Comment by pul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pul | Hacker News Reader

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> I hope that you make more than your salary

Not yet by a large margin, but it's going up slowly :)

> how did you attract users to website?

Currently, mainly through SEO. My stats are open [1], so you can see the percentage that comes in through search engines. In my case, there's a large search volume for 'nslookup', which is currently the largest chunk of traffic. An 'exact match domain' helped for sure. But in the end, Google will be able to gauge how well you're able to solve the problem that made people search for something. So an excellent product * the search volume * backlink profile * how well Google can understand what you're solving will approximate the number of users that visit your site.

You can use tools like ahrefs [2] (which also has a free tools) to get a sense of the search volume and competition on those keywords.

Hope that helps!

[1]: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io

[2]: https://ahrefs.com/

I used to do a lot of research on SEO and the methods behind the madness of getting decent organic traffic, and it basically always boiled down to quality content built around targeted keywords, phrases, or related topics.

The way I always imagined to accomplish this was to write or hire someone to write this content and present it in a blog format. It does not seem that you do this on these properties, so briefly what kind of SEO optimization can be continually done outside of that? Are you still writing content as a guest poster and generating reputable backlinks? Engaging communities that are focused around your topic and promoting through those channels in hopes of generating backlinks? Or am I just in left field with all of this and what I thought I knew about SEO?

I think you have a pretty good idea on how SEO works. I try to do multiple things, and hope some of them bear fruit.

1. This very blog post is part of the SEO effort. A temporary influx in traffic, a couple of backlinks, and a larger following on Twitter (+80 followers from this post alone).

> The way I always imagined to accomplish this was to write or hire someone to write this content and present it in a blog format.

2. I've got an ex-Microsoft employee that writes content on a freelance basis. We do around one knowledge base article or blog post per month.

3. Original content that's genuinely useful and bring something new to the table (like [1]) take a lot of time, but pay off in terms of backlinks. The image by the way is release under creative commons with attribution, so I occasionally look if websites use it and ask for a backlink.

[1] https://www.nslookup.io/learning/dns-record-types/

Awesome, thanks alot. :)

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