Help Hive - Sprinkle A Little SEO On Your Posts
SEO Tips for Hive Content Creators
A selection of SEO tips for formatting your content to try to rank Hive content higher on Google search results.
Source
Although I glad we escaped to pastures new in March, one thing next door has over us at present is a lot more content. More content, however you choose to rate it, will mean more links for the likes of Google to find and index, and more chance folks visiting from the outside world.
In the week commencing 5th May 2018, there were 3837 posts created across the road which contained 'Heading 1' (h1) html. I'll move onto Headings shortly but as a comparison, (moving the date forward two years) on Hive there were just 541 posts created with the same html.
It is worth noting the the total number of top level posts for the week commencing 5th May 2018 were 261,487 and 27,149 for the week commencing 5th May 2020, and so the percentages are better than they were two years ago at 1.5% and 2% respectfully.
However, that % is still pretty low in my opinion and I think we can and should do better. If 20% of next weeks posts had a 'Heading 1' included, this would be a better effort than that week in May 2020 where over a quarter of a million posts hit the blockchain.
SEO Introduction
I first have to point out that I'm not an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) expert, I've just been digging around the source code of Hive blockchain content and looking on Google for tips from the people who seem to know what they are talking about. If you know your stuff and can improve on the below, please let me know.
The plan is to detail some of the basic formatting concepts (there is much more SEO that can be done in the text), and then provide a template that you can use.
As somewhat of an aside, I'll be using hive.blog in the examples as this site currently seems to be preferred by Google over peakd. If you check the source of a post hosted by peakd, there is not much to see - check the same post hosted by hive.blog and you will be able to view your content within.
I'm not 100% sure, but I have a feeling that due to this page rendering, it's unlikely that there will be many links on Google to peakd content. Searching peakd brings back the site homepage, and then links to hive.blog, stateofthedapps, and s...com, in that order.
And to test the above, I searched for 'How often do you backup your passwords', part of the title of yesterday's post which was authored on peakd, and it is the 2nd result on Google at present, with the URL beginning with hive.blog.
Basic SEO Formatting
I'll be looking at the following html/tags used for formatting web content:
- Titles
- Headings
- Images - location/name/alt tags
- Links
- Tags
Title
Fortunately, it is impossible not to include a title when posting to Hive. However, the title also forms the URL and according to Neil Patel, URLs should be between 2 - 4 words. Personally I think this is a bit short, my title yesterday was much longer, and I know that Hive folk like to play with longer titles. Just something to consider - a shorter URL, clearly stating the likely content, could well be better for the indexers.
Edit: As per a comment below, a tip could be to use a short title to begin with (which will form the URL), and then edit the post to expand it if you want it to be longer for readability.
Headings (1, 2, etc)
I am very guilty of rarely using 'Heading 1' html at the start, or anywhere else in a post - it just looks a clunky, especially right under the post title - which is apparently where it should be.
According to Neil, again, 'H1s have always been a major ranking factor.', and from the same link, '80% of the first-page search results in Google use an h1'.
With the hive.blog (and other editors), it is possible to use Markdown which means you can use a 'hash' for heading 1 html, and two hashes next to each other for a heading 2 tag. In the example below, I'll be sticking with html.
Also in the link above, it is suggested that there should only be one 'h1' tag (or two if you include the closing tag) in a document. 'h2', h3', etc, can be used multiples times, but all should try to use keywords relating to the piece.
Images
The image itself may well be important for attracting and keeping attention once the page is loaded, but there are other features which will help the page ranking - location, size, image name, and the 'alt' - alternative, text of the image.
An image at the top of the page could influence the search results negatively and the URL of the image will show up as the contents description - not good for the eyes or the indexers.
Large images will slow page load time, another factor in search engine rankings. png files are usually small, gifs can be quite large.
The image name is another opportunity to boost keywords on the page. If the image is sourced from elsewhere, you wont get to choose the name, but if it is your own work, then why not give it an appropriate name relating to the content as a whole.
The alternative to the image text (alt text) is another place where keywords can be added. I've included the html to do this in the example below.
Links
As mentioned at the start of the post, Hive has far fewer inbound, outbound, and internal (to same domain) links than the space we once occupied.
Outbound links are not such a big deal, and inbound links we can help by for example, Tweeting each post (using #posh if you wish), but internal links are also important. If there are many links to the same place, this will boost that page in search rankings. I've included and example which I think we should link to often in our posts, but I think any internal links to yours or others previous content would be useful.
As far as uploading images, I would use hive.blog at present as peakd (or other locations) are less known to the search engines. If you prefer peakd in the main, you could upload the images anywhere on hive.blog and copy the URL for your peakd post.
Tags
Again, I've not been great with tags overall in the past, and usually try to stick a few funny (debatable) ones in. I think that is OK as we do have multiple tags available, but the majority should probably be more keywords relating to the content. Like the title, we have a box in the editor for these and so there will at least be one for the crawler to look at.
So that's my SEO basics guide, and I hope it is of use - I don't think it can't hurt to try to format our posts to try to boost the search engine rankings. But before you get too stressed out about page formatting, one final word from Neil that I found in the comments section of his blog:
Right, cheers!
