
Ask HN: "Basic SEO"? - DanHulton
I see this phrase thrown around like a magic spell from time to time, a la "Put up a site about a profitable niche, do some basic SEO, and bam! presto! Instant $50/month!"<p>But what <i>is</i> "Basic SEO" to you?  Blogging?  Adwords?  Paying dudes via MechTurk to write articles for you?<p>Googling "Basic SEO" brings you a few good articles, but a LOT of "buy our ebook" articles too.  I just feel that if it were so basic, it'd be more common to find.<p>So what do you consider to be "Basic SEO", HN?
======
andrewljohnson
0\. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site.
If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's
Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site
to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some
common word like Yelp.

1\. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other
keywords. If you want people to search for "fishing tips" and find you, then
several people will need to link you something like this:

    
    
        This site has great <a href=http://www.mysite.com>fishing tips</a>.
    

2\. The more authority these links have, the better you will do. If you get a
very high PageRank site to link "fishing tips" to you, you might be
immediately first for that query in Google. Or, 2-3 medium links might do it.

3\. The words you want people to search for need to be used several times on
your site. You should have the words "fishing tips" on several pages and you
should link to your best page on "fishing tips" by putting that phrase in your
own links to your own pages.

4\. Also make sure you put the keywords you want searches for in the title of
your page, and enclose them in H1 tags or other bold/header tags. This won't
help very much, but it's probably worth doing.

5\. Links don't really help you unless they are from a real domain - a link
from someblog.blogspot.com will not help your PageRank much at all. Also, the
domain needs to exist for a while to help you - something like a year.

6\. Good places to get links are from your college and high school newspapers,
local newspapers, and anyone else who has a website that would appropriately
cover you.

7\. Some sites have way more PageRank than you might expect. www.cmu.edu is an
anchor site for the link graph, and a link from this site will do wonders for
your PageRank.

8\. Here are some excellent pages on SEO:

    
    
        http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/
        
        http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-two/
    

You should also check out Mahalo.com. That site is SEOed within an inch of its
existence on Google, so take some tips from them but tread carefully.

9\. In the end, it really boils down to having authoritative links with the
right anchor text linking to you. The rest matters very little.

~~~
webwright
Great summary.

I'd add that SEO is not just a ranking exercise-- it's a conversion exercise.
On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should
consider that the first ~60 characters of you <title> tag and the first ~150
of your meta-description are what drives people to click through to your site.

Also, all other things being equal, the first position on SERPs gets ~42% of
clicks... So it's a winner take all game unless you are talking about a
content business.

OH-- also do some keyword analysis. In Andrew's example-- how many people
search for "fishing tips" versus "fishing advice" or "how to fish" or "intro
to fishing"? Keyword analysis is about finding out what people are searching
for and then digging in to see how competitive those keywords are. If you want
to dethrone the #1 result for "fishing tips" you'll want to analyze their SEO.
If they are a 10 year old page-rank-9 domain with 87,500 inbound links, you
might consider gunning for a less sought-after search term.

~~~
Grinnmarr
Excellent point. I was in charge of much of the SEO of a large internet
retailer and our organic traffic was stunning. Unfortunately no matter how
hard I lobbied to start work on conversion, split testing etc, they insisted I
do nothing but drive traffic to our poorly converting sites. When sales
started flattening out despite the continuing month over month increase in
organic traffic I was let go as a cost saving measure. And while still an
Internet Retailer 500 company their position has slipped significantly down
the ranks. At the time I left we had top ten positions for hundreds of our
most important key words including #1 position for many of our first tier
words. When doing SEO remember that traffic is only as good as it converts.

------
qeorge
Here's the basics:

\- Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which
ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you.

<https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal>

\- Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords,
first 4 words of the title count the most)

\- Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4, img alt text, ul's,
dl's)

\- Get links from other websites (best case scenario: link's anchor text is
your keyword). Higher the PageRank of the linking site the better. NoFollow's
don't count.

To get links:

    
    
        1) Ask directly
        2) Mention them in your blog posts, hope they reciprocate
        3) Pay them (but don't tell anyone you did)
        4) Make interesting content on your blog that naturally gains links
    

\- Don't use subdomains (i.e., put your blog at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of
blog.mydomain.com)

That will give you a good start. From there, start a blog with interesting
content, and submit it around. The idea with the blog is that the posts are
more interesting than your site's copy, so people will actually link to it.

~~~
metaprinter
what's wrong with subdomains?

