Steemit has pretty strong SEO
I was talking earlier today to one of my favorite artists here on Steem; @hiddenblade about some random art supplies. I had recently finished an ink drawing and we were talking coloring methods, supplies and styles etc while I was listening to her mention stuff I was googling them at the same time. As she was talking about acrylic paint and remembered she painted with that on leather bags at some point in the past I googled "acrylic paint on leather" for fun and was surprised to see this pop up in the top section on google.
I remembered having scrolled through her blog in the past and seen those paintings so I quickly clicked on it and this showed next:
Linking to this post: https://steemit.com/art/@hiddenblade/painting-flowers-on-faux-leather-bags
Pretty amazing really, especially considering that post has barely any rewards (if only we had implemented the EIP way earlier, eh?) but it goes to show that decently written posts will do well on google's SEO even without the rewards. At least we know now that anyone googling the same keywords as I did earlier will stumble onto Steemit and maybe wonder what it is and sign up and receive an account before they quit being an artist. :p
A buddy of mine who knows these things way better than me mentioned that to do decently at SEO this is pretty much a requirement nowadays, to quote @fknmayhem:
Decent english
700 words minimum
Linking back to older content
Not too many links
Cut down on the shit referral links and banners.
Maybe these are some future requirements we should take into account with our #posh initiative.
There's been a lot of posts in the past that have done well with generating traffic to Steemit. Steemit still generates around 5mil monthly impressions even at these markets when activity is low. I really wish we would get the viewcounter back sometime soon as that could be a decent indicator for curation/rewarding authors, hopefully it'll be a bit more robust this time around though than just being able to f5 spam more views to yourself. As we know Steemians love to game systems!
Steemit has been doing pretty well on google trends lately too! It looks like it started to before the Tron rumors and price movements, maybe @gtg is right and it's due to #posh? ;)
I am hopeful that with communities and being able to customize them more and more in the future, possibly even more than what you can do with your subreddits we will get to some pretty cool sites with loads of gamification and nailing down on what content is actually worth the rewards aside from the author, the content or ways they may be generating rewards right now. Add to that SMT's and them having their own value and I think through trial and error we will start ending up with some really, really fun communities and ecosystems. Remember to claim your free Steem accounts cause who knows the demand they may start having in the near future. =)
Until then make sure not to game the system in bad ways though, remember that the blockchain never forgets. ;)
We have some cool announcements with OCD and most of our activities coming up soon but let's wait until these holidays are a bit behind us and enjoy them in the meantime. :)
This is how I find all my previous work. A couple of keywords from the title and 'mattclarke' and it's almost always on the first page of results.
I've learned a lot of SEO wizardry over the last few years while tinkering with learning website design. If we were to take Steem a little more seriously, content creators would be making Steem posts targeting very specific low competition google "keyword phrases". I am working on a blog inspired by the Khmerican Family Abroad series I do here on Steem.
I am aware of Steempress, and the norm is to post on your personal blog and then Steempress it to bring it over here. However, I've learned during website design that content is 10%, markdown is 10% and SEO is 80%. It is absolutely boring and tedious to tweek a post for SEO optimization.
An example is my "Kofta-Inspired Veggie Burgers" post I made here on Steem. That post is slowly being transformed into a post for my website, which is a far from finished hot mess right now, and therefore not sharing the domain just yet.
But my point is, I had to totally deconstruct that post. After some google keyword research and planning, I settled on the keywords "kofta burger recipe" as the keywords which I feel have a monthly search rate high enough to be worth the post, and a low amount of search results for that specific keyword set. The whole post had to be transformed into a "kofta burger recipe" post. Those words have to be repeated everywhere possible. Even before I uploaded the images to my library, I retitled them from random numbers like "1247.jpeg" to "kofta-burger-recipe-featured-image.jpeg", because google likes seeing the keywords even in the image names. Repeating the keywords in the "h3" and "h4" header tags goes a long way too.
Some easy basic beginner stuff we could all start to do on Steem is to plan our title carefully, and reuse words from within the title in our h3 and h4 headers. Using h1 headers outside of the main title for the post is not recommended. So basically h2, h5 and h6 headers can be used without much thought or SEO concerns. Also it would be wise to rename our images including the same keywords before uploading to Steem.
