
My best SEO tactic so far - AlchemistCamp
https://questinglog.com/my-best-seo-tactic-so-far/
======
kanobo
Recap: Every time you have trouble searching for something, make a page with
the information you find. It makes sense, but I'm just wondering what's the
end goal since I imagine the frequency of such searches is very low and your
site will have to be a blog or some kind of site with disparate content.

~~~
tyingq
I wouldn't discount backlinks. Google hasn't made much progress getting away
from _" page rank"_. Once you have that credible page/content, do focus on
non-spammy ways to share it. Including grey area stuff like calling in favors,
sharing it on HN, posting on Medium, etc. In the least spammy, most objective
way you can.

As a concrete example, I found a grey area way to get a somewhat popular
hardware tinkerer interested in something I did. Maybe I even skirted the
rules a bit by sending him a free sample of my cool toy and some rough code
samples. He took it well beyond what I could. I didn't ask for anything. The
investment paid off. Aside from his initial blog post, others took inspiration
and posted their own variations.

Google now thinks I'm the bomb for something very niche, but reasonably
profitable. Likely because my efforts, plus other's work, netted some
interesting backlinks. and backlinks to their posts. And maybe I am a badass
in this very narrow niche, but I doubt Google would know if I hadn't pushed
the envelope a little.

~~~
baddox
> Google hasn't made much progress getting away from "page rank".

Is that so? I thought conventional wisdom is that they now have much stronger
signals about how well results satisfy queries, from Google Analytics and
Chrome.

~~~
luckylion
Yeah, some variation of page rank is still the number one signal. That's why
subdomain/subdirectory leasing at media companies is such a hot deal right
now: you take completely unrelated content (e.g. coupons with affiliate
links), throw them on a subdomain of a news site (e.g. CNN) and then just
watch your content rank that would have never ranked on a "normal" domain.

That "buying links" is the only deadly sin next to cloaking is more strong
evidence for Google primarily relying on it. You don't get penalized for
abusing Microdata, stuffing Emjois into your Title + Description or writing
barely readable keyword-stuffed SEO texts, but get links from a well-known
link-selling-site and watch your -100 penalty wreck your traffic.

~~~
tyingq
Good insight. My intuition tells me that "buying links" is still the fastest
path to ranking well, provided you are stealthy enough.

------
dragosmocrii
I totally agree with the author. I've been frustrated finding the information
I needed so many times, and when I eventually found it by putting together the
pieces from different sources, I called it a day and moved on.

But then one day I figured that me wasting the time to find an answer might be
something that's affecting other people as well, so I did a couple
experiments. My entire blog is now mostly a bunch of solution posts to various
issues I encountered (I know, not very sexy). The most popular one by far is
[https://dragoshmocrii.com/ubuntu-20-04-stuttering-
animations...](https://dragoshmocrii.com/ubuntu-20-04-stuttering-animations-
video/) which brings in tens of people everyday (not that much, but still).
Initially, I just posted the solution, but then I wanted to see what people
actually thought about it, so I encouraged them to drop me a comment if the
solution did help them. So people started to reply, and it's a great feeling
to see I could save people time!

One might wonder, why not use a better place to post a solution, such as Stack
Exchange websites. And the answer is why not keep it on my website and build
some reputation for myself, who knows who stumbles upon my solution post, and
invites me to apply for a great job! ;)

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's a good observation. Come to think of it, according to Google's Search
Console[0], most frequently searched for / visited posts on my blog are a)
some very specific stuff about numerical methods that I wrote during my
university years, b) a decade-old post about fixing issues with Polish
diacritics and Y/Z swap on Windows - i.e. explaining how to use
CTRL+SHIFT/ALT+SHIFT to fix keyboard layout/language, and how to disable it
entirely.

I might start doing it - instead of trying to think of large topics to write,
just describe results of any research I needed to do where I had trouble
finding reasonable answers. Not for fame or SEO - but as a service to random
strangers. Judging by unending stream of searches for over 10 years, I suspect
that this post about keyboard layouts/language switch is the single most
useful thing I've done in my entire life.