~~~
minouye
It dilutes link juice--a subdomain is viewed as a separate site. Putting your
blog as a subdirectory helps to build the authority of your main domain.

~~~
qeorge
Yes, this is it. If you host your blog on blog.mydomain.com your main site
won't receive the full benefit of the inbound links.

Side note: sometimes this is desired. For instance, one domain can only occupy
2 slots in a SERP, but each subdomain can take 2 more slots. So in theory, you
could take up an entire results page with your main domain and 4 subdomains.

------
rubyrescue
Build Links. Here are my 5 steps to get started from nothing, with 5 free
bonus steps. Do one of these per week, in a little over a month you'll have a
foundation. Remember SEO is like farming, you reap what sow and it takes a
long time to reap the harvest of all the hard work.

1\. Leverage your competition, by finding your top five closest competitors
and spend your first round of SEO getting links from the top 100 sites that
link to them. Once you filter out the ones that you won't be able to contact
or you know can't edit their content to add another link, you'll be down to
20% of those 500 links. Now, you can do this in a day. Create an email, send
it to each one of those guys asking for a backlink, telling them you're in the
space and explaining why they should link to you. _Don't pay for links,
because it's not worth the risk of the google "police" finding out._

2\. Long Tail. Don't focus on ranking for the super-competitive keyword such
as "flowers", rank for medium-tail keywords that you can make some ground on
with less effort. "flowers going away party", "flowers evil mother-in-law",
etc. Related to #1, when you ask for a link, feel free to suggest anchor text
in the link that helps you get what you want from that link.

3\. Kickstart your on-site content strategy. Make a list of 100 articles that
would help you drive traffic. Take the top 10 ideas and hire someone to write
them. For each article, when you publish it, find 100 more people to ask for
links to the article. Send them specific text and a specific page you want
them to link to.

4\. Authorities. Make a list of 10 authorities on your subject _who blog or
create content_. Write an article that you think would be interesting to them,
something specific that is in their space. Make the content really good.
Contact them personally (phone call, even) and ask for links to the article.
In the flowers example, academics focused on environmental issues related to
flower farming, for example.

5\. Directories. Build resource articles that cover your space in a way that
focuses on your strengths. Find directories and ask them to link to your
article. In the flowers example, an article on determining the proper type of
flower for all special occasions or religious events.

6\. Build links.

7\. Build links.

8-10. Build links.

~~~
prawn
On #3, you can pay someone $6/300 words to get unique content written (and
that includes some level of SEO research on the phrases you request). If the
quality isn't quite what you'd hoped, use those articles as a starting point
and then expand on them, tweak them and reword certain points. Paying more for
higher quality pieces is an option too.

~~~
xal
how do you go about that? Are there services that facilitate such article
writing?

~~~
froo
Whenever I've done this type of stuff, I've just farmed out my article writing
to elance.

Some article writing services do pretty much the same thing, being essentially
middlemen rather than having talent inhouse, which is why I don't recommend
them, but YMMV

~~~
prawn
When I found three writers I trialled, it was through elance. Tracked down
their portfolios and contacted them off-site. One was in Australia and I
believe they outsourced the writing to Asia and the quality (writers who
weren't native English speakers) wasn't great. The one I favoured was from the
UK. If she was outsourcing, it was to decent writers.

------
Timmy_C
I also like to tell people what basic SEO is not:

1\. SEO is not keyword frequency. Although the page you are optimizing needs
to contain the search term you are trying to rank for it shouldn't be
saturated with that term. The first four words of the <title> tag, the <h1>
tag and maybe an <img> alt attribute are a few good places to put a good
keyword.

2\. More links isn't necessarily better. A couple good links from one or two
good pages can really boost your rankings more than a lot of links from
unimportant websites.

3\. Meta tags won't help a page rank higher. The <meta name="keywords"/> and
<meta name="description"/> tags aren't used as ranking factors but it's good
to include them because they do signal "about-ness" to an engine.

Some things that might hurt your SEO are frequent server downtime and site
inaccessibility, cloaking by user agent, links from spammy domains and
acquiring links from known "link sellers".

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

------
brown9-2
Google publishes a pretty clear and simple "Webmaster guidelines" checklist to
follow:
[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769)

------
bradrydzewski
SEO can be expensive and time consuming, and a single update to Google's
algorithm can send you back to the drawing board.

My advice: take all of the time and money and, instead of SEO, focus on making
your product great or creating great site content.

If you have a site worth visiting, the quality linking and SEO will eventually
take care of itself. People will blog about your site and link to it without
you having to do anything other than being the best at what you do.