Template
The template is pretty basic, but who knows, it could help raise your content in search results. The final link will boost https://signup.hive.io/ and gives new people a place to go when they have found Hive via your content 😃
Cheers
Asher
<h1>Heading 1</h1>
<p>Short description of post contents</p>
<center>
<img src="Insert main image here starting with https://" alt="Image alt text">
</center>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
<p>More body text</p>
<center>
<img src="Insert image here starting with https://" alt="Image alt text">
</center>
etc......
---------------------
<center>
<p>
<img src="https://images.hive.blog/DQmaYZ4QZ9QtQ1SvkqX59EKC7AHbTc7MhjwDyNGD4jb6iGQ/create_hive_blockchain_account.png" alt="create hive blockchain account"></p>
<p>Not got an account yet? <a href="https://signup.hive.io/">Sign up to Hive!</a></p>
</center>
References
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/10-most-important-seo-tips-you-need-to-know/
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/h1-tag/
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/2020-seo-trends/338697/
- https://hive.blog/hive/@runicar/attention-hive-s-seo-is-shit-here-is-what-you-can-do-about-it-prizes-included-d
- https://signup.hive.io/
Not got an account yet? Sign up to Hive!
I am guessing it is good practice to write all text between h1 tags as that must optimize the shit out of the post
Thanks for this! I am hoping that I will remember to be a little more SEO friendly in the future :)
haha :)
I think a bit more punchy is the way, but I'm just providing the tags and not the text - that's for you guys to test out :D
I'd really like to see some hive posts up at the top of google.
And whoever can knock this one off with a search for 'earn cryptocurrency' will win a prize, once I've saved up :)
Challenge accepted 😈
Go for it :)
https://hive.blog/contest/@abh12345/contest-30-000-hive-power-delegations-for-one-month
https://peakd.com/contest/@abh12345/contest-30-000-hive-power-delegations-for-one-month
25k for the top ranking post :D
I think that's the contest right there. Who can get their post the highest on the earn crypto search. If nothing else adding 50 posts on the subject from the same site should do something for the ranking, I'm guessing.
I've been told in the comments by someone more knowledgeable than I, that it would be impossible to knock that blog off the 'earn cryptocurrency' search, however:
This is my thinking also - lets cover places 5-55 then :D
Well, I went for it with a contest :)
Would love to see you have a go!
I didn't know Hive was SEO friendly, or at least not as much as Publish0x!
It's a html doc, so there is stuff we can do. There could be other elements we can't manage, but the above is a start :)
Yup I agree!
If some one wants to have a shorter more relevant post link than
https://beta.peakd.com/hive-174578/@abh12345/help-hive-sprinkle-a-little-seo-on-your-posts, peakd allows you to make your own url link. you can change it here:Preview Link preview: https://beta.peakd.com/general/@bashadow/...click the link and then erase the three dots and type what you would want, likeHive-SEO-AdviceI did not know about the
<h1>being important, so I will have to start using it, I mostly start with<h2>I will have to start adding a sign up link or two, even though I doubt my post ever make any search engine results.
That's worth testing actually. I wonder if that then becomes the permlink, probably does.
I posted via peakd, but the post was prepared on hive.blog for the image locations.
peakd also has a Topic box, which i think goes into the meta description.
still #posh https://twitter.com/AIMStockWatcher/status/1260317280761778177
You mean to say outside people maybe interested in our stuff someday? That’s a novel concept! Wink, wink!! ;)
I'm going to have to whip out the positivity bat soon!
And yes, if we can get some work on those search results!
It's simple if you write something good about a topic people will find it share it read it. So write good and everything follows. But use hive.blog in your links instead of peakd peakd gives 404 sometimes Google crawler doesn't like that and will exclude your post.
I don't know what you're worrying about. OCD comes out top, after just one ad, if you search directly for the community name:
I think everything you say is basically sound, but it's probably worth mentioning that before you worry about SEO you need
And then formulate yer content and headings around those.
Who's going to search for hive-anything?! :D
That's cool though, for starters.
Fancy a shot at the goal set in the reply to Taraz? :)
None of us has got a chance, that's an entire website devoted to free airdrops with 100s of posts and pages all around the same theme.
It would be interesting to see if a collective community based effort could topple it - I doubt it, one web site run by one person is probably going to be much better co-ordinated with interlinks.
They rank above Coinbase, that's quite something!
It is impressive work, but I don't think they are paying and so surely they can be toppled!
That's the target, I'll stick 1000 HIVE in the pot for anyone who can get a post above with the same search. Actually, might have a whip round and do a contest :D
Yeah 😊 well I just read about CEO and I was gonna use it for my freelance and my freelance colleagues to help them finding projects trough hive. I'm without a project now due to corona. So I will spam more CEO based topics with my business account.
Anywhere on the top page would be awesome :D
https://hive.blog/contest/@abh12345/contest-30-000-hive-power-delegations-for-one-month
@abh12345 What's your challenge for 1000 HIVE?
That domain score of 66 means they have Authority, you cant touch this.
Also it takes nearly a year for google to put your content piece into its final SERP resting place! You dont really understand SEO, I cant believe you're going to earn $100 on your post 🤣
@revisesociology is correct in what he is saying fyi..
Is that a free site you used to get that SEO data? That's really interesting!
