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What is SEO
Being new to Hive and seeing some posts and a topic about marketing for Hive, I thought I would try to share some information about what SEO really is, why it is important, and how to do it properly.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. The concept is that you are optimizing your website or web application for indexing by search engines. Search engines index websites through a process known as crawling, where a bot (in the old days these were called spiders) load a web page and then effectively cache it in a database somewhere. When users enter in search terms on a search engine, the db is scanned for relevant content. A website can be crawled approximately every thirty to sixty days without submitting for indexing.
Each search engine has webmaster tools where individuals can see how the search engine is perceiving the site, review data, errors and request re-indexing.
Key Types of SEO
Onsite SEO
Onsite SEO is the content within a web page
Meta Tags
This information is contained in the head of any web page or web app, and includes a title, description, open graph data, and schema or microdata. This information all has character limits, and must be exceptionally well crafted, optimized for what a user might search.
Example:
In this example it is clear that the available characters of the title are not adequately used. The description also doesn't explain anywhere that this is a forum to produce content, earn crypto, join communities. This is not optimal for organic searches.
Recommendation: Search various websites in google, bing, yandex etc. and make note of their use of meta tags.
Domain Rating
This will be built up over time through site visits and back links.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the propper use of meta tags, microdata, site setup, security, servers, social medias, and on site content. Technical SEO is the way in which a search engine ingests a page while indexing.
As an example, H1 tags, both in HTML and markdown will tell a search engine that this content is a title.
SEO is fluid, it must be kept up to date, experimented with and is ever changing. It is only one minor aspect of marketing and in plain terms, is just how easy or hard it is for someone to find your site or web app when searching for it.
SEO and HIVE
The platform SEO needs to improve to allow the user generated content to flourish as it gets indexed by search engines. This is what happened to STEEMit over time and can happen to HIVE. To some degree it will require patience, and to another degree starts with improving technical SEO.
For some simple reports on where PeakD stands in terms of it's SEO score follow the links:
https://seositecheckup.com/seo-audit/peakd.com
https://www.woorank.com/en/www/peakd.com
Start with fixing these issues, can easily get 95+ on seositecheckup and high 80's on woorank. Bare in mind these are free reports, but they are an excellent starting point.
Summary
I wrote this brief, high level, post about SEO because in reading the thread and it's comments it was clear that there are some serious misconceptions about SEO, its importance, and how to do it.
@stellabelle | @whack.science | Hope it helps. Hit me up, lets chat about how to improve the projects footing in marketing and how to market it further..
Best,
DO WUT
wow, you're the exact person I was looking for when i created the Hive Marketing community, as I don't have a formal SEO background, but i have done lots of analytics of my ten year old youtube channel. That Peakd example is what i thought as well. You might consider reaching out to that team @peakd on their discord channel to give them this insight.
yeah, how it works is that each dapp has their own team but we all work together too. Discord is where the peakd team is. They will need to fix these things for sure.
This is a great post, very helpful, i'll be re-hiving it from several accounts. are you on twitter too? that's my go to DM app.
That is an interesting way of working, no small feat I am sure.
awesome
@traciyork this is a good one to curate
Coolness - thanks for shouting out, @stellabelle!
lol thanks!
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 3/6)
This is not the correct medium for this post, you're better off approaching the devs on discord or directly. There's quite a few of us prof SEO's on here, that have been sounding the alarm from Steem days; unfortunately we often get ignored.
You could write a book about SEO, SEM, SMM and etc. on here and it won't make much of a difference. You'll get upvotes, but likely won't change much. I've tried.
I've been an SEO since 1999, PlanetClick, Inktomi, Yahoo in 2001, Claja 2009. My projects have reached a national scale, newspapers etc and my real-world clients are more than pleased. Nobody cares lol, you're better off building something to support the network with offchain SEO efforts like HiveWhat.com
This post is simply in response to some of the questions and comments I saw on here, regarding SEO. I would think that with such a discussion on going on this, decentralized, platform, it is a perfectly fine medium.
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