~~~
webwright
I totally disagree with that advice. A good portion of SEO isn't expensive or
time consuming. In fact, none of it should cost money. And a single update to
Google's algorithm rarely harms folks who are doing white-hat SEO.

SEO effort is a multiplier. You can have outstanding content and make no SEO
efforts and yes, you'll probably do okay. You can have crappy content and be
brilliant at SEO and you'll do great, too. The best scenario is to have great
content AND great SEO.

Of course, part of SEO _IS_ building something worth linking to (and doing a
bit of social engineering to get folks to link to you more than they otherwise
would). Check out Mint for an outstanding example of this.

Great content/software and SEO are not mutually exclusive and 95% of the SEO
tactics you need can be learned in a weekend and implemented as you go along.

------
mseebach
Basic "white hat" SEO is two things:

1: Making sure your site is visible to search engines. Make sure there are
meta-tags, that navigation, headers and text is text, not images or flash.
Have a sitemap. Make sure links to pages contain a good description of what's
on the page.

2: Making sure someone's linking to your site. Pitch to blogs to get them to
talk about and link to your site. Comment on blogs, putting your website in
the "website" field. Have good content that people will want to come to and
share - the best way to be visible is for get other people to do your
promotion for you.

The reason it should be a niche, is that when there isn't too many people
writing a website, it's easier to rank high for a search term. If you picked
generic technology news, you'd be hard pressed to break page 10 on Google. If
make a good site about how to grow your own organic hamster food, you could
make page one with little effort. Picking the niche is as much basic SEO as
the technical stuff for this "trick".

