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!
Don't do SEO.<p>Do accessibility.<p>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.<p>Yet, just doing SEO doesn't make for a very accessible site all the time.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>People who sell SEO usually:<p>- Have the gift of the gab<p>- Prey on peoples ignorance<p>- Prey on peoples greed<p>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.<p>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.<p>SEOMoz is a good place to start (their free blogs etc). Executing good technical SEO on your own website is pretty easy.<p>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.
The article mentions the beginner's SEO guide, but coming in at 2 pages, the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet from SEOmoz is my go-to resource:<p><a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet" rel="nofollow">http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...</a>
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.<p>1. Blog on a subdomain.<p>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.<p>2. Employ Canonical<p>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.<p>Without Canonical an URL like /boats/?dupe=content will point to the same resource as /boats/. Here you might introduce a canonical problem. (<a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html" rel="nofollow">http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...</a>)<p>3. Optimize your site for speed<p>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 (<a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html</a>) might help you fix some of these issues and gain a few seconds.<p>Mostly loading javascript just before </body>, turning on caching, and compressing and combining resources.<p>4. Robots.txt vs meta robots<p>/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.<p>5. Breadcrumbs<p>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.<p>6. Images<p>Add an alt-attribute to the site logo. Specify the dimensions for faster rendering.<p>7. Don't critique ehow.com if you fill Google's index with 245.000+ automated results.<p>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).<p>8. Make clear if an item is "already sold".<p>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.<p>9. Quality<p>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.
Onsite SEO is essentially good web design and content strategy, any developer worth his salt will produce a site that already ticks all the boxes.<p>All the work is in producing great, relevant content and then link building.
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: <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors" rel="nofollow">http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors</a><p>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'? <a href="http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution-of-google-rankings-rand-fishkin-at-the-searchmetrics-partner-meeting/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution-of...</a>
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?
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.
I have a small nit to pick in an otherwise great post:
Codecademy is not the same as Code Academy.<p>It's also noteworthy that codecademy.com ranks higher than codeacademy.org in the google search for "Code Academy".<p>Well played indeed.
If you working on an Internet startup and you're not thinking about SEO from day one: you suck.<p>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?<p>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.