I learnt about cryptocurrency investing in June of this year, 2017. Its only been 4 months but what an amazing ride! Despite altcoin's slowing down in the last month and a half, I've already tripled my initial investment. With profits earned, I've invested into more coins.
But how do I pick and choose which coins to invest in, you may ask. As an SEO Expert with a background in Web dev, UX and UI. Its easy to guess that the weight of my decisions are based on the Crytpocurrency Website's UI, UX, and then of course, like everyone else, I check out the Team and White paper. I usually invest in coins that have a great team and concept but before I click on the team / white paper, sometimes some websites turn me off and I click off the website. Essentially my thought-process is that if they can't build a professional looking site, they aren't going to get very far.
One thing that is fairly obvious is that Cryptocurrency Websites and ICOs are generally not concerned with SEO and Search in general. Here are a few reasons why. Please note that this is my experience 99% of the time. There is that remaining 1% of crypto-websites that meet SEO expectations but they are the exception, not the rule.
Reasons why Cryptocurrency Websites are not concerned with SEO
Social Media brings more traffic to websites than Search Engines
Online publications are possibly more important to Cryptocurrency Websites than presence on the Search Engines
Crypto-trading websites and database sites such as www.coinmarketcap.com are a newbie's bestfriend
Who needs Search when you have APPS?
...the biggest reason is because Social Media has changed the landscape of how people find things online. Aside from being a receptacle of publications, FB also facilitates group discussions on the different coins and its pros and cons.
Should Cryptocurrency Websites care about SEO?
Yes! (Biased answers for obvious reason, this is my profession) But more importantly, as a cryptocurrency investor, in as much as most folks find information on Social Media or other publishers, a majority of Users will go to Google and search for the Coin Website.
For example, just today I discovered a new coin called EVX. I saw it on Binance and wanted to know more information about it before investing it in. I went on my browser and searched for "EVX" and the first link was a company called "EVX - VanEck Vectors Environmental Services ETF"
Mind you, this doesn't have a huge effect on whether or not I purchase EVX coins when I'm on my desktop and have all the time in the world but if I was on a mobile device... thats a different thing altogether.
If I was on my mobile device clicking on links that didn't have anything to do with EVX and I didn't have a lot of free time, this could, potentially, have affected whether or not I purchased the coin on the time and day that I found it. If I run out of time, chances of me going back to it are slim but if I found the website fast and was able to get the gist of everything on a nicely laid-out UI and my UX was top notch, there is no doubt in my mind that i would have bought the coin during my 15 min break. Its really not that hard to impress me: Good Team, Good White Paper, Good Website!
Technical SEO should be included in all Cryptocurrency Websites
In my professional opinion all Cryptocurrency websites should have Technical SEO integration. If nothing else but for bragging rights that you are #1 for your Coin name! It also helps your Users find you quickly. Here are some basic Technical SEO tips:
Remove disallow on your robots.txt -- I was actually researching a coin and saw that their meta data was blocked by Google since they had not removed disallow on their robots.txt -- I tried to reach them via their website to let them know that the disallow was still there but they had no contact form / email. Eventually I had to join a Slack channel to do that and I did. To make a long story short, I did not buy that coin. While you are at it, please make sure you have the correct robots.txt
Create Quality Content on your Cryptocurrency Website -- When I started on this crypto-journey, I noticed that most sites linked to everywhere else, ie. Github, Medium, Slack, Twitter, FB... a lot of them fail to use their own website as their main content space and instead used Medium whenever they had a blog or company update. Content is what helps guide the Search Engines categorize your website. Without original, unique content, it will be very difficult for Search Engines to categorize your website. It helps when you have links pointing to your website yes, but more than that, content will help even more.
Remove duplicate pages -- a lot of CMS websites automatically create duplicate pages. They just do, you need to stay on top of that and delete and then 301 all duplicate pages, when necessary. Here is a free duplicate content checker
Create a Sitemap -- Sitemaps help Search Engines index a website more comprehensively so create one, specifically an XML Sitemap.
Ensure your Website is Mobile Responsive -- Search Engines prefer websites that are mobile-responsive and half your traffic come from mobile browser anyhow so this is a good call. Check how mobile-responsive your website is here
Ensure that Google can actually read your website -- this may sound basic but a lot of folks get this wrong. In as much as Google has come a long way, it can only read some javascript depending on the framework its on. Get more info here and see how Google renders your website here
Make sure your page title and H tags are correctly done on the page -- this is probably the most basic thing in Technical SEO but hardly anyone gets it right. You need to make sure you Page title correlates to your Coin name / Product name and if there is space, provide a short descriptive text that defines your coin. Aside from the page title, check to make sure that your H tags or Headings correlate on your page properly. H1 is the most important tag and should have your coin name. Semantically structuring your web page so that Search Engines can read them properly is a good thing.
Search Engine Friendly URL Structure -- make URLs easy to read for Users and Search Engines, structure them in such a way that makes it easy to read. ie. www.mywebsite.com/easy-to-read vs. www.mywebsite.com/1230402ssan -- Search Engines read dashes as spaces.
There are a few more Technical SEO considerations such as page speed and structured data but if you can get the above done properly, your cryptocurrency website should be fine. I'd like to end this blog of by providing an example of a Search Engine Friendly Website from the Cryptocurrency Industry.
An Example of the Cryptocurrency Website that is Search Engine Friendly
It wasn't easy to find a Cryptocurrency website that has technical SEO integration, I probably clicked on about 20 previous websites but they were not Search Engine Friendly but finally... DASH
Dash has Technical SEO integrations
So Dash has most of the technical SEO considerations that I mentioned above. It has an XML Sitemap, its Mobile-Friendly, It used the H tags semantically. Screen shots below...
Here is the screenshot of Dash passing the Mobile-Friendly Test
Here is the screenshot of the semantic structure of its H tags (Pretty impressive!)
And whats even more impressive is the number of blog entries they have. When you go to their blog page they have a total of 43 pages, each with 12 blogs in each page. Thats a total of 516 blog entries. Granted not all of them are long and some are short and have video but still, thats 516 content pages!
When you are optimizing a website for Search Engines, bear in mind that the Search Engine Algorithm was created to mimic a User's thought-process. SEO isn't simply getting a website to rank, its also ensuring high Click-through-rates, UX and a properly thought-out UI. All in all, having Technical SEO for any website is tantamount to Online success. Its easy to correlate success with Dash.
Please note that I am not an investor in Dash (not yet anyway) nor do I have a professional or personal relationship with any of them. I clicked on as many crypto websites as I could until I found a site that was Search Engine Friendly.
Ok, thats it from my end. If you have any questions / clarifications, please don't hesitate to comment.