I don't know too much about SEO, it's something I'm trying to remedy.... my main blog (my name here) depends on it, and I've got serious competition from another very well organised and much larger company now, so it's really something I need to think about, I need to re-focus my niche.
There's a real case of double irony on the reward amount...
Reward isn't necessarily always about the content, it's about how known you are in Hive circles. Ironically Asher would probably not appreciate the irony of that!
At least that's the way it is for now, things might change at any time.
Yup those tools I suggested here are free 👍 Then add your google search console and google keyword planner in there and you've got a toolbox.
First post I've ever had at the top of Trending and it's apparently way off the mark, brilliant :D
Stop it, I can't handle the irony.
You can always quickly do this and change it!
https://peakd.com/seo/@felander/free-seo-course-from-top-website-due-to-corona
haha :D
It's OK, I caveated the post with I'm no expert and spent a few hours proving the point. Luckily, the comments have helped make it not a total waste of time!
The circle of Hive, before Steemit, is more influential than any improvement in SEO performance.
Yup, no expert here, but trying to raise awareness of some basics that can help.
Sorry about that, I did vote it but that's only 1/150th of the value.
Thanks for the template.
Posts will be upgraded for the good of the community!
Awesome, cheers!
So to be clear, using markdown code works as well as HTML tags? I mostly compose using full markdown with if it helps to switch, I wouldn't mind.
Yes, the markdown is converted to 'proper' html.
If you right-click your post on hive.blog and do view source, you'll see the 'hashes' as h1, h2 tags etc.
I usually use markdown but though for the template i'd try to be proper.
Great tips. I almost never use H1. I wonder can an image come first?
On PeakD there is now a place near the bottom for short description. This is very important. Think of it as your Tweet.
Another tip is to try and use all the keywords from your tags title and main headings in the first paragraph. Also try to use these words frequently throughout.
With photos the alt tag should also be a keyword or at least used in the post a couple times.
Also, I think div lines may be good, but I don't full understand why or how.
Cheers, and thanks for the additions. I didn't put any focus on keywords, what I read time and time again was to try to use them wherever you can, but don't go crazy - seems like more of an experiment and a bit of luck.
The image first is going to show in the description, but perhaps the peakd description could replace that? Will need to test.
Also will need to look at divs, didn't see much on those.
I just looked into it a little more. If you are using a front end to post like PeakD, DIV is largely irrelevant for SEO. However, people who put lots of random links and banners at the bottom of their pages, or randomly calling too many @ people and # words out may be negatively impacting SEO. Google algorithms are clever and tend to ignore stuff that would annoy a human reader or slow down any webbrowser.
I agree with most of this, but your Link example of "Sign up free here!" in your template is hitting all the wrong ways to create a link for SEO purposes.
For links we should avoid generic things like 'Click here' or 'Article', etc, and instead provide a short description of what we're linking to.
Google itself recommends this in it's Use links wisely section of it's SEO guide. (Which is a tiny bit lower than where this link will take you).
A more SEO effective link would be 'Get a Hive Account'.
Thank you for this valuable feedback, I will make the change :)
Absolutely! It was a great post, thank you for writing it up!
Would love to see you have a go at this :)
https://hive.blog/contest/@abh12345/contest-30-000-hive-power-delegations-for-one-month
Thanks for the link! My cousin tossed this my way yesterday as well. I have been kicking around the idea of doing a post about it, just trying to figure out what I want to say! haha.
Absolutely correct!
SEO is the reason for some of my posts back on Steem to be at the top of the search results. What I like the most is the I haven't focused on SEO at all. It just happens naturally and often yield great results. Will be fun to see how that will work with Hive.
Been blogging here for quite some time, and I have no idea about this stuff, I think it is time to get serious about this.. Good post.
started reading, but just so i don't forget. think the year is wrong :D
lol thanks :D
I learned so much from this! Great job sharing this with the community.
I have a question, how do I show the code in one of my blogs like this:
Note: You can always see the original publication code in hiveblocks.
https://hiveblocks.com/hive-174578/@abh12345/help-hive-sprinkle-a-little-seo-on-your-posts
Hive a nice day!
You provided me with the answer and then some. Thanks a lot 🤝
You are welcome.
Thanks for this, I was sleeping :D
A nice tip to alter the URL to hiveblocks to see the code!
How much of html can you use in posts? is there like a cheatsheet of what tags are accepted?
I think most 'formatting' html will be accepted. Things go a bit weird when you try to include 'meta' stuff.
really a usefull information for seo, by the way i never tried for any seo for my posts or blog :)
Well I hope you give it a go soon :)
Greetings @abh12345, definitely appreciate you bringing up the topic of SEO. I know you have good intentions with this post so please dont mind if I jump in and fix you up a little 😅 All feedback I'm going to give is in regards to SERP, specifically google SERP [Search Engine Ranking Page].
Titles
Suggesting a length of 2-4 words is only viable for a particular area of SEO. That would be if you have a site with a high Domain Authority, as in an established subject expert. In this case you can compete in what's referred to as a broad keyword targeting. For everyone else, including all the "bloggers" here, since you don't have DA your best bet is to target what's known as long tail keywords with your title.
