

Ask HN: SEO today, what's it all about?  - voidfiles

What are the best practices. Is it worth it, whats okay whats not?
======
byrneseyeview
A little SEO is worth it, whether or not you know what you're doing. You can
read the free stuff on SEOMoz to get a good idea of best practices.

Essentially, SEO is a way to showcase your content so it's more obvious to
search engines that your site is about whatever it's about. That means:

* Fresh content. * Titles and subtitles relevant to what you're talking about (no "mystery meat" headlines -- if you're writing about website usability, say "Website usability," not "The business mistake that could cost your customers"). * A reasonable amount of self-promotion: if you know what you've written could help someone, tell them so; if you see a blog that you like, ask to write a guest post. * In every online interaction, make sure people see that you know what you're talking about -- and make it clear that for the _good_ stuff, they have to pay.

I write a blog about SEO copywriting: <http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/> Read
it for more.

------
yannis
(a) Content (and attach a blog)

(b) _Be_ the community.

Answer questions on forum(s) related to your niche. Help people solve those
problems via Twitter and other social sites. Write in turn about those
experiences. Rinse & Repeat.

It's cheaper to cause awesomeness than to buy it.

(c) Adhere to basics, good titles, viral marketing, link building, make it
easier for people and spiders to find you site.

~~~
voidfiles
I try this sometimes, often people get mad at me for suggesting that my site
might help them. I try to be upfront about being the creator, but people still
seem to have a problem with people who own things "hocking" them in niche
sites.

------
ddemchuk
of course it's worth it...if you're interested in proactive SEO, you need to
focus on building relevant, targeted one way links to your site for the
keywords you're looking to rank for. Start with long tail keywords (like 2004
nissan altima 5 speed vs. nissan altima) so there is less competition to worry
about. As you build authority on those long tail words, it will become easier
and easier to get ranked for the harder keywords. Use your target keywords in
the anchor text of the links you build (so instead of "Click here" do "2004
nissan altima 5 speed" as the anchor text)

The best link sources are: web 2.0 site profiles that allow links web 2.0 blog
sites that allow articles with links social bookmarking article marketing blog
commenting wiki links directory links (though not too much)

Don't go crazy on the number of links you build. There's no set number of
links that are too much per day, but what's most important is consistently
building links. That way the search engines see you as a long term authority
site for your niche.

Also, while on site SEO is a good thing, it really only amounts to about 10%
of your rankings. It basically makes it easier for the search engines to crawl
your site and determine its topic once they find you.

It's all about links...

