If you're running Wordpress, disallowing your /uploads/ directory will nuke your Google Image Search prospects, as Googlebot won't be able to crawl any of your images to begin with.
Also, submitting to a paid directory such as Best of the Web or the Yahoo! Directory would be a much better use of your time. DMOZ is still a valuable directory (for a lot of reasons), but the likelihood is small that they will review, let alone add your site to the directory in a timely manner (if ever).
A few other things worth doing:
- Create a Twitter account for your site.
- Create a Facebook page for your site.
Indeed. Blocking JS and CSS from all robots will also cause your site to render poorly in most web archives, like the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Depends on what you are launching. A weekend project? Just get your work in front of people. Something you spent six months in stealth mode working on? Sure, get it all set up before launch during the development process.
Can't say I agree with you. Even with weekend projects I'll throw some analytics and other quantification tools in from the beginning as I want to see what kind of traction it gets. How else would I even begin to know if there's interest in what I've created?
There is only one thing on the list that is not completely obvious -- dmoz still matters. Is it possible? Sure, it's a valuable list of sites touched by a lot of care and bureaucracy, but does anybody who wasn't online 10 years ago know about it?
At least you could submit. They had some sort of catastrophe four years ago when I tried to submit -- there was just some sort of "come back in a few months... yeah" blurb.
I forgot all about it until I saw this, so I guess I'll check back sometime in 2013.
DMOZ does matter, as do many of the old directories that are hand curated (Yahoo Dir, Business.com, Best of the Web, and hundreds of small directories).
These directories are valued by the search engines because all listings are not automatically approved, so there is a certain quality aspect to the listings. While the directories don't send very much traffic, they do pass trust to the sites they are linking to.
It can be tough to get a DMOZ listing, particularly if the category you are applying to doesn't currently have an editor. However, it's worth it if you can get accepted.
The same thing I said in their comments (dunno if they'll approve my blatant self-promotion):
If anyone is interested in automating their fetish for checking their organic SEO rankings, I’d be happy to give you a free spin in my app http://rankiac.com/. Basically, you enter your keywords and domains, and we email you daily with changes in ranking.
Hit me up at contact@rankiac.com if you want your account sprinkled with some free “Pro” subscription magic dust!
Regardless, this is a good list and contains a few things I ALWAYS forget to do (site-map & Google Webmaster tools).
Good organic seo is almost always the best way to advertise your site. Spending money on fleshing out your site with lots of pages with lots of relevant specific copy and keywords is much more cost-effective than simply spending money to advertise the site.
A couple important things the article leaves out:
1) Create a cron script or otherwise automate sitemap creation. Otherwise, its easy to forget to manually add new pages.
2) Put a useful succinct meta description in the header of all your pages. Otherwise you leave the little blurb of text that shows up on google search results to chance and miss potential clicks on search results.
Personally, I don't really think there's anything wrong with a "x tips for y" title, but it does go against the submission guidelines for HN:
If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
I think the point of the guideline is to keep things fact-oriented here, and to keep the amount of sensationalism, hyperbole, and "link-baiting" on HN to a minimum.
I think the point of the guideline is to keep things fact-oriented here, and to keep the amount of sensationalism, hyperbole, and "link-baiting" on HN to a minimum.
I agree that we should respect the HN submission guidelines, but the OP seemed to be expressing approval that the original post wasn't titled as such. Additionally, I hardly think that numbering your main points counts as sensationalism or hyperbole. Maybe it's link-baiting in some cases, but I think that's a stretch.
As someone just starting up their first website (http://wayofthescholar.com), there's a lot of helpful material here, and a lot I still need to work through.
Although each item may be obvious and discussed in greater depth a thousand other places, a list is sometimes really helpful.
I would also redirect my feeds/rss to FeedBurner, just to have an idea the number of subscribers I might have, and which are the more popular items people read about me.
XML Sitemap along with Google notifications goes a long way!
Many sites do not notify google when their XML sitemap is updated yet it is a very efficient way to achieve instant indexing for new content!
While large sites with high PR are crawled frequently, crawling rates for small/medium sites will never result in instant indexing unless they use this method.
Use it and gain some search engine results momentum!
Disallowing your css/js files in your robots.txt is probably not a good idea - Matt Cutts said as much himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU
If you're running Wordpress, disallowing your /uploads/ directory will nuke your Google Image Search prospects, as Googlebot won't be able to crawl any of your images to begin with.
Also, submitting to a paid directory such as Best of the Web or the Yahoo! Directory would be a much better use of your time. DMOZ is still a valuable directory (for a lot of reasons), but the likelihood is small that they will review, let alone add your site to the directory in a timely manner (if ever).
A few other things worth doing: - Create a Twitter account for your site. - Create a Facebook page for your site.