(As context for non-Americans: language & keyboard layout switches are all too
easy to hit by accident, and suddenly your keyboard "isn't typing" some
characters, or swaps Z and Y, or whatnot. This doesn't go away on restart (or
at least it didn't use to), and completely confuses regular people, making
them think their computer is broken. Those non-tech-savvy people usually
resort to manually copy-pasting problematic characters from a file or from a
website whenever they want to type them. You can imagine the impact on
productivity and sanity, particularly at work.)

(And I just can't fathom how this is still a problem in 2020. Microsoft, WTF?)

\--

[0] - I don't use Analytics or any other tracking script on my site. Search
Console gives you access to data on performance of your site on Google's
search engine, and includes the only two things I ever cared about wrt. any
analytics - how do people end up on my site, and what posts do they visit.)

------
Lammy
Here’s a good example of this that I ran into recently: I was searching for
software to display pictures as post/page content on my static Jekyll website
with automatic handling of thumbnails, multiple type conversion (e.g. to
WebP), and all that fun stuff. What I found was a fairly even split between
people who call them “pictures”, people who call them “photos”, and people who
call them “images”, and in a way that seems like the three groups rarely
cross-pollinate!

I ended up disliking all the software I found and wrote my own (as one does),
but then when it came time for a README i made sure to use all those terms and
even provide links to the other projects I found in case those links help
somebody who ends up preferring one of them to mine:
[https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD](https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD)

~~~
john-shaffer
I've never thought about it before, but I've consistently used "image" ever
since I learned about the <img> tag as a kid. It's very interesting that you
can segment groups by which word they use.

~~~
Lammy
I'm the same way, also thanks to [img] in BBCode. For what it's worth I was
also a heavy ImageShack user and always avoided PhotoBucket. I wonder if
there's any relation :p

The HTML5 <picture> tag makes that variation a lot more relevant. The "photo"
people are also implicitly talking about art direction! Photos are almost
always a "page content" thing, then I see people talk about generating
"images" and "pictures" for their website's pixel-perfect UI/navigation/logo
needs.

------
nickswan
Google Search Console is a great source to help you build on this technique.
It’s the most reliable source of data on what your site is appearing in the
search results for - even if it doesn’t get a click. You’ll often find your
site appearing for queries that you haven’t directly addressed yet with
content. Create an article that does address that query or question - and get
more traffic. My tool [https://seotesting.com](https://seotesting.com) works
off GSC data and has some predefined reports that help you find these types of
queries - please give it a try.

------
NewHatMatt
I think this is a great example of "scratch your own itch". Rarely are
frustrations so specific that they don't impact multiple individuals. SEO
aside, you're benefiting those who come after you asking the same questions.

About two years ago I started writing specific technical posts that I had to
piece together from various sources. Although it's primarily for my own
selfish reasons to reference later, I've seen quite a lot of traffic from
folks who are trying to find the same solutions. Not too unsurprising, the key
here seems to be the more niche a post, the better it performs compared to
posts that cover broader topics.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
> you're benefiting those who come after you asking the same questions

Thanks! The idea of just being helpful on the internet is vastly undervalued.

Since this specific tactic is about avoiding competition, it does pretty much
always lead to something very niche, very new—either in content or the
audience/approach to the content.

Larger topics are often worth going after or necessary for a larger site, but
then you have more authority and more resources to do so.

------
dddddaviddddd
The process of documenting something I couldn't find an answer to is
effectively the current raison d'être for my personal website.

------
taphangum
Great article.

I guess the next question is, how does one create a way to reliably generate
these kinds of "itch scratching" type queries on a regular basis?

My immediate guess would be to just be building something within your niche
that you find interesting. And the ideas would come as a by-product of that.

