How we improved the SEO performance of WW.com, a mini how-to | Hacker News Reader

How we improved the SEO performance of WW.com, a mini how-to

jacquesmattheij.com

55 pointsjacquesm27 comments

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

You're welcome, I promised. We were really pressed for time on Monday or I would have done it right then.

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.

This might have been posted here before but posting it again - http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimiza... . I found this a very good read for SEO.

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.

> Analytics Analytics Analytics!

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

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

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

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

Thanks. Any other good tools for SEO?

Patricks 'greatest hits' collection is a good start:

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

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

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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

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