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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I love instapainting's approach to SEO: produce articles like this that are genuinely interesting, post it to HN, then wait for TC and the like to pick them up and reap the link juice. They've also got a few neat little hacks hosted on www.instapainting.com which serve the same purpose. Here's a good writeup on their strategy:

https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/instapainting

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There is no fast way of doing linkbuilding these days. The effect of viral content, and the links they bring is short-lived.

Unless it's your actual product going viral, it doesn't do much for SEO. It's just a good way to get your name out there.

https://moz.com/blog/the-seo-myth-of-going-viral

I suspect, though, that there isn't a ton of competition for the keywords that matter to them. So the boost you get from hitting HN/TC/whatever once a month might be enough to keep them at the top of Google's SERPs. They did say that SEO drives something like 90% of their business.

The immediate links to the linkbuilding content itself, sure, I'll buy that. But those links create clicks, and some of those visitors will end up linking other parts of the site, including the product.

So a slower process, but still one that should be worth it as long as your viral content is actually about your product and facilitating discovery of the product.

I think that's one of the problems: People pump out content that is only marginally about the actual product, and few people go on to visit the parts of the site you want to actually get people to link to.

How do they go up so high on HN? Just by being interesting?

That and it satisfies a variety of similar traits: stories about successful proof of concepts, outsourcing work, YC, interesting write ups of business processes, transparency.

FWIW this is called "Content Marketing" in the SEO industry. Chris Chin calls it that in the article you linked. He's pretty good at it: most content marketing is terrible and uninteresting content.

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