
Minimum Viable SEO - omarish
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/15403657245/minimum-viable-seo
======
weeksie
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!

~~~
WillyF
You're definitely missing the incoming links part.

~~~
weeksie
Ok, but what the hell does that have to do with building the site. Inbound
links are obvious. Wow, really, is that all? And there are entire communities
devoted to this? Seriously, I really want to know what I'm missing because I
feel like I must be whiffing pretty hard here not to see it.

~~~
trevin
It's a lot more complicated than you are letting on.

What you are saying is like saying architecture is just drawing diagrams or
good journalism is just writing about stuff.

Like many industries, there's an art to SEO and plenty of nuances far beyond
clean coding and user friendly design.

~~~
davidw
I think many SEO type people have done a terrible job of marketing their
field, because the place they occupy in most people's minds is not a
particularly nice one.

I think emphasizing statistics and analysis would make a bit better impression
on some of us. It turns on a light that says "aha, there is something real
there!".

~~~
jaredmck
the problem is there are so many hacky, cold-calling SEOs that the majority of
people you're likely to run into in SEO suck. when you really get into it
(obviously biased) i think the combination of statistics, data mining,
creative content and competitive analysis of your position in a perpetually
changing market is a fascinating blend and you can learn as much as you want
and take your skills and strategies in a ton of different directions.

it'd be nice if we could be completely transparent with analytics while
iterating a search strategy for a large site, because the learning experience
would be great whether you're a big-name, experienced SEO, looking to get
further into SEO, or an anti-SEO hacker looking to just call us all out for
being full of shit :) it'd be cool. too bad the economic reality of releasing
complete analytics data to the entire internet makes this an impossible dream.

------
tibbon
Don't do SEO.

Do accessibility.

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.

Yet, just doing SEO doesn't make for a very accessible site all the time.

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.

~~~
randfish
I read this, and all I can see is:

"Don't do marketing." "Just make a good product and people will find it."

I think this is the downfall of many great products. The current startup world
has an idealistic belief that better products always win and if you build
something people want, they'll find it, when in fact, this has never been
true. The "best" politicians consistently lose to those better at marketing
and branding. The "best" ideas in organizations often fall to those trumpeted
with more style or by those with more clout. Many great startups shut down
because they couldn't find a repeatable, low-cost way to acquire customers
(and SEO is exactly this).

More here: [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-disagree-with-fred-marketing-
is...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-disagree-with-fred-marketing-is-for-
companies-that-have-great-products)

And here: [http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-
marke...](http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing-
for-startups/)

~~~
YourAnMoran
I believe parent was trying to express the sentiment that search engines
inherently favor sites that are well-structured and present the relevant
keywords in a format that is easily parsed by web crawlers.

------
TomGullen
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.

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.

People who sell SEO usually:

\- Have the gift of the gab

\- Prey on peoples ignorance

\- Prey on peoples greed

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.

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.

SEOMoz is a good place to start (their free blogs etc). Executing good
technical SEO on your own website is pretty easy.

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.

~~~
xander54
2x search traffic over 6 months? That is not something to be proud of. A real
SEO would have got 6x easy on a site with no existing SEO.

~~~
TomGullen
All depends where you are measuring from doesn't it! Where do you think I was
measuring from when I said 2x? A site with 0 traffic? That would be quite easy
to x6 sure.

Also your post smells exactly like the sort of sales pitch people seeking SEO
should try to avoid. Big grandiose speculative statements.

------
helipad
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:

[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-
shee...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet)

~~~
rhizome
I'm seeing only bad links to the PDF on that page.

~~~
brador
Yep, same here. Google isn't helping either. Anyone want to upload the pdf for
all?

~~~
fedd
seo pages can't be found by google.

meta!

------
blauwbilgorgel
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.

1\. Blog on a subdomain.

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.

2\. Employ Canonical

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.

Without Canonical an URL like /boats/?dupe=content will point to the same
resource as /boats/. Here you might introduce a canonical problem.
([http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-
your-canonical.html))

3\. Optimize your site for speed

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
(<http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html>) might help you fix some
of these issues and gain a few seconds.