This requires doing keyword research and identifying low hanging fruit, understanding what your competitors are doing, and besting their efforts. To do this would encompass both the title and also a number of other elements such as h1, h2, going after snippets, meta descriptions, internal linking structures, links in and out, and then most importantly HELPFUL CONTENT that's in the area of 1200+ words. More on all that below..
To be honest if you even understand all this, there's still another level deeper on titles that you'll need to go. That would be understanding how to target niche topical subjects using long tail keywords. That is NOT doing broad term long tail but rather more niche topical long tail. Because going back to DA, if you use long tail you cant target broad topics with it because your competitors with more DA will far outrank you. So we start with niche long tail topics, where a piece of quality content stands a chance to out perform your competition.
SEO is a WAR! SERP is a WAR. You are always fighting to best your competition. look at google rankings and see the subjects you want to talk about, and see your competition in the results, analyse them, understand their strengths and weaknesses, then seek and destroy!
SEO is extremely competitive and requires real subject expertise.
Headings
Your headings tips were ok. H1 is for title only, H2 is for secondary titles, I wouldn't bother with h3 unless you're actually serious about all this.
h2's are SEO opportunities, this is where you would attack additional keywords and search terms that you are trying to rank for. The best tip I can probably give here off the top of my head would be to make sure the H2 titles are relevant to the H1 title topic. Dont have an H1 "The Ultimate guide to SEO blogging" and then there's h2's that are completely unrelated, like H2 "Today in splinterlands".. If you really want to put in the work to do this properly use a tool like Also Asked.
Go to the tool and type in your search term that you are targeting to rank for. The tool will spit back an organized list and hierarchical structure of other similar topics that those users are also looking for. In SEO you need to be helpful, that is key, needs to be value add. Google is looking for this, and if you can deliver on your subject plus be helpful for similar topics that are also relevant and useful for that searcher than you're scoring points.
As you are doing article research and again analyzing your competition and forming your content piece I suggest you start with your H1, and 4-5 H2's from a tool like Also Asked or even just using Neil Patels Ubbersuggest and seeing who is currently ranking for your terms, going to their content, seeing what they are doing for H1 and H2's then one upping them at it. I'll leave that there, I don't want too give away to many secrets of the trade. 😜
Images
Some actual tips here would be 1) use image descriptions, this info helps google to rank you against your competition, Again incorporate your keyword or key phrase strategy into the words you use in your description.
A second tip 2) would be to use caching and image compression to speed up load times on image heavy content. But cant do those thing on hive.blog or peakd.
Links
Hate to say but you're incorrect with your advise here.
They are a big deal, linking is a very big deal both internal and external linking. SEO and SERP specifically is all about establishing Authorty in the eyes of google. For anyone that is actually interested in SEO its worth your time to learn proper link structuring throughout your content and within your website. Content should consist of "Pillar Posts", and "Response posts", and then a third group of more shareable content, and finally your affiliate posts. Pillar posts are your 2,500+ word evergreen posts that cement your foundation as an expert in a particular subject, an Authority. A good link structure might look like this -> response posts that you have ranked for bring traffic in, then internal linking from these response posts link to your authoritative pillar posts.
This structure builds authority and tells google, or actually essentially points google to your authoritative content.
From here you'll want to incorporate external links from your pillar posts to other AUTHORITATIVE domains on the same subject. Link out to websites that have established authority on the subject, this again tells google that you're being helpful, credible, and authoritative. I wish I could explain this properly, this is something that takes many hours of study to fully conceptualize. But please research internal linking structures, and linking out to authoritative sites, this is part of any half decent SEO strategy.
Tags
Including the correct tags will help for content discovery here on hive and peakd, for SERP I would focus on your keyword or rather key phrase strategy and then as you suggested incorporate those keywords as tags.
Thanks if you have read this far! Hope it's helpful🙏
SEO is king on the internet
This is a blog under blog. I learned a lot. Kudos guys.
Great tips, will follow through this advice and see results :D
Awesome work!
I was hoping someone would come along and set me straight on a few things, I am by no means an expert but really wanted to push some basics out as we seem not to be doing so great (using a now, bad idea for a search of
!)Thanks a lot for taking the time here, I will be using your advice and links to learn more about SEO.
Hey, do you think you could write a hive.blog to knock the top result for 'earn cryptocurrency' off google? :)
You can do pretty much everything mentioned in that blog on Hive, and more, and I would like someone to tell the world about it :)
Great stuff, cheers :D
I love this question as I have been into SEO and blogging for 8+ years now. The short answer: NO. Not right now.
Because:
It will take us some time. Our images, for example, are not frequently indexed too.
There's a lot we can do though. Perhaps I can share examples on some best SEO practices that we can use on Hive (and also on personal projects).
Bummer :)
One for the future then.
Yes please, drop me a note if you do :)
Hehe! We will eventually get there. My biggest concern is with the technical SEO, which stops us from ranking higher. And nothing is organized as well.
So users can't do anything about that.
Someone has to audit the technical SEO with the devs.
Think we should do one for the users - like a series. Starting with the basics and expanding on each subject. Not generic. But one focussed with examples (examples from posts written here).
Quickly came up with this list:
Wish to revisit these. And make some time to get 'em out. Perhaps one a week. Definitely going to update you. :)
It is a lovely idea!
