SEO tricks from Patio11

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

"Github, Slideshare, Tumblr are fantastic, but don’t give them your link juice. Put your content on your own domain. "<p>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 (<a href="http://vowsjs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://vowsjs.org/</a>) does this. It makes me excited to clone their module and use it in my project. More people should be doing this!

Ooh, look, an on-topic location to ask Patrick questions. ;)<p>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"?<p>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.)

&#62; <i>Design Matters. A lot.</i><p>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.

&#62;&#62; Twitter links has no SEO juice<p>Besides using Twitter to:<p>- build your network and following,<p>- Twitter can aid in brand/product mentions<p>- Some reason to believe Twitter links are followed by the search engines, so help with indexation and discovery.[1]<p>- Some reason to believe Author/Agent/Identity rank of social profiles will start playing a role.[2]<p>- Finally, there are sites who add Twitterfeeds to the author profiles. Not all these feeds have the "nofollow" property.<p>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.<p>&#62;&#62; Don’t use the keyword meta tag.<p>Exactly, but do use its fine on-page alternative: Microdata keywords: <a href="http://schema.org/WebPage" rel="nofollow">http://schema.org/WebPage</a><p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-indexation" rel="nofollow">http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-index...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus-as-an-identity-service-or-digital-signature/" rel="nofollow">http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus...</a>

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?<p>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...

<p><pre><code> 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. </code></pre> This is <i>really</i> cutting it close to violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines for quality and originality on each page.

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.

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."<p>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."<p>This kind of seo-engineering just seems so desparate, as if SEO is the be-all and end-all of running an online business.<p>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.

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!

As someone who has been in the SEO industry a long time I can tell you that some of this is terrible/spammy advice...<p>Buy KW rich domains and pay some copywriter to crank out 4-5 pages?! Are you serious?<p>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<p>I'd hold off on that hug if I were you...

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.<p>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.<p>However, this 'trick' is quite old, but probably new to some people...

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?

Unfortunately, I have to agree on much of the advice.<p>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.

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

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.

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

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

Nice article

Awesome! Thanks :)

Patio11, thanks for coming!!!