This would be a small shift in the right direction. Too many times I google search a tribe or token's logo or banner, and I find something I created before the very logo the tribe uploaded. This comes down to very basic things like naming your images. I googled "ocd steem banner" and found something I created for a footer months ago listed on page 1 of the search results in google images. These are just examples.
I hate to admit I love Steem because of the freedom of not worrying too much about SEO when posting. I don't even do keyword planning before I post on Steem, I just let the consciousness stream flow. If I like what I created when it's done, I do some keyword research and see if it can be turned into a post for my future website that will be very competitive for a specific keyword set I can alter it to. Also, this won't create any interference between Steem and my future similar website post, as the vocabulary and syntax are too different for google to penalize me.
I do go to the trouble to name all my images something similar to my title for basic SEO optimization, but I do zero thinking of keywords when steem blogging. I have been drumming up some bounty ideas for possible low competition highly searched keyword sets that we incentivize Steemians to blog about. Some of the trouble on Steem is that there is no way to test your post's SEO characteristics in real-time in the editor. I have a the Divi Builder, YOAST SEO plugins and various other things that allow me to change things in real time when I am creating a website post. However, I've gotten so used to the requirements, I could probably make the perfect Steem post for a keyword set without ever needing to analyze it first.
For me, I simply don't have the time to the days doing SEO optimization for my Steem posts. Post payouts are done after 7 days, and there SEO optimization is a long-term game. There's simply no incentive for Steemians to do SEO optimization. It's extra work for no reward, and it won't improve any results within Steem, as it's all about the tags here.
I do see this as a barrier preventing Steem from becoming mainstream, because we do need SEO optimization to grow this platform organically.
Steemit SEO has always been great, especially when I was in charge of sharing the content. I remember people were so happy that their content was on page 1 of Google. The 700 word number is a rumor in SEO in my opinion. Proper use of H1, H2, tags and Meta Data on the images is the most important.
Yeah, agreed re-700 words. 450-550 is often enough to rank. Even more so if newsy content and not targeted at longterm ranking. The recency boost is much less critical but after some weeks you may be pages down the SERPs.
At the same time many outlets have switched to 900, and even 1,100-1,200 words already.
Truth is the Big G loves some longer content and has gradually been focusing more on ever longer articles. Pretty much since Panda. A decade ago 250 words were enough, those days are long gone.
Longer content also makes it easier to add and spread out (back)links, even if there aren't many traffic shaping options on a mass submissions platform like this. But whoever wants to rank with content will do well to consider Steemit as their hosted content platform of choice.
Interesting, didn't know that! I should start using headers more! Thanks for the input!
I’d love to have you back working for Steem. Thanks for pointing me to Appics. I’m having fun and powering up in a big way there too.
It's surprising, especially as I don't imagine people tag their images! Maybe it's all in titles and headings people use?
Good news and a reason for optimism!
It would be nice to see more focus on SEO. I’ve always felt the platform lacks showing the user some kind of metrics about the impact they are having as a way to motivate more too just spend a couple extra minutes.
Once in a while I’ll have a weekend where I’m in the mood to edit some older posts of mine. I might drop in a couple of links to similar content I have, change a couple of words, put more effort into image meta.
For me though it’s easy. I’ve created my own index on my gaming content so I can just go through it and see what I have. I only update it every month or two otherwise I’d be editing older content all the time.
That's so kewl. You didn't even include my username in the search bar. :O
”Maybe these are some future requirements we should take into account with our #posh initiative.”
Linking SEO to rewards is something I have talked about before. Incorporating that with a curation project like #posh is a great idea.
Posted using Partiko iOS
I noticed this too.
I mainly use Google to find my older posts, I just have to put my username and something like the title I used and viola: first result!
Maybe, part of the reason is that there are many tribes on Steem that give backlinks to each other. What do you think?
In addition to what fknmayhem pointed out, tags are also very important for seo. I always try to optimize my post no matter the number of words. I've tried to Google stuff in the past and steemit posts ranks quite high in search, no doubt. Every content creator should learn about seo, thanks to @hungryhustle, I have just enough knowledge to get me going.
Posted using Partiko Android