SEO Helps Steemit Outdo Technologically Superior Competition
Overlooking competition (especially when they are successful) is not a smart action. When we are this close to a parabolic bull market for altcoins where money start pouring in, we must have gather all the advantages we can to decouple ourselves from $BTC cycles. There are three primary niches that I see as capable of decoupling at the moment. Blockchain based social media is one of them. The fact that we are on a blockchain should not be a thing that get ahead of us dominating the niche. We must be able to eclipse the likes of Substack, Medium and all the other text based social media sides.
One could bring up the fact that no decentralized social media has managed to go mainstream. Although that is true, there are some pseudo decentralized social media projects that managed to get the attention of cryptosphere while the the blockchain with 8 years of history failed to generate the same level of attention.
Analytics from Semrush
There are many tools to analyze web traffic, keywords and various other things that help with Search Engine Optimization. These are not perfect tools. Nevertheless, they can provide useful insights. Let us begin with Steemit.
These are decent statistics for a blogging website that look and feel old and lacking in advanced features. I don't even know how the organic competitors end up being what they are for any of the front ends I checked the statistics of.
Comparison With @peakd
These are a tiny fraction of what Steemit has managed while keeping the website almost the same as what it was during the time of fork. Justin Sun has done a great job with capital allocation. He settled for milking what has already been built since 2016! I do think we will be able to win in the long term. We even have an idea of how much we need to catch up with,
- Backlinks
- Authority Score
- Organic Search Traffic
I do think that long history of backlinks + age of the website has a lot to do with the current success of Steemit. Feel free to do more research on your own. HIVE has a variety of front ends to choose from.
Comparison Withe @ecency
I do not consider different front ends as competitors. I go out of my way to make sure I use multiple front ends and help them with their user statistics. There seems to be a significant correlation with Backlinks, Authority Score and Organic Search Traffic.
INLEO Statistics
Semrush showed 3.9 million Backlinks and an Authority Score of 19. Organic Search Traffic was only 132 (which should not be correct IMHO). @leofinance team is using Simple Analytics which is a more privacy friendly alternative to the commonly used Google Analytics. I wish more websites used Simple Analytics or similar alternatives.
Pay attention to the top countries for each of the front ends. Different front ends have had different levels of success per county. If we take a look at all the countries that come to the top and focus extra effort to growth in those geographies, we should be able to achieve faster growth.
Eg: @peakd and Steemit gets a amount of its traffic from India. Other front ends should be able to find ways to become popular in India since all front ends share many similarities between each other. Even BLURT should find these strategies useful.
SEO Course for Beginners
Do not take this as a burden on yourself. Think of it as a game to rank better on search engines and help the growth of your favorite decentralized social media project. Do not overthink the lessons or try to get everything right on the first try.
This one is a much shorter collection of tips that can help authors rank better. As the video state at the end, combining these is the best way to achive success. Do not think of these techniques as a thing that exist in a vacuum.
There is no one size fits all solutions. Different cultures and demographics are going to have different preferences. Factor in this information when you write your articles. There can be many different styles of content that can bring in viewers.
Few Quick Tips I Have Been Using
I make sure to stuff the image names with keywords related to the article I write. Search engines see the file names. Combine this with a strong opening paragraph related to the title and you have begun your SEO journey. If you can keep users on the page for longer with useful content, it is going to improve the metrics for the front ends. I have even written about HIVE creating a news focused front end which was received well. This is a way to bring in revenue from outside via ads. Take note that I have linked to many other HIVE articles on this page. I will cross post this article to STEEM with all the links pointing towards HIVE.
Hive has never really had a real marketing push and the big thing with STEEM was it did reach critical mass and had enough inflow from SEO that if they would have put in Ad Revenue right at the peak of 2017/2018 it probably could have reached escape velocity but when it was just tied to the speculation of the crypto that broke it's back and then the community fractured so many times over and what is left is hard to generate enough traffic for advertising to generate enough revenue to create a flywheel effect.
Above is a reply I got from @brianphobos under an article I wrote about Google Trends among other things. I have been a part of this blockchain for over 7 years and I HODLed $HIVE $LEO @splinterlands investments and many more through all the bear markets we have gone through. I want to see HIVE + DAPPs to achieve massive success.