Sweet :)
A series connecting back to each post would be very handy.
Perfect. Thanks a ton for the motivation. Definitely going to make it WORTHWHILE! :)
@sidwrites the technical stuff is a concern, would you help me approach @asgarth and @jarvie in regards to incorporate an SEO module into peakd.com? I know their desire is to attract pro bloggers, I heard one of them say it. That's when I suggested they needed more and better traffic metrics plus SEO.
They need to work with steempress, bloggers want to brand themselves and if we can enable both our platforms SEO and bloggers ability to easily post while maintaining their own efforts in branding we stand a chance of on boarding them... good luck getting any entrepreneur blogger to brand to HIVE on their own as it is limiting.
Fair point for sure! I'm a long time fan of steempress.io and I support them with a witness vote on the Hive chain. I just dont see enough bloggers wanting to actually bother with crypto, they have enough to worry about with SERP and content production schedules, info products and monetization. Once crypto is a little more mainstream then I could see something like a steempress implementation having value in the area of building and maintaining a community, that the blogger could go back to and monetize further. But as it stands professional bloggers have email, video, and social media marketing to engage with their target audience, I dont think crypto is needed here. What problem is it solving really?
the issue is not crypto,
it should be sold as additional backlinks. I know steempeak and peaked have follow-links on the profile so that means more authority for the bloggers. Now this is also ported to the blogs themselves and all the different portals we have. Hive is a good link source and even that should be worth having steempress up and running as a blogger. The money is secondary since the big ones just want the authority. If they then start realising they can make a lot of money here as well they will shift their focus
BRUUUUUH, thanks for this! And thanks @abh12345 for pushing this. This is one of the best posts I stumbled upon in my 2 years service on steem/hive :D
Nice, thanks!
The comments made it worth the effort, loads of extra details here from folks more knowledgeable than me.
Thank you boss @abh12345 for this informative publication about the importance of the SEO code structure to be indexed by Google spider bots.
HTML is well accepted by those Google bots, so in blogging it is important as well. So, we need to recommend the use of HTML to new members.
Take care!
Thanks for taking a look and commenting an answer to a question that was raised.
Yes I think we should all be trying to use a bit more html in our work - you never know if a blog will get lucky and draw in many new eyes :)
My pleasure!
Great introduction to SEO. I learned many things today. Thanks Asher. :)
Thanks for taking a look :D
Started using it already. The headings work. lol
I thought
<h1>is for old people who can't read good, but want to read stuff too?Ha :) A multi-purpose bit of html!
The life span of a HIVE post is seven days. Content creators only get paid on upvotes in the first seven days. The curation rewards gives people incentives to post in the first hours of a post.
The Google Page Rank of a post is meaningless to content creators as it is unlikely that Google will send traffic to a page in the first seven days.
The platforms using HIVE have a convention that the platform used to post an item will be denoted as the canonical source. I assume you composed your post in PeakD. The HTML for this page sets PeakD as the canonical source:
https://peakd.com/hive-174578/@abh12345/help-hive-sprinkle-a-little-seo-on-your-posts
If you put links to your post outside HIVE, you should link to the version of the post in the platform you used to create the article.
The only SEO that matters to content creators is links from HIVE.
For security reasons, HIVE puts the code rel="noopener" . Google treats this as rel="nofollow"; so you don't get SEO benefits for links from HIVE. Which is well and good because it reduces the number of spam posts.
And the first non-paid for link on google is my post of 2 days ago:
This is correct, I should have used hive.blog throughout but got tempted by the 'Topic' box that peakd offers in the editor:
but i don't think it is of much use for the crawlers.
RE: noopener and nofollow (and noreferrer)
I read that there is a difference: https://www.reliablesoft.net/noreferrer-noopener/
From this I conclude that it is OK to be using hive.blog links?
Thanks for your comment.
I searched for “How often should I back up my password,” your article still made it to top 3. That’s a more realistic search.
Happy with that! Cheers :)
Once upon a time (I have no idea about now) Google (that thing that proper seo people seem thoroughly obsessed with pleasing) didn't like multiple
<h1>in an article and as the title tends to be<h1>it might be better to go from<h2>onwards maybe? :)Though having said that I don't know about how well feed pages as they tend to be chockers full of
<h1>, I very rarely find feed pages when I'm searching for things unless I search specifically for a site that I can't remember the url for (which could have something to do with having a very limited set of stuff I search for and not always using Google) and on my statistically insignificant glorified blogsite the only hits to the main url (which is a blogrolly feedy thing) seem to be people who are dropping in directly rather than people looking for stuff (in which case they usually land on whatever was hopefully relevant to their search terms).Hey
I'm not sure what you mean by 'the title tending to be the h1'
Computers tend not to work that way :D
I think, from reading around of late, to give your work the best chance of moving up the ranking, both will help.
Sorry, I've just woken up and not had a coffee yet, and so could be misinterpreting what you are saying and been a bit grouchy.
I probably just suck at explaining.
