parrots this "clean URLs" meme, but do we have a definitive proof that clean URLs help and that unclean URLs penalise a site?
SEO fundamentals: google is smarter than you are, and has invested a lot of effort into discovering the sort of websites that their users want to visit. If you make the sort of website that users want to visit (relevant content with clear navigation), google will send their users to it.
Seriously, don't worry a single bit about SEO. Yet, if you make it so that your site's content, navigation and URLs are screen-reader friendly, then you've probably made a site that has solid SEO and is accessible to people with vision problems.
Yet, just doing SEO doesn't make for a very accessible site all the time.
Once this is done, make good content, be real and responsive humans to your customers and you're on your way to a good business model and website.
"Don't do marketing."
"Just make a good product and people will find it."
I think this is the downfall of many great products. The current startup world has an idealistic belief that better products always win and if you build something people want, they'll find it, when in fact, this has never been true. The "best" politicians consistently lose to those better at marketing and branding. The "best" ideas in organizations often fall to those trumpeted with more style or by those with more clout. Many great startups shut down because they couldn't find a repeatable, low-cost way to acquire customers (and SEO is exactly this).
Climbing search engine rankings has less to do with on-site SEO perfection yet much more to do with backlinks. Look at what porn and gambling kings are doing to compete with eachother.
Too many posts about SEO get everyone obsessing over marginal website tweaks/details when a single backlink to their webite doesn't even exist outside of their HN account.
I absolutely agree... that this is how it should be.
The only problem is that it isn't currently this way (despite what Google and Matt Cutt's might say). It is naive to think that this approach is going work.
Furthermore, you're competitors are going to do accessibility + SEO, and they are going to trounce you. randfish said this better than I could, so I'll leave it at that.
You can get away with what you are suggesting if you have staggeringly awesome content, but even then - why risk it. If you integrate SEO into your culture from the start, and have the right process then it doesn't have to be that hard.
This is a simplification. Yes, I agree that making your site accessible improves SEO, but there are lots of things that fall under SEO, and not accessibility that you should do. E.g. "What am I ranking for?" will tell you what the wider internet thinks your site is good at. "What search terms are bringing people to my site?" will tell you what your visitors really want. "How many people are searching for X and Y?" will tell you how popular X and Y are.
We've spent a lot of time doing whitehat SEO on our website, and it's paying off (2x search traffic in 6 months). I really would recommend most startups spend a few days reading up on it from good quality sources. Nearly 40% of all our traffic comes from search so it makes sense to pay it some attention.
It's not hard. What is hard is navigating your way through the crooks/spammers/quacks who will try every trick in the book to try and sell you something you don't need. Startups do not need to hire experts to do it for them. What they need to do is solve problems like they solve other problems, with no money.
People who sell SEO usually:
- Have the gift of the gab
- Prey on peoples ignorance
- Prey on peoples greed
There are good SEO people out there, but they are rare. Also I struggle to imagine a situation where smart people just can't read up on it themselves and execute it themselves.
As a startup you should be focusing on good quality content and sustainable growth. So play to your strengths and don't pay a lot of money for magic potions that offer short term benefits. Play the long term game.
SEOMoz is a good place to start (their free blogs etc). Executing good technical SEO on your own website is pretty easy.
Tibbon made a good point, 'dont do SEO do accessibility`. I'm not sure I'd go to that extreme, but it's a good way of looking at it. Google is your most disabled user, it can't see very well, it can't really understand things very well either. If you make your site highly accessible you're well on your way to good SEO.
For me, spending money on SEO doesn't make much sense.
However, spending time does.
Most of the big wins on SEO are a combination of strategy and time. As in : have a strategy to get links, and spend time on that strategy.
Sure, you can pay someone to do this for you, but anyone who is smart enough to develop software is more than smart enough to do SEO.
The big mistake people make is thinking it exists outside of marketing. In fact your SEO strategy and your marketing strategy are just two dishes on the overall meal of gaining customers.
There's no question that whitehat SEO pays off. And referring to startups, you mention "I struggle to imagine a situation where smart people just can't read up on it themselves and execute it themselves."
It has everything to do with your opening line: "We've spent a lot of time doing whitehat SEO on our website".