Mostly loading javascript just before </body>, turning on caching, and
compressing and combining resources.

4\. Robots.txt vs meta robots

/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.

5\. Breadcrumbs

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.

6\. Images

Add an alt-attribute to the site logo. Specify the dimensions for faster
rendering.

7\. Don't critique ehow.com if you fill Google's index with 245.000+ automated
results.

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).

8\. Make clear if an item is "already sold".

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.

9\. Quality

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.

~~~
jsm386
On point 1 - if you do have your blog already stuck on a subdomain
(blog.site.com) this a neat solution to serve it through site.com/blog that
might work for you: [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-
how-c...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-
help-my-seo)

~~~
semanticist
Reverse proxying an external application isn't always as trivial as just
proxy_pass in vhost.conf and go - we recently moved our company blog from
blog.picklive.com to picklive.com/blog and it caused issues with WordPress
relating to cookies for the admin control panel and invalid cookies set by
WordPress caused us huge problems with our actual app.

These issues were fixed by doing slightly more complicated proxying rules and
by filtering the cookies as part of the proxying.

Reverse proxying is a really powerful technique (you could sit things like
mod_security in front of your relatively vulnerable WordPress install, for
example), but unless you have an experienced sysadmin on hand to help if it
all goes wrong it's probably not something you want to try based solely on an
infographic.

------
andrewnez
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.

All the work is in producing great, relevant content and then link building.

------
chocoheadfred
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: <http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-
factors>

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'?
[http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution-
of...](http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution-of-google-
rankings-rand-fishkin-at-the-searchmetrics-partner-meeting/)

------
tlack
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?

~~~
jaredmck
who recommends highly nested folder trees? i've not heard this and have
certainly seen it hurt sites. all things equal, flatter is better. my rule of
thumb is go as flat as you can while still having an organized, navigable URL
structure.

~~~
blauwbilgorgel
I sometimes recommend nested folder trees, but never deeper than 3 folders. 3
folders deep is enough for millions of pages.

I like nested folders for a couple of reasons, some of which are:

\- Clarity. A good structure will instantly signal what the page will be
about, before a user or searchbot follows that link.

\- Bolded keywords in URL in the SERPS.

\- Using pages to flow juice to categories.

\- Benefit of targetted anchor text, when using the URL for anchor text.

Compare: big-ecommerce-site.com/yoga-pilatus/accessories/yoga-mat/

vs.

big-ecommerce-site.com/yoga-mat/

And search queries like: "pilatus mat" or "yoga accessories". Which will work
better for these queries?

\- Structure. Your URL's will reflect in your breadcrumbs, allowing users to
navigate your site through URLs (By removing a folder and going to a higher
level in the site).

\- Silo's. After the Panda update, and this is speculation on my part, Google
might lower the imporance of "parts" of your website. Let's say only your blog
is of very low quality. Google could discount /blog/ when you have nested
folders. With a flat structure your removed "parts" or higher level categories
from your site, and don't allow for this.

Ofcourse there are benefits to going flat too. But nested folder trees are not
neccessarily a bad thing.

------
dsrikanth
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.

------
melc
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.

------
risource
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.

------
kenny_r
I have a small nit to pick in an otherwise great post: Codecademy is not the
same as Code Academy.

It's also noteworthy that codecademy.com ranks higher than codeacademy.org in
the google search for "Code Academy".

Well played indeed.

~~~
AznHisoka
I think Codecademy needs to get CodeAcademy.com as soon as they can..
otherwise they're gonna rely on mostly search traffic to get visitors since
most ppl won't remember their url

~~~
allbutlost
It seems that they do already - see <http://www.codeacademy.com>

------
steele
I first read this as Minimum Viable CEO and double face-palmed

~~~
paulovsk
LOL

------
pinchyfingers
If you working on an Internet startup and you're not thinking about SEO from
day one: you suck.

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?

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.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
There's no need to employ this tone; we're all adults here.