CMSs and platforms like this will just use whatever the user put in the "title" field of the form as the
<title>(which is in the head tag and that we can't edit) and as the visible title of the article (rendered as<h1>).If the
<title>tag was removed you wouldn't notice a difference in the article but might notice that the browser tab is empty (or maybe contains| [site name]as most of them append the site name to the article). Browsers and search engines use it so you probably want it.If the
<h1>tag was removed, the title would be rendered as body text and be non-obvious to humans so you probably want that too XD Additionally, search engines (or at least Google because all seo is apparently all about Google) use h1 to identify what the page is probably about, the h1 is one of the main things that get matched in searches.And yes as you noted you do absolutely need both to help with rankings :)
The heading tags (h1, h2 etc) are semantically supposed to function kind of like how they do in textbooks, where you have one main topic heading (h1) and several subtopic headings (h2) possibly with subsubtopic headings (h3+). There was a time where Google was using the h1 to help with matching keywords and rankings and stuff and so would penalise for multiple h1s as some were trying to do that to game their rankings, which is why I suggested starting from h2 when writing your post as the post title will be set as h1. And even if it doesn't matter for Google anymore (because they change their algorithms like underwear) it still looks nicer from a semantic point of view (like too many people would look at the code anyway XD).
That's the important bit and the rest was me ramblingly wondering how they deal with feed sites then but seems smart sites like peakd just give the feed pages lower headings (all the post titles on my "following feed" on peakd use h5).
Did that help or did I make it worse? :D
😂
So i've just created this wonderful post: https://hive.blog/itsatag/@zapncrap/testing-again-title
and on checking the page source, I see no '< h1 >' tag, which I didn't include in the text but gather from what you are saying will come from the Title if not included directly?
Damn, things are tough in the morning - I should probably go back to bed for a few more hours!
Great post, much inform XD
Yep :)
And in the source code:
ahh!
I was looking for h1 with a > directly following. Thanks for that. Soo, where are we - another coffee and I re-read what you put above? :D
So we can either have title and h1 the same by just entering the title, or go for a slight alteration and include a h1.
Go clickbait with the title and more keywordy with the h1?
If you can change the
<title>then you could do that :) I don't know if you can do it on here though?I think I'll quit while I'm behind :)
Although I tried with SEO stuff on this post, I guess it's not really the type for trying to rank high on engines and bring people in.
What I really want to see, as mentioned in another comment, is a hive.blog post ahead of this one for an 'earn cryptocurrency' search on Google.
I think we've tried to move away from the 'get paid to do stuff' theme in recent years but lets face it, there are many things you can do on Hive to earn crypto (outside of begging and selling your vote too :D )
If you just write what people are looking for they'll find it. Which means either do all that horrible market research crap that I hate or just write what you're gonna write XD I put exactly no effort into seo these days (too lazy, got too many other things to do) and people are still managing to find the Blender and (now ancient because I haven't done any recent ones) Drupal notes on my blog.
Most of Hive's current ranking problem would be age as all pre-fork posts are also on steem so if the age thing still matters that would probably get priority if you were searching for something that could be found on either.
So really all we have left to do is write amazing beautifully formatted posts ;D
Indeed. Which is why we need to probably reproduce the guides/etc on the new chain, and be good with formatting. And write awesome content of course :)
I think sir H1 is reserved for the post title and H2 can be added somewhere inside for additional supporting topic to the main topic. I also read that Google will penelized the stuffing so much heading tags.
I thought this too but is you view the source of this page on hive.blog you should see otherwise.
This is one area where we need to improve; as there is so much content here now. Appreciate the tips.
Cheers.
It's all quite simple stuff to do, might add 5 more minutes to a post but if someone gets lucky that post could attract many new eyes to Hive.
On-page SEO won't hurt but I think the bigger factor are Hive's backlinks, traffic and other authority metrics.
From the looks of it, I think Hive is doing pretty well.
Right, sounds good :) Do you know how we can view/measure this?
Ahrefs and SEMRush are good options. Alexa.com/siteinfo gives a good indication as well but takes a while to update.
Good to know the H1s have always been a major ranking factor, I always use a H1 at the beginning.
Yeah, I think Hive needs more SEO focused posts. And more articles like this are needed for the community to get better informed. SEO is an important marketing step. If most content creators give attention to SEO, then Hive would easily rank.
About the short URLs, there’s a trick I do sometimes to make it possible on my personal blog. This could work on Hive as well. You can make the title of your post “SEO tips,” then after posting, you can simply rename it to the current name.
That way you can retain the name of your article, but the url will be shorter. Neil Patel does something similar for his articles on his blog. And I think it is worth it.
BTW I like the template you shared, I’d use it on my next post on Hive.
That's a nice tip - I will edit the section on titles to include.
Thanks for the feedback :D
That is some good stuff! Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is really important, for sure. Thanks for taking the time to put this together.
Cheers Sgt!
Some really good stuff in the comments which i need to incorporate.
Hopefully some hive.blogs will start appearing in searches and bring some fresh eyes here!
Yup. Just cross-posted your piece to the Marketing Community.
I am interested in all this, it is new to me
Nice post!
Now this is what I call a "Top Rated" post.
Bookmarked of course.
Always wondered how people got their stuff up there.
Thought SEO was some company name lol.
Now you come with other funny things like H1 and H2 and a lot of other stuff here:)
My idea of a post was always to create quality and original content period.
No mystical stuff, will take me a hundred years to learn everything here.
Maybe you can do an ordinary post for us to have a look at?
