HN Explorer

Ask News.YC: How much time and effort do you spend on SEO techniques to gain traffic?

2 points by jkush ↗ HN
...and if you've had successes in the past what did you do? Did you hire an SEO firm or do it yourselves?

I've got a startup that's facing a fair amount of keyword competition. Ranking in search engines is going to take some time. Purchasing advertisements is possible, but our budget is limited. Any advice?

8 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 39.5 ms ] thread
mig
What does your startup do?
jkush
Our startup is in the merchant account services industry.
icky
Make something so good that it spreads by word of mouth.
adrianwaj
Yeah, I don't think Facebook depends on SEO.

I guess it depends on the context of the site though. Good SEO generally always important (can be a kickstarter). Wordpress blogs are great 'out of the box' for SEO - maybe a company blog with Wordpress could be a good start.

jkush
We do have a blog and are posting nearly daily. I see our blog as being the absolute minimum. It's something we have to do, but it's not going to be enough. Good suggestion, though. It's a good start.
adrianwaj
I hear that blogs on wordpress.com have great SEO from the get-go and can be custom domained too.
pchristensen
Since SEO and organic search favors older links, I started the blog for my startup before I even started coding! I'm still very early on so I can't report any results, but if you write blog entries that are more useful than anything else, people will find them. But it takes time and LOTS of writing (see Paul Graham, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Reg Braithwaite, etc). Little mediocre posts get quickly lost and forgotten because they're not worth pointing out (see Steve Yegge's latest post).

SEO prominence comes not from what words you put in your posts but from content good enough that other people link to you. Become prominent! (there, that's enough armchair quarterbacking)

mrtron
Yes, most of true SEO (read: not blackhat tricks that will get you burned in a few months) are just standard practice.

Like starting a blog thats heavily linked to about your topic of expertise.