So this definitely works best for builders. Those who are just focused on
content creation and not building may have a pretty tough time using this
strategy, due to lack of ideas.

~~~
woutr_be
I'm not sure how the author found these queries, but looking at Google Search
Console, I definitely see quite a few queries that I could write content
around.

------
moltar
Isn’t that just part of the long tail keyword strategy?

~~~
jspash
Yes indeed. "What's old is new again" truly applies here.

Something I enjoy about having been around since the beginning of the
internet, is to watch the cyclical nature of information and how each new
generation "discovers" bits and pieces from the past.

I could take the "get off my lawn" stance and just complain that "kids these
days" don't understand logic gates or finite state machines, so what business
do they have messing about with promises and javascript. But it's genuinely
enlightening to see new approaches to old problems. Having an open mind was
easy when I was young. Nowadays it can actually take effort to do so.

However, this one sits firmly in "duh! Wasn't it obvious?" territory with me.
But I mean that in a nice way :)

------
bpatel576
I really enjoyed the section about working with the search engine and how we
typically use search. Naturally, when we come across a problem we search to
find solutions. When your problems are generic, it's easy to find an article
that gives you an exact answer, but the deeper problems that you work on or
the more specific they are, the less likely you'll find an article you can
follow to fit your needs. That's where it's important to form models and
sharpen tools for inference. It's more likely that you'll have to read a
handful of articles and take segments from each article to formulate an
answer.

------
iblaine
> Create what you hoped your search would find

This is the content is king mantra. Ideal SEO is the point that delivers the
best results with the fewest consequences. That’s a subjective rule, so it’s
hard to say creating content works for everyone.

Point of saying this is you should strive to appease search engines by
creating useful content, but the real world is messy. Some industries need to
bend the rules to survive.

------
notgpt
Thank you Mark, that helped trigger some cascades. I went ahead and did just
that [1], let us see what shape it takes.

[1]: [https://notgpt.com/2020/08/15/life-is-like-a-
blockchain/](https://notgpt.com/2020/08/15/life-is-like-a-blockchain/)

------
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1
I think SEO is improving search rank given specific content. Creating content
given specific search results is something entirely different. It's like
someone hired you to promote their car parts shop and you added boobies page
to it, Alexa rank to the moon!

------
Shorel
My own strategy has been answering questions in Stack Overflow and related
sites.

I guess yours is more profitable.

~~~
AnonHP
Your strategy is definitely profitable for StackOverflow (and StackExchange).

But all these approaches end up helping others, regardless of who gets to make
some money out of it.

------
dergachev
[https://www.google.com/search?q=my+best+SEO+tactic+so+far&oq...](https://www.google.com/search?q=my+best+SEO+tactic+so+far&oq=my+best+SEO+tactic+so+far)

Looks like his tactic worked ;)

~~~
pmiller2
Yep! It is interesting though that the top 3 results for this totally not
specially crafted /s query are the article (expected), this comments page
(fairly expected), and then an outdated 5 year old article (not so expected).

I wonder if the overall quality of Google search would improve significantly
if, for some topics where timeliness is important, they ranked things more
heavily by date, emphasizing recent results. This would probably have a decent
impact on some technical searches, but I wonder how wide the applicability
would be.

~~~
graeme
Google actually does heavily index by date. It has caused a lot of problems
for trying to find good older stuff in evergreen niches.

The issue with this search is no one would normally search for “ _my_ best seo
tactic”

~~~
dhosek
Good point. "best seo tactic" doesn't show any of this on the front page (and
there's a half page of ads before you see any real content).

------
sixhobbits
That's a lot of words to say "write stuff that you wish existed but doesn't".

It's the strategy used by literally ever beginner blogger I've come across.
Not saying it's bad but I'm not sure why there's a whole article about it.

~~~
site-packages1
More nuanced than that, I think. Brainstorming things you wish existed and
writing about them doesn’t completely overlap with taking searches you’ve
actually done and have ended up difficult to complete because of a lack or
disparity of information and writing the solution.

------
zupa-hu
I guess this works as long as you are clueless about your profession so you
search a lot the same way your customers do.

I suspect this is rare.

