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rubberduck-vba / Rubberduck

Every programmer needs a rubberduck. COM add-in for the VBA & VB6 IDE (VBE).
https://rubberduckvba.com
GNU General Public License v3.0
1.91k stars 300 forks source link

RD does not show up easily in search engines #427

Closed Phrancis closed 9 years ago

Phrancis commented 9 years ago

If you wish to promote RubberDuck further, you should try to find ways to improve SEO. Using Google I searched for a few general VBA queries to see if/where RD would show up. I think it should be at least in the first 3 pages, but ideally on the 1st or 2nd. Here are some examples:

I noticed in all those searches that MSDN forum posts usually comes up on the first page, perhaps this would be a good place to start. Here are also some useful SEO related posts:

Five Ways to Improve your Site’s Ranking (SEO)

7 Advanced Ways to Improve Your Site's SEO

Also, if you want help with some HTML related things, I know my way around HTML pretty well so don't hesitate to ask!

Phrancis commented 9 years ago

Adding a link to my SEO CR question for your reference: http://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/74634/cardshifter-website-meta-tags-for-seo

Ryankey commented 9 years ago

Just wanted to give my experience of how I found out about RD, since it was fairly recent.

I was searching Google for "vba unit test" and found "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4547487/how-to-unit-test-excel-vba-code", which has an answer from Mat's Mug promoting RD.

More references to RD on StackOverflow questions and Excel/VBA forums would be a good start to getting more users, especially for the search terms that Phrancis listed.

retailcoder commented 9 years ago

80% of the project website's traffic is coming from combined Stack Exchange sites (Stack Overflow, Code Review, and chat server).

Search engines are ~5% of the hits.

retailcoder commented 9 years ago

I've added a <meta name="description" tag on every page, let's see if that helps :)

rubberduck203 commented 9 years ago

You might want to take a look at Google's Webmaster Tools if you haven't already.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

retailcoder commented 9 years ago

@Ryankey I agree, leveraging Stack Overflow's awesomeness is ...easy. But I feel like a dirty spammer every time I do that.. not to mention that SO questions asking for tools, books or libraries.. are off-topic. These answers are useful for Rubberduck, but they don't make me a very good SO citizen:

Phrancis commented 9 years ago

@retailcoder good job updating the HTML meta tags. I performed the same searches as before, after clearing my cache and cookies of course, and here are new results:

Keep in mind the potential bias caused by clearing the cache since I originally searched at first.

Hosch250 commented 9 years ago

I have a bit of experience here. First, blog about it - a lot, and tag it. Then, search it - a lot, search your blog too. Each time you search, add the hoped-for keywords, and gradually refine your search until it comes up in the first few pages - then click it to signal to the search engine you found what you wanted. Gradually, you should be able to work up into the top few pages for your keywords.

retailcoder commented 9 years ago

Try "VBA rename refactoring" - I get 4 first-page hits :)

I also get ok-ish results with "VBA refactoring", and we need to blog more about our unit testing feature, although we have a link on the first hit (Stack Overflow) - same with "VBA extract method" and "VBA extract procedure"

rubberduck203 commented 9 years ago

@retailcoder out of curiosity, did my blog about unit testing with rubberduck show up in your search? It's getting a fair bit of traffic. Perhaps a re-blog is in order?

retailcoder commented 9 years ago

Just did a quick google search on my phone, "announcing Rubberduck 1.0" showed up on 2nd page @ckuhn203

Sent from my Samsung mobile

Hosch250 commented 9 years ago

You might be interested in Software Recommendations.SE: http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/

rubberduck203 commented 9 years ago

Time is the main factor here. Closing the issue.