It always comes down to TIME. If you're a new startup, you're trying to work on your business, not in it.
Then you need to find someone who can help you with whitehat organic SEO. And as you mentioned, the hard part is navigating your way through the 'quacks'
I did a quick SEO analysis on priceonomics.com. Most of these tips fall into the 20% category. Maybe they can use some of these tips to perfect their SEO strategies.
1. Blog on a subdomain.
Though sometimes easier for administration, subdomains might dilute your SEO efforts. Links to a subdomain don't count 100% as links to your main domain. A /blog/ could help with the generation of incoming links and addition of fresh content to the domain you want indexed a lot.
2. Employ Canonical
www. redirects to non-www. Trailing slashes get added automatically. So far so good. But it is still easy to create duplicate URL's by adding random dynamic variables.
Though not that many search queries are affected by the site-speed algo, site speed remains very important for your visitors, and so indirectly for your SEO/marketing efforts. Google Site Speed plugin, Yslow or these guidelines (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) might help you fix some of these issues and gain a few seconds.
Mostly loading javascript just before </body>, turning on caching, and compressing and combining resources.
4. Robots.txt vs meta robots
/search is disallowed in robots.txt. If you disallow it on a page basis, with meta robots, you can specify: "noindex, follow". That way if people link to your search results, link juice will keep flowing through your site.
5. Breadcrumbs
Add rich snippets mark-up. For product information and reviews, but an obvious contender is the breadcrumb. Link to your twitter (and future Google+ profile) with 'rel=me' to signify ownership of your graph.
6. Images
Add an alt-attribute to the site logo. Specify the dimensions for faster rendering.
7. Don't critique ehow.com if you fill Google's index with 245.000+ automated results.
Or put less bluntly: Write more unique content to introduce bigger categories. Add more relevant content to your listings (reviews, search/trend data, price watch).
8. Make clear if an item is "already sold".
If I click on 10 entries and I get 10 times "item already sold" I start to doubt the usefulness of the application. I compare this to a job site, where the jobs are mostly filled: You happen upon
such a site through Google, because Google still thinks these listings are relevant.
9. Quality
The site is mostly void of trust factors. Due to some listings being in ALL-CAPS, some result pages can look a bit spammy. Add more trust factors, and try to repair spammy listings.
Agree entirely with your summary - lots of good advice.
The amount of actual content on the priceonomics product pages is super thin. google is not going to be a big fan of throwing out every page of search results into the index - you're pretty much ONLY creating duplicate content at this point. also the taxonomy has a ton of copies of what is actually the same item, depending on how it was written in the listing.
http://priceonomics.com/headphones/sennheiser/hd-595/http://priceonomics.com/headphones/sennheiser/hd595/
Sorting the taxonomy into distinct products and then adding some sort of content to beef up at least the category pages, which right now are 100% navigation, would be a big step forward. Lots of things you can do going forward, in thinking about this vertical, it's an interesting market space for SEO, lots of challenges and possible strategies.
I'm assuming eventually some sort of comparable product cross-linking will be built into the system?
It's not what you say, it's what people say about you. Kinda like a popularity contest in high school. If you are quarterback screwing the hot cheerleader, most people are looking/following you (whether they "like" you or not).
So, get links. Lots of 'em. source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Yes, setting up your site based on broad or long tail terms is good foundation...but you can rank your site for words that aren't even on your site. Why do you think disney ranks for 'exit' and 'leave'? http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution-of...
A bit off topic, but relevant to the suggestions in this post: a few of my friends are finding it more effective with Google to use a flat file structure rather than the highly nested folder trees that are usually recommended. Anyone have any thoughts/experience with this?
It really depends on how many pages you have. If you just have 10 pages off the domain (/signup, /login, /about, /jobs, /how-it-works, etc) then there's really no benefit of having a hierarchy. If you have > 1k pages, then a flat structure will confuse google/users and do a poor job spreading your site's link equity amongst your pages.
From my experience it all depends on the size of the site. If you have less than 200 pages on your site I'd recomment that you try and stick to no more than domain.com/folder/page whenever possible.