Finally, TANSTAAFL.

~~~
kilian
I had to look that acronym up:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_aint_no_such_thing_as_a_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_aint_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch)

------
noodle
here's the basic set of rules i adhere to:

1) only pick a few keywords.

2) make sure you have those keywords in the title tags, in an h1 that either
copies or restates the title, and in an h2 that is basically a site summary
sentence/paragraph. you can use css to hide or image replace the h1/h2.

3) get some other sites to link back to you. old, established, trusted sites
are best. avoid link farms. avoid becoming a link farm yourself to obtain
links. links with "nofollow" attributes don't count.

4) the url you have helps. whether it is yourkeyword.com, your-key-word.com or
whatever.com/your-key-word, it isn't a huge thing to worry about (especially
if you can't help it). but it does help to have the keywords in the url in
some form.

5) in the end, content trumps most things. search engines are smart enough to
recognize most spammy things. if you want to get good results, produce a good
webpage with good content.

------
eurokc98
I am surprised no one has mentioned this yet:
[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-s...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-
seo-report-card.html)

Google recently published an internal SEO audit. The report is more or less a
blueprint of what you should follow on an on-site level with your own site and
I would have to imagine that was the intent.

------
lmkg
SEO has two basic components: making your site seem good and worthwhile, and
associating it with particular search terms. Making it good and worthwhile and
not-spammy mostly has to do with incoming links, and having fresh content.
Reach out to blogs and other sites in your domain to try and collect back-
links.

In order to find what terms you should associate with your site, do some basic
research on search volume (google has some tools for this). Once you have the
terms you want to rank for, it's a matter of making them more prominent in
your site. Header tags, the title tag, the first 100 words of your body copy
(p tags), and your URL structure (readable & hierarchical) have the strongest
impact on this, as does the anchor text of both internal and external links.
Meta description doesn't impact your ranking, but it does impact click-through
in the search engine listings because it's the default text the search engine
will display under the title.

The last part is making sure that content is available in text form on your
page. Banners that are in flash or image files should either be replaced with
images, or you can do graceful degradation by having the text be replaced with
images via javascript (this is consider OK by google so long as the replacing
image contains the same text). If you have videos, include transcripts or at
least summaries. If you have lots of images, use the alt attribute. Don't make
things Ajax unless you really need to.

The last recommendation is don't spam. You'll get penalized. Spamming is
putting more SEO-bait than content on your page, and/or placing content that
search engines will see but most users won't (putting the same content in
different forms is ok). Most tricks you can think of, someone else has thought
of first, and you will get burned for it. Done properly, white-hat SEO and
accessibility overlap very well, since search engine spiders are basically
low-capability browsers.

------
rokhayakebe
Ask yourself this question: "If I was looking for X and landed on this page,
what would I want to see (information, layout)?" X being what you want to rank
for. Edit: Then get people online to talk about X and link to your page.

------
akrymski
I also see ads that say "mom working from home earns $500 a day online!". If
it was so easy to make "instant $50/month" then I'd just sit there and set up
a new site every day for a year, and then retire. Truth is - there's no get-
rick-quick scheme that runs on auto-pilot. A site isn't just a domain, you
have to publish content on it, you have to continuously improve SEO and gain
links, you have to invest in the domain, hosting, bandwidth, time, content,
links, etc, etc.

First decide how much an hour of your time is worth. Then decide if an
investment in this website is worthwhile.

------
epi0Bauqu
Really basic: [http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-
optimiza...](http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-
starter-guide.pdf)

My tips (once you understand the really basic):
[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/04/search-engine-
op...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/04/search-engine-optimization-
seo-tips.html)

HN comments on my tips: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553613>

------
stef25
"Put up a site about a profitable niche, do some basic SEO, and bam! presto!
Instant $50/month!" I've done this but the 10 page site brings it a little
less, about 30 - 40USD / month. No adwords, wrote the content myself, only one
or two incoming links. If your niche / keywords are specific enough you'll
rank in the top 5 without many problems.

Keep in mind that since the content is very specific and does take some time
to write (research, ...) knocking out 100 or even 10 sites like this would be
quite hard work.

------
csomar
Black Hat Seo

0\. Find a new, non discovered niche. This niche should be gold, this mean the
Adsense Pay Per Click is high. Register a related domain.

1\. Purchase unrelated domain names, any domains really, get ".info" domains
since they are cheap.

2\. Buy a SPAM tool like Xrumer and SPAM related/unrelated blogs with
unrelated keywords. (Did you wonder the thousands SPAM comments you get with
xfdfrg in anchor text and wonder why the spammer didn't found better than
those keywords?).

3\. SPAM a couple thousands blogs, get a couple hundred back links. You need
many links, your anchor is not targeted, so quantity need to beat quality.

4\. After you get the back links listed in all your domains, make a 301
Redirect, this will bring all the Google juice (back links) to your domain.

5\. Your domain rank high, it brings traffic, optimize it for Adsense.

Why all this mess?

A. It helps stay under Google SPAM radar since you are using unrelated
keywords, in fact keywords that related to nothing.

B. Other black hat or white hat web masters won't discover your Gold niche
while you are building back links.

As I said, this is black hat and involves spamming. I never tried it, but it
seems to bring some good cash it you choose well the niche.

------
joel_hughes
"Basic SEO" to me would be doing a good job of understanding the client's
products & services during the design process and making sure these come
across well in the build - especially with good URLs (eg
<http://www.mycompany/weoffer/service-name/> etc) plus making sure that key
page website copy is written in light of the obvious keywords/phrases for
their industry.

If the above sounds obvious then you'd be amazed how many sites I come across
which blatently ignore this - if you don't put the raw ingredients into the
mix - Google aint ever gonna bake you a cake!

Basic SEO (to me) is NOT: \- advanced keywords research \- advanced off site
SEO tactics \- probably not keyword/time tracking

Joel

Ps I never really class Adwords as SEO

Pps apologies for any typos - on my BB

------
imp
1\. Pick your target keywords
(<https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal>)

2\. Make sure those keywords are on your page and maybe urls also.

3\. Get links. More the better. Not from spammers.

------
javahava
There a few automated tools that can help you analyze your site for potential
SEO mistakes - this is one I've made which can hopefully help:

<http://www.seositecheckup.com>

------
DotSauce
If you use WordPress I have written an article detailing some common SEO
mistakes and how to fix them:

1\. Bloated title tag and abandoned post titles

2\. Lack of relevant keywords and phrases

3\. Disregarding the NoFollow link attribute

4\. No Sitemap or ping notification to search engines

5\. Not adding images in posts

6\. Improper anchor text for internal links

For my suggestions and solutions to these basic SEO issues, continue
reading...

<http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/11/17/wordpress-seo-mistakes/>

Do not listen to the black hat advice! Organic SEO pays off much more in the
long run.

------
joshklein
Search engine optimization is about (1) some basic technical steps that most
standards-complaint developers understand, and (2) making your website worth
caring about so people WANT to link to it. At least, that's the non-sleazy
kind of search engine optimization.

The magic spell you're referring to is just that; a magic spell. The reality
is that these people make hundreds, if not thousands of these "niche sites",
and 1 in 100 is marginally successfully. They do it at such volume and with
such an efficient system of rolling out template websites with useless filth
the internet doesn't need that they can turn a profit.

But their real profit comes from selling their system, using select stories
like the ones you've heard, or generating a month or two of profits and then
flipping the website to another owner. Unfortunately, these websites rarely
maintain said profit.

The real question you have to ask is whether you would rather make an average
of $5 per month off of 200 websites, or $1000 per month off of 1 website.

For a technical person, there's no doubt that the 1 website is the "easier"
road, and it ain't easy. But 200 websites making $5/month ain't easy either.
The people doing so have an extensive and intricate understanding of internet
marketing sleazeball tricks, the same way many technically-oriented hackers
here know their craft inside and out (the good and the bad).

Still, there ARE some quick things you can do to optimize your pages and
create your own “link neighborhood” when you launch a fresh site. Real success
comes from really making something HUMAN BEINGS want to visit... but these
things will jump-start you once you have that material.

1\. Pick a domain name that matches your primary keyword.

2\. Get other important keywords into the secondary page URLs using mod
rewrite (or a platform that supports it, like Wordpress).

3\. Make sure every page has a unique title and H1 tag that matches your
primary keyword objectives for that page.

4\. Make sure the homepage links to most, if not all, other pages (at least to
start).

5\. Make sure every page links back to the homepage and many other secondary
pages using appropriate anchor text.

6\. Register on every social media site that makes sense for you (using this
list). Include a link to the site in your profile. It helps if the username
you choose is a primary keyword.

7\. Link the social media profiles to each other where applicable. Fill them
out as fully as possible.

8\. Actually use the social networks. More activity will create more pages of
content with more links to the profiles, in turn passing more “juice” to your
website.

9\. Claim your site using Google Webmaster Tools. Submit your sitemap
(preferably one that is automatically updated).

10\. Do a Google Search for every one of your top keywords. Figure out how to
get a link from any site showing in the top 20 results.

11\. Do not under any circumstance pay someone for a link. Do not offer or
accept offers to trade links.

12\. Avoid linking out to shady websites of any kind.

13\. Study the keywords your competitors target (if they use meta-keywords
like bozos, you can just lift those from the source).

14\. Write a blog, or find some other way to continually add new content. This
adds to the content you have indexed, but is also another opportunity for
links. Long term strategy right here.

15\. Build a Twitter client, wordpress theme, or something else that people
will link to and use with persistent links to whatever you decide is in the by
line.

Follow these tips and you’ll end up with a few hundred links to your site.
That should get you indexed and off to a start, but its no replacement for the
real work of being worth caring about.

