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SEO / Keyword research

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Dec 28, 2018
4 min read

Table of contents

Child pages

Major sites

Keyword research

Articles

  • 2013.10(?) - Link-Assistant.com - Google's Hummingbird update explained - what should it mean for your SEO?
  • 2017(?) - IndieHackers - How I've Lived the 4-Hour Work Week for a Decade

    • I noticed that the owner of a particular lyrics website had been manually adding new pages to his site. That felt very inefficient to me, so I pitched him on letting me build a database, and he agreed.

      Soon enough, I discovered a massively effective approach to search engine optimization (SEO): I would hunt for announcements of upcoming song releases, add those songs to my site (without any lyrics), and by the time the song was released I would already be ranking #1 in Google.

      With nothing but SEO, my website became so successful that within a year we were able to sell it to LiveUniverse, an LA-based company that was run by a self-proclaimed co-founder of MySpace. I promised to stay on board for a 50% revenue deal.

  • 2017.06.14 - Sistrix - The Story of TheSun.co.uk shows us why SEO is so important
    • New website with a focus on load speed and usability
    • Technical improvements to optimise crawling and indexing
    • Improved information architecture and internal linking
    • Content focused on capturing traffic from popular and trending stories
  • 2018.03.22 - IndieHackers - What is the 80/20 for SEO easy wins for a new bootstrapped startup?

    • Make sure Google can crawl and index all your pages and content easily, and that you're not using any tech, awkward (or missing) internal link structures, or content practices (e.g. video/animations with no parse-able text, interactive content w/ no parse-able text, etc) that stops Googlebot from accessing your work.

      Create content that...

      a) addresses real problems that people are searching Google for

      b) truly solves the searcher's problem, and takes them all the way through the solution (i.e. it can't just be "marketing" for your product)

      c) intelligently employs the words and phrases searchers actually type into Google (so do your keyword research and match your topics + headlines to the words + phrases they use)

      d) doesn't annoy or piss off users such that they click the back button and choose someone else's link instead of yours

      e) earns links and amplification (see #3 below)

      Have a great answer to the question: "Who will help amplify/link to this and WHY?" If you can nail that, and then get what you create in front of those right people/organizations, your ability to earn amplification, engagement, and links will be vastly better than simply trying to make stuff, then put it in front of likely linkers. Craft content the way Amazon crafts products - write the press release first. List the people who will want to share it/tweet it/post about it/write about it/link to it/etc. and then explain their motivations. Now you've got content that has the potential to earn the ranking signals you need.

      p.s. Right now, your site looks like it's just a single page, which is really, really hard to do SEO for (at most, you might get it ranking for a half dozen keywords or so, but it would take a lot of links, some better keyword targeting, and likely a page that better "solves" those search queries). I don't love trying to solve searcher queries on pages designed to convert browsers to customers (it's often quite difficult to balance both). My suggestion would be to create a resources, news, blog, or content section on a subfolder (NOT a subdomain!) of your site that starts targeting queries with content that solves the searchers' problems and is likely to earn links + amplification.

      p.p.s. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I did a video for Skillshare that's free on SEO for startup founders that might be helpful here: https://www.skillshare.com/classes/SEO-Today-Strategies-to-Earn-Trust-Rank-High-and-Stand-Out/423483018

Individuals' Thoughts

  • My thoughts
    • I've noticed that forum and Atlassian wiki pages seem to get fairly-highly ranked. Maybe one strategy for SEO is to add a wiki to a website (hosted on your domain, unlike my xxxx.atlassian.net wiki), and create pages that have a ton of information on them, rather than the typical blog approach of having lots of blog posts.
  • Pieter Levels
    • Twitter - tweets from @levelsio with "seo" in them 
    • I've made all the SEO mistakes in the book, duplicate content, no H1 H2s, wrong slugs, 404s, 403s, 500s (Source)
      • So that's a hint at what issues you should take care of.
    • my mother's nephews goldfish's sister could do SEO blindly (Source)
      • So don't overthink it.
    • I'm not smart, most of SEO is add url slugs and proper <h1> tags, even w/out that google ranks sites well
    • Add og meta tags
      Use natural slugs, same in title and H1
      Use schema dot org
      Use sitemap.xml

Tools

Courses / Tutorials

Keyword research

Vocabulary

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