But, one other thing I would strongly recommend is to never create extra or redundant folders unless they really add a lot of value to your site usability. And, never, ever, create empty folders ... it seems like a no-brainer but it happens a lot more frequently then you might think with people using them to force a specific heirarchy on their site or for the sake of stuffing keywords into their URLs or just because they think the final URL looks 'nicer' that way.
Last thought on why flat is normally better, homepages are likely to accumulate more links than any other page on your site and often more links than the rest of the site combined. So the closer an interior page is to the homepage the more benefit it will derive from the inbound links pointing to the homepage.
I don't think the actual urls matter. In terms of site structure, I actually don't recommend having too many nested folders/directories if you don't have a lot of inner pages. I see a lot of sites with category and subcategory pages with just 5-10 links in each. Google won't crawl that deep if your site is new. and the deeper a page is, the less important Google deems it (based on flow of internal Pagerank).
who recommends highly nested folder trees? i've not heard this and have certainly seen it hurt sites. all things equal, flatter is better. my rule of thumb is go as flat as you can while still having an organized, navigable URL structure.
I have to agree that most people ignore SEO because of the lack of understanding. May be they are intimidated by the very word.
The three steps mentioned in the article: URL, Navigation, Page title go a long way. This is were content management systems like WordPress really help as these three things are taken care by design. In addition to this, internal linking structure is important to. Again, a proper CMS makes it way easy to get a decent SEO going to begin with.
In addition to the 3 minimal actions I would also add, to use relevant keywords in each page's content. Often I notice clients creating content without actually using the keywords, by which they want the specific pages to be found. Also check the grammar, especially when creating multi-language content.
Great discussion, thanks. Now im off to the urology forum to ask about my sore elbow. Theyre all doctors, right? They all went to med school. A body part is a body part...skin and bones and theyre all connected anyway.
It's practically impossible to reverse engineer the SERP, but if you look at the Domain Authority for both codecademy.com and codecademy.org, you'll find that the former is orders of magnitude higher (65 vs 35). This might explain a lot.
I think Codecademy needs to get CodeAcademy.com as soon as they can.. otherwise they're gonna rely on mostly search traffic to get visitors since most ppl won't remember their url
If you working on an Internet startup and you're not thinking about SEO from day one: you suck.
Any decent marketing strategy is at least going to give a nod to SEO. Is your team is so consumed by your awesome product that you think it's more important than marketing and distribution?
I really hope that isn't true of anyone here. If championing product over marketing and distribution does sound like your team, I have GOOD NEWS! — you'll be too busy jerking each other off to notice that you're not making any money.
[+] [-] weeksie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ig1|14 years ago|reply
It sounds like your just constantly reading material aimed at beginners rather than diving in depth into the subject.
[+] [-] chrisguitarguy|14 years ago|reply
The biggest issue that I see on client's sites is site architecture, organization and internal linking. Most commonly that means multiple pages with the same content and different URLs. Amazon is a good example of this:
This URL floats around internally - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416571760/
But it's rel="canonical" is http://www.amazon.com/Greater-Journey-Americans-Paris/dp/141...
Amazon is essentially passing internal link juice around to non-canonical URLs, then "fixing" it with a rel canonical hack. Not that amazon needs the link authority, it's just an example.
Another good one is folks who append things like ?ref=category to a URL to track visitors through the site. That's a unique URL to google, though you can specify what url parameters are legit in webmaster tools. If you really need to do something like that, use onclick events and keep the href attribute to a pretty, canonical URL.
Those don't seem like big issues individually, but imagine a 3,000,000 page site that never links to a canonical URL anywhere internally (this happens).
Internal anchor text can also play a roll in what you rank for. If you happened to make it through all that stuff up there, here's an SEO gem: use breadcrumbs, but your home link doesn't need to have the anchor text "home". Instead use a keyword that's relevant to your site's purpose. If you sell dog food, use "dog food" as the anchor text of "home" breadcrumb link.
An example: do a search for "online shopping" on Google. You'll probably see overstock.com in the top results. Why? Are they really more well known and authoritative than Amazon in that arena? Every home breadcrumb on overstock.com has the anchor text "online shopping". Millions of internal links with perfectly optimized anchor text pointing to a single page.
[+] [-] WillyF|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quicksilver03|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinchyfingers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbon|14 years ago|reply
Do accessibility.