All that I have taken from this is to post in hive-blog
Btw. Where are you in discord?
Sure :)
Copy this into hive.blog:
Fill in the gaps and you have a post with some basic SEO :D
Great thank you and will do.
I presume we place the image in the last "Image alt text" section? Or do we post this whole scribe above or below the image?
Copy everything, and then you will need to delete the images highlighted, and replace with your own.
The alt text is for adding keywords that help describe your post/image.
The final image can stay if you like it and want to link people to create a new account. Good luck!
You won't believe Ash. I did the post exactly as per your example on hive-blog. Took me hours.
Then when I clicked "Post" no luck.
What a struggle as I kept getting the message in RED that an image was not fully loaded.
At first I thought it was the template and me and my wife scrutinized it. Couldn't find any fault.
Went out and back in 3 times, still no go.
So eventually I removed all of the images and as I was busy removing the images, I saw that I did not compress the one image!!!
By then I had removed all of the template, so I compressed the image and loaded the post.
No problem and it loaded at last.
I will try with the template again later on today and now in the early morning hours and must go to bed.
See ya later!
That sounds like a great effort, sorry for your struggles!
Hopefully it will go a little more smoothly next time!
I do everything at extremes my friend. Hope that I will get it together very soon and I will send you the link to scrutinize the post.
First to go sleep now and then later I will do a charity post about our feeding scheme for the poor under lockdown.
Take care!
Greetings Ash,
Tried my best to copy your template in my post today.
Please have a look and let me know if it is okay. Also feel free to criticize, but no swearing please hahaha.
https://peakd.com/hive-174578/@papilloncharity/h1don-t-let-the-children-pay-h1
I've got an SEO background, and I was working on an ultimate guide for Steemit users when the HF happened. It's still an unfinished project, but it's so hard to put in as simple of a way as possible.
We don't have access to a YOAST SEO plugin within out editors, but YOAST principles can be applied. It would be easy for me to explain what needs to be implemented to users, but because we don't have an SEO plugin, there is no way to check how good your SEO is on a post before you release it.
I take that back, there are no convenient tools for that. You'd basically have to take the text from your Hive post and drop it into various online tools to test it. Me personally, I've gotten so used to SEO, I can pretty much draw up a post without checking if my keyword density is too much or too little, etc.
Also, SEO standards change week to week, so by the time I can make a guide, things have already changed. One of the most recent implementations I've noticed in YOAST is that your "keyword(s) set is best placed not only in your title like it always has been, but is now preferred as the first words of the post title.
I haven't abandoned this project altogether, it's more of a challenge to work up incentives to make users implement SEO in their posts. I've been discussing with @riverflows from NM.io about doing some bounty SEO contests, where I find a new highly searched but low competitions keyword set that users all post about during a weeklong rush with the winner receiving additional LOTUS rewards.
I would imagine the winner be whatever user's post is the highest ranking in google search results after a month or so. I'm still working on it but haven't given up. It is bizarre to see that when I type "hive blockchain logo" in google images, one of the results on the first page is my hive intro photo.
This is only because I took the time to write
or something similar in the brackets of my photo upload. It's amazing how few tribe owners even do that. I've searched for a lot of logos on google images only to find the one I uploaded myself ranking higher than the one uploaded by the logo creator.Good job on the logo ranking!
This sounds awesome, I was thinking about putting a contest out myself which involved trying to get a good ranking on Google for a particular search. Let me know if you plan to get this one going.
Cheers!
Sure thing, I think the blockchain is now settled enough to get back on this project. That will be my mission from tomorrow morning on. I have been putting it off for far too long. Certainly SEO-ification has to be rewarded with a carrot.
not good, can this be improved @asgarth?
I asked around and apparently this rendering will be crawled these days - so perhaps not an issue :)
The thing I'm always thinking about is how to not confuse people with hive blockchain and ''HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd''. Usually when people look for hive, they find them. They existed before. We are kind of competing with them in search engine. How to make our blockchain apear there ? Is there a way to do so ? I'm sure that's impossible to rename it now. So, we have to look for a solution for sure.
Yeah, it's a bit unfortunate.
I'm hoping that people don't search too much for 'Hive blockchain' and find us through content that has scored well in the search engines.
And a great introduction, we all should do our bit to make Hive the best platform.
Thank you :) Some simple things can make a big difference I hope.
Whoa, Asher! Before my coffee?
I'll just take this home with me and read it for breakfast. Thank you!
!tip .20
haha, sorry about that! Yes, a coffee for the post and a coffee for the comments - some crackers in here.
Thanks for the tip Denise!
Hehe! Yes! Well, it's all better now! :)
🎁 Hi @abh12345! You have received 0.2 HBD tip from @dswigle!
@dswigle wrote lately about: Let'S Monochrome On Monday Feel free to follow @dswigle if you like it :)
Sending tips with @tipU - how to guide.
You only need SEO if you're creating content you actually want people to find :)
haha yesss, are you saying some people would rather just collect the auto-votes and not care if anyone reads their stuff? :O
I wouldn't dare suggest such a thing..
nice post
You have your logo on that template above that "Not got an account yet?" is it free for use , does i have to mention you if i use it on my post
Yes of course, it is from https://signup.hive.io/
Hey man, long time no see. Hope life's treating you well.
