This is true. I run a community/blogging site for fun, not profit called yakkstr.com. There are about 50 regular users and it currently has around 5k posts. I mention it because it's a good counter example. I've done no link building, and I get very little search traffic. Maybe 50 visits per day. Occasionally someone will post about a product, instead of their relationship drama, and one girl posted about "mio liquid". That post gets about 2 hits a day from google. We can extrapolate from this, 1000 pages like this would get around 2000 hits a day and from my expeience that would earn about $1.50 a day from ads.
You have no meta descriptions on any of your pages. The links to your content pages (e.g., http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday) aren't inside a H1/H2 tag on your index pages. You are letting Google crawl/index your tag pages (pointless/bad). Your robots.txt isn't pointing to a sitemap. Are you using Google webmaster tools?
Get rid of the /posts/N-title and just roll with /title, if possible.
Most of those back links are from ubuntu forums, my profile, which seems to show up on a ton of pages. They are nofollow. I think I have 2 back links that are follow, both on friends blogroll, which I believe google discounts.
How much of a difference do you think those changes will make? I'm willing to do them as an experiment, except for the /title because that has caused me a lot of problems in past experiences.
It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. Some of them will definitely be an improvement. For example, it's not really valuable for someone to land on one of your tag pages.
Putting all your links to your content pages inside H2 tags tells search engines that they're more important that other links on the page.
The /title one is big. Google likes short URLs without a lot of extra cruft. You're using rails from what I can see, so the change is trivial. :) Add a route, throw an index on your slug field, and have requests to the old URLs do a 301 redirect to the short version.
Check this out: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yakkstr.com Lots of empty/valueless results. Maybe you can noindex blogs that have no posts in them so they don't pollute the search results?
Your question wasn't very good. The changes suggested need to be made one time in order to affect your site's traffic many times. The changes might make the site more attractive in search results based on improved snippets. The H tags change could help google better understand the content and rank it for more appropriate searches. If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them. If the end result is 10%, how do you know it wasn't because your users started writing more popular content 4 months after you made the changes?
First, let me reiterate that my site is for fun, and nothing more.
But let's assume that it were a business, and I'll explain how my question is not only good, but the most important question a you should ask. We have finite resources and time, and we have to decide what to use those resources and time for. How do we do that? I could implement all of these changes in a 2 days let's say, or I could use that same time and money to add some feature my users have been asking for. Which should I do?
To answer that we have to estimate in some way the impact of each. Saying it "might make the site more attractive", "could help google", etc isn't a good answer.
"If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them."
No it wouldn't, and what I'm offering here is to do the changes and measure the change.
You could never isolate it completely with only a single site, but that doesn't mean you conclude that you can't measure anything, or estimate at all. If I made all the changes in a few days, gave it a few weeks for google to notice the changes, and organic search traffic didn't increase in any noticeable way ... that's strong evidence that it didn't have much of an effect.
Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Their gut? Or did they do these things in the past, and measure an improvement, even when they didn't isolate all the variables as you are demanding of me! Why not demand the same from the person making the suggestion?
> Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on?
Fair question. I would say these things are current, accepted "best practices". I'd liken it to suggesting you use a version control system instead of emailing code back and forth. Your existing system might work, but many other people who were also emailing code back and forth are seeing gains using this new-fangled VCS thing, so it's almost definitely worth doing.
You might try searching for "SEO before and after" or "SEO case study" to see how on-site changes have worked (or haven't worked!) for other sites. At any rate, many of the current "best practices" are trivial, under the hood changes so it doesn't really cost anything to put them into place. Most of them simply help search engines understand how your content is structured and benefit both you and your users.
yes, I agree with you sort of. I"ve done a lot of SEO in the past, nothing you mentioned was new to me. But here is my experience, one of the startups I did had a brand new domain, which had nothing on it before launch, and didn't hyper optimize the type of SEO you mentioned. However, due to the nature of our site we got a lot of links for big name groups like peta, the nra, etc. Follow links on their site, all within a few months of launching.
We ranked really well really fast, whatever sandbox people think google may or may not have didn't seem to affect us. Like I said, within a few months, on a brand new domain, without an SEO expert optimizing things like H1 tags, we ranked really really well for competitive keywords.
That's the basis of my hypothesis, without good backlinks, it doesn't matter a whole lot, and good backlinks matter a lot more than tags on a page, whether you have /posts/title, etc.
But I do really appreciate the time you took to look at my site and offer suggestions. You did catch a missing index :) I didn't notice because no human goes to tag pages, and it didn't show up in 'new relic' because my other pages are fast and get hit a lot more.
Yeah, SEO is really just about having good content and having links from other good sites to it. All the tweaks are just to help the search engines determine exactly what your content comprises and where it lives in relation to your other content (see Microformats/rel attribute on hyperlinks). Without good content, none of that matters.
Yup, I do see your site on the first SERP for that query. Here's a shot of the SEO breakdown for that SERP: http://i.imgur.com/URUr2.png Not bad positioning considering there's zero backlinks to that page on your site. If you had 1-10, you'd probably rank higher.
You probably wouldn't see any rise by just doing tweaks, but they're probably still worth doing overall. I would focus on encouraging your users to spread your content. Give them a "share this link with friends/embed this link on your web page" widget. Digg is dead/useless, get rid of that icon. Get a Tumblr and Stumbleupon share icon on there instead. I'd probably space them a bit more away from that big, ugly, unrelated image ad, too. :)
Basically, SEO comes down to having awesome content, identifying it properly on your site, and getting other people to link to it.
What is proposed in the OP's link is NOT impossible as the various detractors in this thread would have you believe, but it IS a lot of work. The tech stuff is easy, consistently building out your backlinks is the hardest part. If you're lucky, they'll start to grow on their own and you have 100% passive income.
I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible, but that it is a LOT of work. Becoming good at SEO and marketing, then executing a good plan, is a lot of work. My site was intended to be an example of not doing that. Doing that means trading a lot of time that could be spent learning ... I don't know, machine learning or something. Is that worth maybe 2k a month? Depends on the person.
As I stated here [1], It's definitely not easy, though I've found the only difficult part to be getting initial traffic and consistently building high quality backlinks. It's not something that can be automated, but it can be outsourced.
ug, do not waste time on sitepoint, wickedfire, or the like. seobook, seomoz, seroundtable.com, distilled.co.uk, wiep.net, wolf-howl.com, rosshudgeons.com, and citationlabs are all more worthy of your time. Read The Art and Science of SEO and attend to Mozcon in June and you'll be on the right track.
I don't know about Sitepoint for SEO, but I did like that one topic I linked to. I actually learned a substantial amount of my XHTML/CSS knowledge from Sitepoint (back in 2004-2005), so it's not all bad. :)
I like seobook and seomoz, and I'll check out the other sites you mentioned. Thanks!
We have the advantage that we can automate/rip through most of the tech stuff, but there's people out there doing everything manually that are making more than you and me. :)
Yup. If you plan to enter the internet-/affiliate-marketing space you'll want to keep tabs on what this crowd of folks is up to. You'll learn that this is a space inhabited by an interesting spectrum of people...from clever, helpful people displaying an inspiring amount of hustle to straight-up criminals.
Also, careful clicking any links in those forums. Lots of disgusting, immature people over there.
