You have 1,211 backlinks.
You have no meta descriptions on any of your pages. The links to your content pages (e.g., http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday) aren't inside a H1/H2 tag on your index pages. You are letting Google crawl/index your tag pages (pointless/bad). Your robots.txt isn't pointing to a sitemap. Are you using Google webmaster tools?
Get rid of the /posts/N-title and just roll with /title, if possible.
Set up a RSS feed and add OpenSearch.
You have a lot of on-site SEO work to do. :)
How much of a difference do you think those changes will make? I'm willing to do them as an experiment, except for the /title because that has caused me a lot of problems in past experiences.
Putting all your links to your content pages inside H2 tags tells search engines that they're more important that other links on the page.
The /title one is big. Google likes short URLs without a lot of extra cruft. You're using rails from what I can see, so the change is trivial. :) Add a route, throw an index on your slug field, and have requests to the old URLs do a 301 redirect to the short version.
Page load time is also a SEO factor now. http://yakkstr.com/tags/7-Politics takes 4.25s to load according to your X-Runtime header. That's really bad. You're not paginating, and you're only loading a few entries, so I think you're missing an index. :) Here's some tips: http://madhatted.com/2009/8/12/faster-sites-done-faster
Check this out: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yakkstr.com Lots of empty/valueless results. Maybe you can noindex blogs that have no posts in them so they don't pollute the search results?
Your slug generator is generating bad slugs: http://yakkstr.com/posts/1793-Climate-Change--- You should look at using String#to_url from https://github.com/rubypanther/stringex instead of whatever you're using currently.
Google text ads may convert better than the image-based ads since they're usually more relevant to the topic at hand. Try experimenting with them.
This is an experiment I'm trying to do ;) My hypothesis is that these things won't make a significant difference.
But let's assume that it were a business, and I'll explain how my question is not only good, but the most important question a you should ask. We have finite resources and time, and we have to decide what to use those resources and time for. How do we do that? I could implement all of these changes in a 2 days let's say, or I could use that same time and money to add some feature my users have been asking for. Which should I do?
To answer that we have to estimate in some way the impact of each. Saying it "might make the site more attractive", "could help google", etc isn't a good answer.
"If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them."
No it wouldn't, and what I'm offering here is to do the changes and measure the change.
Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Their gut? Or did they do these things in the past, and measure an improvement, even when they didn't isolate all the variables as you are demanding of me! Why not demand the same from the person making the suggestion?
Fair question. I would say these things are current, accepted "best practices". I'd liken it to suggesting you use a version control system instead of emailing code back and forth. Your existing system might work, but many other people who were also emailing code back and forth are seeing gains using this new-fangled VCS thing, so it's almost definitely worth doing.
You might try searching for "SEO before and after" or "SEO case study" to see how on-site changes have worked (or haven't worked!) for other sites. At any rate, many of the current "best practices" are trivial, under the hood changes so it doesn't really cost anything to put them into place. Most of them simply help search engines understand how your content is structured and benefit both you and your users.
We ranked really well really fast, whatever sandbox people think google may or may not have didn't seem to affect us. Like I said, within a few months, on a brand new domain, without an SEO expert optimizing things like H1 tags, we ranked really really well for competitive keywords.
That's the basis of my hypothesis, without good backlinks, it doesn't matter a whole lot, and good backlinks matter a lot more than tags on a page, whether you have /posts/title, etc.
But I do really appreciate the time you took to look at my site and offer suggestions. You did catch a missing index :) I didn't notice because no human goes to tag pages, and it didn't show up in 'new relic' because my other pages are fast and get hit a lot more.
btw, i'm curious if you see my site on this search, http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
I rank decently for long tail things like that, if I did your suggestions would that page go up? I see it in 7th position.
Yup, I do see your site on the first SERP for that query. Here's a shot of the SEO breakdown for that SERP: http://i.imgur.com/URUr2.png Not bad positioning considering there's zero backlinks to that page on your site. If you had 1-10, you'd probably rank higher.
You probably wouldn't see any rise by just doing tweaks, but they're probably still worth doing overall. I would focus on encouraging your users to spread your content. Give them a "share this link with friends/embed this link on your web page" widget. Digg is dead/useless, get rid of that icon. Get a Tumblr and Stumbleupon share icon on there instead. I'd probably space them a bit more away from that big, ugly, unrelated image ad, too. :)
> It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science.
The answer is that there is no definite answer. :)
Like I said, I'm happy to do this as an experiment and see what impact it has if you're interested. email me at yakkstr at yakkstr.com
http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3...
Basically, SEO comes down to having awesome content, identifying it properly on your site, and getting other people to link to it.
What is proposed in the OP's link is NOT impossible as the various detractors in this thread would have you believe, but it IS a lot of work. The tech stuff is easy, consistently building out your backlinks is the hardest part. If you're lucky, they'll start to grow on their own and you have 100% passive income.
But the OP made it sound easy. It's not easy.
I like seobook and seomoz, and I'll check out the other sites you mentioned. Thanks!
The tech stuff is easy for us. If us programmers can figure out the non-tech stuff, we can be rich!
Is pure gold (there's tons more on SEOmoz).
I am not condoning such methods.
Also, careful clicking any links in those forums. Lots of disgusting, immature people over there.