~~~
jacquesm
> 1\. Pick a domain name that matches your primary keyword.

What's the last time you actually managed to follow that point of your advice
?

------
steveklabnik
It's probably something like this:

[http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-
seo/adsense/42980-how-...](http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-
seo/adsense/42980-how-i-make-15k-month-adsense.html)

Which was discussed on HN here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511935>

------
hfz
I believe this article by Derek Powazek is worth reading:
<http://powazek.com/posts/2101>

------
sidsavara
<http://www.sensational-seo.com/> Free firefox plugin for basic SEO ;)

------
sscheper
My advice:

1\. Content is king, obviously, but get inbound links through guest posts

2\. The rest is details

The details: 1\. Use alt img text to describe images

2\. Use hyperlinks with solid naming conventions:
<http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/>

and not

<http://www.localseoguide.com/p=188270>

3\. Use rel=nofollow for links that you don't want the search engine to pick
up.

For instance, if you're an amazon affiliate, your links should look like:

<a href="<http://amazon.com/product/affiliateid=blahblah> rel="nofollow">name
of amazon product</a>

4\. Pick a title tag that you think people will search (e.g. "How to Lose
Weight," not your post title, "Amazing thing that I did last month")

6\. Add certain pages to your robot.txt file that you don't want to get picked
up (i.e. your privacy policy or terms).

7\. Ensure that there are no broken links within your site (internal broken
links)

8\. Have keywords and a metadescription on each page

~~~
_delirium
What's the point of nofollowing the Amazon link? I could be wrong, but I
believe Google will still look at the link even if it doesn't follow it, and
still factor it into the "does this site have too large a proportion of
affiliate links?" calculation.

------
rogermugs
why is it even called SEO anymore? Shouldn't it just be GO? Google
Optimization?

------
hockeybias
Nice!

