
How we improved the SEO performance of WW.com, a mini how-to - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/How+we+improved+the+SEO+performance+of+WW.com%2C+a+mini+how-to
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lachyg
Whenever I read these SEO articles, I get a little depressed at how people try
to game the search engines.

This article, was a nice contrast. Good to see some solid, basic tips, with no
crap / gaming.

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antirez
Completely agree with you, but unfortunately since Google is already so
strongly gamed sometimes the only way to survive is to game it yourself.

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lachyg
Agreed. I guess that's the next advancements that search engines need to make.

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bobds
It's a continuous process. People find ways to exploit the ranking algorithms,
other people improve the algorithms, and so on, ad infinitum.

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wesley
So, in a way, google should be thankful for these people?

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phpnode
Google would (probably) never have become so successful if it wasn't for SEOs
and spammers

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ewjordan
That's largely true because the SEOs and spammers were _so_ successful at
gaming Google's competition that the other search engines were all but useless
when Google hit the scene.

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melissamiranda
Thank you so much for the followup. SEO can be hard to learn (beyond the basic
checklist google provides) since every expert is just trying to sell you their
black box of services. It's enlightening to learn specifically what another
site's problems were and how you addressed them- it's much more honest than
anything I'd find by googling. Thanks so much for sharing!

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jonbishop
Melissa, there are a ton of SEO resources on the web. SEOmoz's Ranking Factors
is a great place to start: <http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-
factors>

SEOmoz.org(and seobook.com) also has free tools and other resources.

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barfoomoo
This might have been posted here before but posting it again -
[http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-
optimiza...](http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-
starter-guide.pdf) . I found this a very good read for SEO.

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terra_t
the basic practice of SEO is "search engine compatibility".

many sites do things with sessions, frames, javascript and such that are
effectively a "romulan cloaking device" so far as Google is concerned. Then
they wonder why they don't show up in the search engines.

now, there's a whole world things to think about once you're getting crawled,
but there are a lot of good sites by good people that are entirely uncrawlable
-- all because of ignorance of the "unwritten standards" of the web.

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joshstaiger
> Analytics Analytics Analytics!

What metrics are you looking at in your Google Analytics data to find areas
for improvement?

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phpnode
Obviously looking at top landing pages and keywords is a big part of it, but
the Analytics data is really the most useful when you have have another set of
data to cross reference it with, e.g. if you know that you're ranking at
number 11 for a keyword that gets 1,000,000 searches a month then that keyword
is probably worth targeting. But you'd only get one of those 3 bits of
information from GA, the rest you'd have to get elsewhere

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barfoomoo
Does google analytics tell you your ranking for a particular key word? If not
is there any tool out there which does this?

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inerte
Google Webmaster Tools does (well, for Google search anyway).

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barfoomoo
Thanks. Any other good tools for SEO?

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jacquesm
Patricks 'greatest hits' collection is a good start:

<http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/>

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hcho
Sorry if you posted this earlier, but by how much did you improve the SEO
performance? Any numbers?

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jacquesm
Concretely, 100K more pages indexed (the effect of which remains to be seen),
the cumulative changes to the site have increased in a tripling of the signup
rate.

So colour me very happy so far.

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inerte
My bet is that you'll receive more referals from Google, so congratulations on
everything you've done. But be careful about number of pages indexed, it's
deceptive: I had one site where this number decreased on Google over time
(from ~60k to ~4k in about a year) and my number of visitors coming from
Google has NOT changed much.

But my site was heavily SEO optimized back then, and still is. I guess somehow
Google has decided the other 56k pages aren't even worth to index anymore :p,
none was searching for the stuff on these pages and/or the remaining 4k pages
from my site were already sufficient to appear on SERPs for a given query.

Factor in that I haven't updated much this particular website in the last 18
months, and my guess is that Google also think these pages aren't worth to
index. Which doesn't mean they are not crawled, just that Google (for the
speculated reasons above) has decided not to store it and/or show on SERPs.

Ahhhhh, talking about Google... so much guessing...

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ddemchuk
there's really not that much guessing necessary. Google knows the click
through rate of all SERPs, so after a year, if they see that 95% of your pages
are never visited, they have no reason to hang on to them.

Because those pages weren't bringing traffic anyways, your stats don't change

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js2
Why didn't you link to ww.com from that post?

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jacquesm
Because even though we try very hard I can't guarantee that the homepage is
always SFW. All it takes is one jackass and some HN'er could be out of a job.

I never realized how sensitive that is and after being corrected I've become
more careful.

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rewind
Off-topic, but maybe mention that in your initial posting too. I never think
twice about copying/pasting if there isn't a URL in the main posting (but I'm
in a home office and don't have the work office issues you're trying to help
people avoid). If I didn't already know who you are and what ww.com is, I
wouldn't have any way to know that it might be NSFW.

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jacquesm
Ok, I've added a little pre-amble to that effect.