Seriously, don't worry a single bit about SEO. Yet, if you make it so that your site's content, navigation and URLs are screen-reader friendly, then you've probably made a site that has solid SEO and is accessible to people with vision problems.
Yet, just doing SEO doesn't make for a very accessible site all the time.
Once this is done, make good content, be real and responsive humans to your customers and you're on your way to a good business model and website.
[+] [-] randfish|14 years ago|reply
"Don't do marketing." "Just make a good product and people will find it."
I think this is the downfall of many great products. The current startup world has an idealistic belief that better products always win and if you build something people want, they'll find it, when in fact, this has never been true. The "best" politicians consistently lose to those better at marketing and branding. The "best" ideas in organizations often fall to those trumpeted with more style or by those with more clout. Many great startups shut down because they couldn't find a repeatable, low-cost way to acquire customers (and SEO is exactly this).
More here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-disagree-with-fred-marketing-is...
And here: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marke...
[+] [-] danneu|14 years ago|reply
Too many posts about SEO get everyone obsessing over marginal website tweaks/details when a single backlink to their webite doesn't even exist outside of their HN account.
[+] [-] TomAnthony|14 years ago|reply
The only problem is that it isn't currently this way (despite what Google and Matt Cutt's might say). It is naive to think that this approach is going work.
Furthermore, you're competitors are going to do accessibility + SEO, and they are going to trounce you. randfish said this better than I could, so I'll leave it at that.
You can get away with what you are suggesting if you have staggeringly awesome content, but even then - why risk it. If you integrate SEO into your culture from the start, and have the right process then it doesn't have to be that hard.
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomGullen|14 years ago|reply
It's not hard. What is hard is navigating your way through the crooks/spammers/quacks who will try every trick in the book to try and sell you something you don't need. Startups do not need to hire experts to do it for them. What they need to do is solve problems like they solve other problems, with no money.
People who sell SEO usually:
- Have the gift of the gab
- Prey on peoples ignorance
- Prey on peoples greed
There are good SEO people out there, but they are rare. Also I struggle to imagine a situation where smart people just can't read up on it themselves and execute it themselves.
As a startup you should be focusing on good quality content and sustainable growth. So play to your strengths and don't pay a lot of money for magic potions that offer short term benefits. Play the long term game.
SEOMoz is a good place to start (their free blogs etc). Executing good technical SEO on your own website is pretty easy.
Tibbon made a good point, 'dont do SEO do accessibility`. I'm not sure I'd go to that extreme, but it's a good way of looking at it. Google is your most disabled user, it can't see very well, it can't really understand things very well either. If you make your site highly accessible you're well on your way to good SEO.
[+] [-] brc|14 years ago|reply
However, spending time does.
Most of the big wins on SEO are a combination of strategy and time. As in : have a strategy to get links, and spend time on that strategy.
Sure, you can pay someone to do this for you, but anyone who is smart enough to develop software is more than smart enough to do SEO.
The big mistake people make is thinking it exists outside of marketing. In fact your SEO strategy and your marketing strategy are just two dishes on the overall meal of gaining customers.
[+] [-] ddemuth|14 years ago|reply
It has everything to do with your opening line: "We've spent a lot of time doing whitehat SEO on our website".
It always comes down to TIME. If you're a new startup, you're trying to work on your business, not in it.
Then you need to find someone who can help you with whitehat organic SEO. And as you mentioned, the hard part is navigating your way through the 'quacks'
[+] [-] xander54|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helipad|14 years ago|reply
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...
[+] [-] dsrikanth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kruipen|14 years ago|reply
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
[+] [-] thematt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blauwbilgorgel|14 years ago|reply
1. Blog on a subdomain.
Though sometimes easier for administration, subdomains might dilute your SEO efforts. Links to a subdomain don't count 100% as links to your main domain. A /blog/ could help with the generation of incoming links and addition of fresh content to the domain you want indexed a lot.
2. Employ Canonical
www. redirects to non-www. Trailing slashes get added automatically. So far so good. But it is still easy to create duplicate URL's by adding random dynamic variables.
Without Canonical an URL like /boats/?dupe=content will point to the same resource as /boats/. Here you might introduce a canonical problem. (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...)