I've been working in SEO for about 2 years now. What you're talking about within the article is pretty much right. However, the articles we post on Hive.blog or Steemit.com are mostly ranking because of the high domain authority of the main site.
Links and the authority of the site count the most in rankings. Google doesn't really likes to admit it but, the more quality links you have, the higher you rank. Fortunately, our articles don't need links since the domain is pretty damn strong. So, as long as we cover good topics, and have some quality articles, they will rank pretty high - potentially even higher than Medium.
Yoooooooooo
Just read your post actually and was about to reply asking where the F you'd been :D
Cheers for the info, that sounds pretty good to me. We just need some more decent writers knocking around.
Good to see you back, get some content out!
Whoop, whoop! You British fucker! We always need good writers.
That's me, without the fucking part at present. Damn lockdown!
Haha, I get that! This pandemic is not the best for building real-life relationships.
Here's one problem, in a Twitter survey we took recently of 77 people, 75% of people like peakd.com over Hive.blog.
Most bloggers (myself included) once they experience peakd.com, there is no going back to hive.blog. It's boring, and lacks visual features, and tools. I think promoting peakd.com, makes way more sense.
See for yourself:
I am one of those who prefers peakd, for the features it includes that were spread all over in the past - delegation's, account creates, etc.
With the rendering issue though, peakd don't look like they will rank in google - sorta key for attracting new people isn't it?
So, I would write your posts and post from hive.blog, and do everything else on peakd.
i disagree. hive.blog is a bad way for people to get introduced to Hive.
Peakd.com needs to be the first thing they see...actually looking at Google Trends for Peakd.com, the rankings are going up.
The trends are usage though? Not first click visits - have they got referrer stats?
If we post from peakd, the canonical link, the images, and other links likely included in the post will point to peakd, which google seems to have no knowledge of post-wise.
this is for peakd.com
you're right that hive.blog seems to have more visitors, but the engagement is happening on peakd.com.
here's hive.blog https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hive.blog
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/peakd.com
I don't have an account with alexa but would be interested to know the referrer stats for peakd - where is the traffic coming from. If it's bookmarked links and hive.blog, then that'll be existing users. I'd like to see referrals from Google - if these are happening then it will not matter which interface the blogs are entered on.
it states 7% are coming from Google
Ah good!
So peakd links are appearing in searches, awesome :D
Do we have to pay to know this site?
I will not be using hive.blog. I tried recently and can't go back to that....it's good to have a backup site, but peakd.com is so much better, that people need to find it first. LOL
These are the metrics we should be looking at, as we can see, the only thing that really matters is human attention. Peakd.com has almost double the engagement than hive.blog.....sending people to a place where engagement is low, that's not a good plan. Human attention is the thing that matters:
We have a branding problem. People come to know about "Hive" and visit hive.blog, but peakd.com has twice the engagement stats, almost double of hive.blog. Peakd.com is such a different name to "hive" that I feel people won't associate it with "hive'. This is the main problem i see....
If peakd.com gets a really good mobile app that is integrated and works well, i could see peakd.com and hive succeeding....if it remains fragmented, with random mobile apps and different sites i think onboarding will remain difficult.
Totally agree with the branding and fact we have many entry points, but could it work for us longer term?
Those interested in natural medicine might first arrive on the Hive blockchain at https://www.naturalmedicine.io/
If in the future they can get an account there, they may never know about hive.blog or peakd.
It's hard, and makes my brain hurt.
Common sense and marketing comes from one thing: human attention. Put your best thing forward. Don't send people to a site that has low engagement. We need other sites to be linking to peakd.com, because right now there is only ONE! LOL. i saw this on alexa rank site.
but the good news is that peakd.com has engagement numbers that are better than Facebook. Now we have to get the word out, and have links to peakd.com from other sites, and build up communities......
And imagine if we had more cat videos :)
Doing my bit, I think. Feeel I need to write more general content though.
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@abh12345 I'm glad you wrote this post. I have been trying to give seo advice to steemit for years and now hive and nobody seems to care or engage. I was planning a whole series of seo posts for hive so people might start creating content for their businesses but my test posts on the subject were met with only crickets lol. I have used steemit as part of my seo strategy and it worked very well for my websites. I have high hopes for hive. Your info here was very basic but very helpful. Great job!
Thank you :)
My knowledge is basic but there have been some good comments added. It's tough to know what level to pitch something like this, but hopefully people can use the basics to improve their work.
Glad to hear there is someone else with SEO knowledge - one day we will be filling those google searches up!
It is going to take a lot of work and a lot of "working together" for that to happen but it can happen with very low hanging fruit (long tail keywords) first.
Also if the users do some keyword research before writing content and add perfect keywords naturally in the post then it can be also beneficial for hive community.
If I can add my humble opinion.
The biggest thing Hive can do for SEO, is to sort the Communities URLs so that the name reflects the community and the individual posts within that community.
Having urls such as hive.blog/hive-123456789 is a big turnoff for the Google crawlbots.
Cg
Good post and useful information!
I reblogged this one to learn a bit more about SEO. Thanks for sharing this, it will be helpful :)
Thanks for the tips I might have to use some of these
This site is great
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