You are probably already aware of the simple fact that in the age of hyper-digitalization the success of any project/product/company is greatly correlated with the amount of eyeballs it pulls in, most of which are coming from direct Google searches.
How can we increase the number of eyeballs Hive receives?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
source
While I won't go into the nitty-gritty of SEO because it is insignificant for the point I'm trying to get across, I'll give you a quick TLDR about what Search Engine Optimization is.
In short, it is the process of optimizing a web page and its contents to be more easily discoverable by users searching for keywords relevant to your website or the content published on your website. It is the art of ranking high on a search engine. We are living in a highly competitive world which means that ranking high on a popular browser like Google is going to be a nightmare to achieve.
To increase the SEO of any given website one must put in quite a lot of work, consistently.
One of the most important aspects of SEO that we as a community can collectively work on is publishing awesome content. Absolutely massive amounts of relevant content (no-spam or plagiarism of course) with the right keywords included. This is exactly what all of us have been doing for Steemit all these years. Each one of our posts published on Steemit slightly increased its SEO and we've been doing it for years, mostly unwittingly. Inch by inch, one keystroke at a time, post after post, we've built up Steemit's SEO to rather admirable level.
Don't believe me?
Do me a favor and punch in "Steem" into your browser of choice. Although steem is a fairly generic word, because of Steem's SEO and the SEO of other sites which published content about it, you will see it pop up as the first result. Not only that, but you will find six, seven or even eight in some cases, pages full of Steem related content.
Now try browsing for esteem and see what you get. Yes, a bunch of retarded articles about how to increase self-esteem. Now try finding @good-karma's esteem app on that list without adding any other keywords.
.
.
.
.
Ten pages and still nothing....
Why?
You've guessed it, it's because of poor SEO!
On the other hand, this is where Steem/Steemit kick ass and most of it is our credit.
Hours and hours on end which we've collectively put in creating content for Steenit all went in increasing it's SEO.
For a site used by only a few tens of thousands of people, it turns up at the top of search results and is ranked really well by Alexa. Currently sitting @ 18k on Alexa, while Peakd is way down the list @ 193k.
View more stats on Hypestat
If it wasn't for us and the content we've created, Steemit's SEO would be garbage. Sadly, this is not the case today and this is where Hive is going to struggle going forward.
Try searching for anything Hive-related and see for yourself the point I'm trying to make.
I have yet to find out any long-tail keyword which results in Hive popping up on the first page (apart from including Peakd in the mix but that's irrelevant for now) and this is going to be a major hurdle we need to jump over in order to move forward in any meaningful way. No matter how many people we get in the know about Hive, it's all in vain if they aren't able to find it through browser searches.
So what can we do about it?
This will be an unpopular solution because it results in a lot of content related to a topic that people are already sick and tired of reading about, HIVE. While most yearn for non-Hive-related content, it's exactly this Hive-related content which we need more of, now more than ever. In order to start boosting Hive's SEO, we need to re-write all of the Steem-related content which now have nothing to do with Steem anymore and everything to do with Hive.
That means writing about:
What is Hive?
How to make a Hive account
How to earn on Hive
How to increase your follower count on Hive
How to style/edit a post on Hive
What are upvotes/downvotes on Hive
How much is my Hive upvote worth
How do delegate/undelegate
etc.
etc.
etc.
etc.
You get the point!
Any question one might ask oneself about Hive should and must be answered, time and time again. Not only so that we would increase its SEO but also to guide new users through this new and fairly complicated and hard to comprehend experience.
Apart from further development of the chain itself and coding out new features like SMT's, this is what the content creators among us should be putting an emphasis on. Because, even if we got the sexiest, most user-friendly blockchain out there, it won't mean a thing if the everyday Joe and Jane can't find it through a simple Google search.
For this reason, I would like to invite every one of you to start posting about Hive. How to's and tutorials.
The more the merrier.
NOTE: There are a number of techniques one can implement in order to help rank its article higher in Google searches. This not only increases the SEO of the article itself but also the SEO of the links within the article. Most of them are easy to implement and don't require a lot of effort. I'll drop a couple of useful links down below for you to take a look at which will greatly aid you in pimping your articles to be SEO friendly.