3. Optimize your site for speed
Though not that many search queries are affected by the site-speed algo, site speed remains very important for your visitors, and so indirectly for your SEO/marketing efforts. Google Site Speed plugin, Yslow or these guidelines (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) might help you fix some of these issues and gain a few seconds.
Mostly loading javascript just before </body>, turning on caching, and compressing and combining resources.
4. Robots.txt vs meta robots
/search is disallowed in robots.txt. If you disallow it on a page basis, with meta robots, you can specify: "noindex, follow". That way if people link to your search results, link juice will keep flowing through your site.
5. Breadcrumbs
Add rich snippets mark-up. For product information and reviews, but an obvious contender is the breadcrumb. Link to your twitter (and future Google+ profile) with 'rel=me' to signify ownership of your graph.
6. Images
Add an alt-attribute to the site logo. Specify the dimensions for faster rendering.
7. Don't critique ehow.com if you fill Google's index with 245.000+ automated results.
Or put less bluntly: Write more unique content to introduce bigger categories. Add more relevant content to your listings (reviews, search/trend data, price watch).
8. Make clear if an item is "already sold".
If I click on 10 entries and I get 10 times "item already sold" I start to doubt the usefulness of the application. I compare this to a job site, where the jobs are mostly filled: You happen upon such a site through Google, because Google still thinks these listings are relevant.
9. Quality
The site is mostly void of trust factors. Due to some listings being in ALL-CAPS, some result pages can look a bit spammy. Add more trust factors, and try to repair spammy listings.
[+] [-] jaredmck|14 years ago|reply
The amount of actual content on the priceonomics product pages is super thin. google is not going to be a big fan of throwing out every page of search results into the index - you're pretty much ONLY creating duplicate content at this point. also the taxonomy has a ton of copies of what is actually the same item, depending on how it was written in the listing. http://priceonomics.com/headphones/sennheiser/hd-595/ http://priceonomics.com/headphones/sennheiser/hd595/ Sorting the taxonomy into distinct products and then adding some sort of content to beef up at least the category pages, which right now are 100% navigation, would be a big step forward. Lots of things you can do going forward, in thinking about this vertical, it's an interesting market space for SEO, lots of challenges and possible strategies.
I'm assuming eventually some sort of comparable product cross-linking will be built into the system?
[+] [-] jsm386|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chunkyslink|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewnez|14 years ago|reply
All the work is in producing great, relevant content and then link building.
[+] [-] chocoheadfred|14 years ago|reply
Yes, setting up your site based on broad or long tail terms is good foundation...but you can rank your site for words that aren't even on your site. Why do you think disney ranks for 'exit' and 'leave'? http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution-of...
[+] [-] tlack|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] midas|14 years ago|reply
Is that what you're asking?
[+] [-] jpzeni|14 years ago|reply
But, one other thing I would strongly recommend is to never create extra or redundant folders unless they really add a lot of value to your site usability. And, never, ever, create empty folders ... it seems like a no-brainer but it happens a lot more frequently then you might think with people using them to force a specific heirarchy on their site or for the sake of stuffing keywords into their URLs or just because they think the final URL looks 'nicer' that way.
Last thought on why flat is normally better, homepages are likely to accumulate more links than any other page on your site and often more links than the rest of the site combined. So the closer an interior page is to the homepage the more benefit it will derive from the inbound links pointing to the homepage.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredmck|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsrikanth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] risource|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenny_r|14 years ago|reply
It's also noteworthy that codecademy.com ranks higher than codeacademy.org in the google search for "Code Academy".
Well played indeed.
[+] [-] midas|14 years ago|reply
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
You can also lookup how many inbound links the sites have using different anchor text like "Code Academy".
[+] [-] AznHisoka|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steele|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulovsk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinchyfingers|14 years ago|reply
Any decent marketing strategy is at least going to give a nod to SEO. Is your team is so consumed by your awesome product that you think it's more important than marketing and distribution?
I really hope that isn't true of anyone here. If championing product over marketing and distribution does sound like your team, I have GOOD NEWS! — you'll be too busy jerking each other off to notice that you're not making any money.
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|14 years ago|reply