Get High at Work!

Science of SEO Debunked in One Word

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

in

When I started Atlanta Tech Blogs as just a project to stay on top of the Atlanta tech startup scene, one of the concepts that kept popping up was “SEO“. I was familiar with SEO, but not in a guru kind of sense. I knew what it meant and I knew that if you want people to find you via a Google search, you need to pay attention to SEO.

Aside from that, I really didn’t know – or care – about SEO. But once I started running Atlanta Tech Blogs, I quickly realized that if I wanted more website visitors, I needed to think about SEO. Since the site is built on WordPress, I also learned that Yoast SEO plugin was the way to go. A million people can’t be wrong, right? That part was easy.

I set one goal, and that was to be on page one of the Google search for “tech blogs“. That’s it. Meanwhile, I was banging away at curating more content, automating as much as possible, and building the social media presence for @atltechblogs on Twitter. Side note: I went back and forth with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, but ultimately decided to keep them going, and even added Tumblr, really just as a test.

And that’s what this whole “project” has been: a test. A bunch of experiments in content marketing, social marketing, content curating and aggregating. So I kept experimenting with different ways of doing things. Here’s how Atlanta Tech Blogs works today.

  • Blog posts are curated via RSS feeds, and a post is created from each feed item. If a blog doesn’t have an RSS feed, like this one, then that blog doesn’t get promoted. If you have a blog, make sure you have a valid RSS feed. It’s built in to most blogging software.
  • Titles of blog posts are changed to reflect the content of the post, rather than a title that only that blog’s organic audience would understand, so anyone can glance at the title and have some idea of the content of the post.
  • Blog links are published to the front page as rel=nofollow outbound links only. I’m still on the fence on this one, as to whether nofollow is better for SEO or not.
  • We capture whatever is included in the RSS feed (the source controls that), but redirect all traffic to each blog post back to the original blog, so that content is never seen on our website, other than the new title on the home page.
  • We include the canonical link as part of each post title link, so the original author is always recognized by Google, and so no one mistakes us as the author or source.
  • All new posts are tweeted with their new titles, and also auto-posted to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Tumblr.
  • Every day, Mailchimp’s RSS-to-email system gathers up everything that we posted since the previous email, and puts it in a nicely formatted digest for easy clicking and reading for our subscribers.

That’s it. It’s simple, and best of all, it has worked. Up until mid-February, Twitter generated most of our traffic by a long shot, but in the middle of that month, traffic from organic Google search surpassed that of Twitter, and the gap continues to widen. Also, at that time, we made the front page of Google search results for “tech blogs.” As a bonus, we’re very high (sometimes first) for the following Google searches:

My next goal is to hit the charts for “startup blogs“, but we’re not even close there. Yet.

All this is to say that, other than using the Yoast plugin for WordPress, there is no dark art or black magic or pseudo science that has gone into our SEO. Nothing. Here’s what gets us great SEO:

  • Exact match domain name for what we do.
  • Publishing new content every day.
  • Using Google Webmaster Tools (including a sitemap).

Yup, that’s pretty much it. I don’t write code, nor do I know or do anything related to meta key words. We curate content, promote content, and change the titles of the blog posts we promote in order to give the random viewer a better idea of what the article is about. I tried using https, but that had no effect. Our WordPress theme is mobile friendly by default.

So, what do you make of these three amazingly complex and double-secret probationary tactics? Getting an exact match domain is tough, and not always tempting. AtlantaTechBlogs.com is 16 characters (not counting “.com”), whereas Buffer says the optimal length for a domain name is 8 characters. Anyone can – and absolutely should – use Google Webmaster Tools, so no excuse there. What’s left?

Content.

Brand new content every day. Period. Content is king for SEO. Want better SEO results? Publish more content.

Comments

Leave a comment

More from Kevin

  • Try a sample, then eat the whole cake

    Have you ever seen a big tasty-looking carrot cake in the window of a bakery, then run in and bought that $21.99 carrot cake, and then you get home, nuke a piece, dive in, and…ugh. That’s how my grandmother made carrot cake!! Where are the raisins? It’s so dry! But you bought the whole cake, and…

  • 4 Steps to Determine How Well You Know Your Brand

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. How well do you know your brand? DO you know your brand? Actually, “brand” is an uncomfortable topic for many startup founders and small business owners, simply because they weren’t thinking about their brand when they started. It’s not a knock on them. Every entrepreneur…

  • It’s easier – and better – for someone else to tell your story

    Since transitioning from a simple content aggregation publication into a content marketing service, I’ve had dozens of meetings with entrepreneurs and marketers about “telling their story.” A consistent pattern has emerged out of those meetings that has become predictable in all my initial consultations with potential clients: It’s easier for me to tell your story…

  • How and Why to Segment Your Website Audience

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. When you go shopping for new clothes, online or in a brick and mortar store, which section do you hit first, the men’s or the women’s clothing? Good. OK, when you need a new power cord for your computer or smartphone, do you go…

  • 4 Steps to Predictable Marketing Outcomes

    One of the greatest achievements in starting a business is when you reach the point at which you can conduct a marketing campaign and predict with great confidence the outcome of the campaign, regardless of the end goal. When you can accurately predict the outcome of each individual marketing effort, you can then grow your…

  • Digital marketing summed up in six simple points

    Last Thursday, I led a 2-hour version of the six hour version of the 10-week Digital Marketing class at General Assembly. I really enjoy teaching these short, impactful sessions that serve as great introductions or primers for folks who want to learn to talk the talk in Digital Marketing or determine if they’d like to…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. 1. Analytics – information resulting from the systematic analysis of data or statistics. In digital marketing, analytics is the information resulting from systematic analysis of data gathered from marketing activity such as email marketing, landing page A/B testing, or Google Adwords purchases. 2. Average…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Creating Your Digital Marketing Calendar

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. This post is part of our Digital Marketing 101 series. Sign up to get the full series! Everything we’ve discussed so far in this Digital Marketing 101 series has focused on what to do and a bit about how to do it. But in…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Understanding the Digital Marketing Funnel

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. When we started our latest session of Digital Marketing at General Assembly’s Atlanta campus, I told the class, “the term ‘digital marketing’ is a misnomer. It’s marketing, but we focus on getting our message to our audience digitally. But it’s still marketing.” What I…