Best Tips For Writing SEO Optimized Article in 2020
SEO Copywriting: How to Write Content For People and Optimize For Google
How To Write SEO Friendly Content (Beginner To Advanced)
If you do decide to step in to help fix HIVE's SEO by pushing out great content, put up a link to your articles right here in the comment section and I'll throw an upvote your way. Heck, I might even distribute some liquid HIVE as an additional incentive if we get enough people participating.
Also, don't forget to reblog the shit out of this article in order to get the word out to as many people as possible.
As always, thank you for your precious time and cya in the next one.
Peace out!
You're absolutely right about this. However I felt i felt many people haven't dived into this yet because of maybe hive seems like a continuation of Steem. I'm reblogging to create awareness.
Regardless of what people feel about it, this is of utmost importance imho.
Thanks! Much appreciated.
I have a WordPress/SEO background, but have never implemented these strategies within the blockchain. I would say it's mostly due to economic reasons. When I spend hours to SEO-ify a wordpress post, it will increase my economic benefits, especially in the long-term.
But if I spend hours to SEO-ify a blockchain post idea, the post payout is still the same for me as a content creator. However, my time spent SEO-ifying posts benefits those with massive amounts of HIVE that get gains from onboarding new users.
I think the main problem with this blockchain and SEO-ification is that there are no lures to bring content creators here. You can't simply create good content and engage on the blockchain to get decent post payouts. You also need to command a large amount of HIVE to garner attention.
So, in short, I have talked with fellow content creators from Wordpress and YouTube, and most choose not to blog on the blockchain because time invested vs potential payout is super low. I am still on here because I like a challenge, and I think one day this blockchain will get its act together.
The biggest thing killing SEO at the moment are the hive tags and communities.
The issue is in people having misaligned incentives and over-inflated expectations when coming here.
One can currently not expect to earn hundreds of dollars per post. Not when the price per token is 13 cents.
The economic incentive of posting on hive is currently broken only because $hive is so undervalued, like most other coins during a bear cycle.
A 10$ post now is close to 500$ at a price of 5$ per token and I do expect $hive to reach that valuation and even more, during this imminent bull trend that has seemingly already started.
All of the people that left because of the price decline will turn up once again as the price recovers, mark my words.
I took care of the dot com issue. Check it out...
https://HivePeople.com
While the Hive blockchain is the most important aspect for the community, it’s actually the domain that’s most important for SEO.
We have so many different front ends (domains) which while they’re displaying original content on a blockchain, Google is viewing as duplicate content.
As a result, we need to focus on a single domain, especially for any internal and external linking strategy.
Is it widely accepted that all internal links for Hive related content should be focused on the hive.blog domain?
Where does this leave community content, for example all finance related posts on LeoFinance?
IMHO, we should focus on promoting PeakD instead of Hive.blog because it seems that front-end development of hive.blog is not a priority. I fear that it will stay underdeveloped just like steemit.com has.
It should be separately promoted by its community members on other platforms such as Twitter, Medium, FB and other centralized platforms.
I have noticed incremental small updates to the hive.blog interface since launch, though. While I prefer peakd, I am more optimistic about Hive's own site improving than I was about Steemit.
Although I too am more optimistic about that, that's just not going to cut it. Imagine how many hours of work it would take in order for it to be on par with PeakD.
Promoting community front ends on social is fair enough, but from an SEO viewpoint, isn't it just duplicate content? Also we can see the struggle for consensus on which front end to focus our SEO efforts on just in this one reply thread. Hive.blog vs peakd.com.
When PeakD were asking people to vote on their new URL, they were talking about using something without the Hive word because they want to be a front end for multiple blockchains going forward. While theirs is clearly better (I'm using it right now), I think we should be focusing on an original, main hive URL for community SEO efforts.
It's just such a shit domain... I wish more thought went into SEO and the domain when the name change was thought of.
Tbh I have no clue, I'm no SEO expert, just aware of some basic concepts.
Good point about PeakD. Maybe we should focus on Hive.blog then. But then again, I would only be willing to promote it if there were clear intentions to develop its front end to the level of PeakD and beyond.
I couldn't agree with you more on this. Although this entire fork was made in such a rush, this should have been considered more.
I made a point about this when I wrote an explainer about the basics of Hive. I talked about upvoting, hive power and all that shit. It is not particularly relevant in the general scheme of things because everyone knows it but if more people write about Hive, we'd have been more popular.
We're only a few weeks old anyways, I think if we keep at it, we'll get the SEO coverage up when we're well and truly out if Steem's shadow.
Link if it's not too old to upvote :D
I get your point that we will naturally get our SEO up there, on par with Steemit and Steem but why not speed up this process ten-fold by putting in extra effort aimed towards achieving it faster and with greater rate of success?
Yup I totally get your point. We might actually need to write about Hive on places like Publish0x and medium to speed it up.
Here's the post.
https://hive.blog/hive-148441/@belemo/getting-started-on-hive-understanding-the-basics
Great idea!
Seems that I already voted your post :D
haha seems so. I'll be making those kind of posts regularly. People need to learn about hive from hive.
Good point, but to be honest: I dont want to see too many articles talking about the same thing related to HIVE itself. I think when none-HOVE people see that most content is about HIVE, they'll not even bother to subscribe to HIVE. That said, I think we need another name than HIVE. HIVE is a too generic name, and conflicts even with some of the exchanges listing HIVE Technologies as another asset. Bad start of our new community. Too little marketing experience with the witnesses who started this new home for us. And too stubborn to understand branding is key. And for any digital service, branding must include some very unique name, which can be more easily picked up by search engines. Although its a marketing nightmare, I opt for rebranding HIVE within a few months, or if we all dare, right now!
I know, that's how most people feel about hive related content but it's exactly what we need now as exemplified in the post.
We don't need to change our name, as seen in how a generic word like steam can be pushed up to the top of search results.
Also, about the issue with HIVE tech. that's non-existent and based on thin air cuz they don't and can't get a trademark on such a generic word as hive.
Hive tech just wanted to get some free PR and clout.
Miserable attempt to do so imho.
Well, Steem is not. Steam is but not Steem and definately Steemit, its not in the English dictionary as far as I know.
I disagree, we should've had a name with the .com available. Nice to have hive.blog but seriously, any brand that wants to establish itself gets the .com domain and uses that. In case we wouldn't want to use this is our primary extension, then we should've had the .com forwarded to the .blog and/or .io Again techies at work. HIVE.io ; Sounds so super cool to them, but the .io extension is used by techies, not by the average blogger, the mass, the not so techie people.
I'll be writing some more HIVE post :)
https://www.yourdictionary.com/steem
The masses don't care if it's .com .blog .org .io or .toiletpaper
What's important is that the site ranks high when searching for the keyword. If that's not the case .com won't bring in more users to the site.
Thanks! Be sure to let me know when you publish them :D
Dont agree. You know what the mass does when you tell them to browse to some website? They try the .[country] of their own country and they try the .com. A little less - nothing really - to do with SEO, but all to do with discoverability.
Hahahaha will do. I'll continue promoting my HIVE posts at Twitter, and the HIVE ones will be there as well :)
Idk, to be honest. Any time I try to search for something online I don't even bother punching in the .com .org .us or .whatever
Rather, I just search for the brand itself.
But who's to say that this is how others search too.
Nevertheless, I don't see a major issue neither in the .io or the name itself.
We only need to get it up there on the first page and we are good!
Hahaha, Can't agree more. It'll take a lot of effort and some time to get it there though :)
View and share on twitter too
SEO takes time... but you are right, right keywords and improvements, brand awereness is important.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not dissing esteem but rather pointing out the clear lack of intentional effort by the community to increase its SEO.
Good Post! Here is one of my recent extensive Posts about Hive social Media:
The advantages and disadvantages of Hive - Good reasons why you should use Hive
You inspired me to write even more about Hive. I think i will also write a post about SEO now.
Thanks! Looks like I already upvoted it automatically due to a curation trail I'm following.
Will have an eye out for your future posts about Hive.
Cheers!
Thank you very much.^^