Reading up on Ahrefs

I wanna share all my startup experience, one topic at a time, Today it's ---SEO--- In the past years, I generated over 1B impressions and 1M clicks from SEO. Everything I've done: 📁 Domain names ↳ Use: .com, .org, .dev, .ai, .io ↳ Use keyword-like naming, e.g. osssoftware dot org ↳ Max 14 letters in a domain name ↳ No “-” or “_” ↳ One topic per domain when possible ↳ Pick www or non-www and stick to that one version (one redirects to another one) 📁 Tech SEO ↳ Make sure the page renders HTML when bots make requests ↳ One way to check it:  ↳ Drop your URL into Claude  ↳ Ask if it’s doing everything right for tech SEO ↳ There are many more details, but really, Claude or Codex will lay it all down for you if you show it your website ↳ HTTPS on ↳ Mobile-friendly ↳ Fast enough that it doesn’t feel broken  ↳ PageSpeed Insights is enough  ↳ Open GSC web-vitals and if it's green then all good ↳ Short, stable URLs  ↳ Url slug should match the meta title and h1  ↳ No random strings ↳ One H1 per page ↳ Unique title + unique meta per page ↳ Image alt text on anything that matters ↳ Canonical URL on every indexable page that has no query string in it ↳ Fix 404s and redirect chains ↳ No orphan pages  ↳ Every important URL should have at least one internal link pointing to it (seogets shows all such pages) 📁 Indexing ↳ Add sitemap.xml to Google Search Console ↳ See if all the pages are indexed  ↳ If not, run @indexrusher ↳ Do the same for Bing and Yandex via indexrusher ↳ robots.txt should be there and allow your public pages, again, ask chatgpt to check your robots.txt ↳ Request indexing in GSC for new pages or run indexrusher to automate this ↳ Check Coverage / Pages reports  ↳ Fix “crawled – currently not indexed” on pages that should rank  ↳ Don’t waste crawl budget (don't create too many pages, too many folders, tags, groupss...at least right away, you better do it later once the first bulk is indexed) 📁 Analytics ↳ Google Search Console ↳ Ahrefs small plan ↳ @seogets + @DataFast_ ↳ Once a week, look at:  ↳ Queries with impressions but few clicks (take the queries pointing to these pages and embed them into h1 and meta title)  ↳ Pages that used to get clicks and then decayed (update the content here) 📁 Low hanging fruit ↳ Pages already in positions 8–20  ↳ Those are closer to page 1 than any new article  ↳ Add the exact query(if makes sense) to H1 / title / H2  ↳ Add one missing section the current top results have ↳ Queries with lots of impressions and almost no clicks  ↳ Rewrite title + meta, keep the keyword ↳ Old pages that already get a little traffic  ↳ Update them before writing a new one (google kinda loves to see pages being regularly updated) ↳ Pages Google knows but didn’t index  ↳ Request indexing manually page by page, or run @indexrusher (if it doesn't help, remove them, cuz google wont index them ever) ↳ Thin pages fighting each other for the same query  ↳ Keep the stronger URL  ↳ Merge or 301 the weaker one 📁 Quick 5min SEO hacks ↳ Paste a URL into GSC → URL Inspection → Request indexing ↳ Put the target keyword in the first 60 characters of the title ↳ Add the main query into the H1 if it’s missing ↳ Add 2 internal links from old posts to the page I want to push ↳ Add alt text to the first image on the page ↳ Add a 3-question FAQ at the bottom using GSC queries ↳ Submit / resubmit sitemap.xml in GSC ↳ Search site:mydomain and see if the pages are indexed and how they look like ↳ Google my brand + product keyword  ↳ If a page mentions me with no link, ask them to add one ↳ Ask ChatGPT “best tool for [keyword]”  ↳ Open the cited URLs  ↳ Email those authors the same day (offer them either money or a link exchange) ↳ Post the article URL on X / LinkedIn / Reddit with the keyword in the first line ↳ Drop the URL into Claude: “what 5 on-page fixes can I do in 5 minutes?” 📁 Blog ↳ Write 1 good blog post a week  ↳ Do it manually with some AI assistance  ↳ Focus on the most promising keywords where you already rank high ↳ Use @seobotai to generate more blog articles  ↳ See if some of them get traction  ↳ Manually turn the promising ones from AI-generated into high-quality human-made articles ↳ Before writing, search Google for the keyword  ↳ Match the format that already ranks  ↳ Answer the question better than the current top 5 ↳ Put original stuff in the article  ↳ Screenshots  ↳ My own numbers  ↳ What I actually tried (basically ensure google that this article comes from a human's own experience) ↳ Refresh old posts that already get impressions  ↳ Update the date only if the content actually changed (avoid hacks here, do real updates) ↳ Useful page types on top of the weekly post:  ↳ “best X”  ↳ “X vs Y”  ↳ “X alternatives”  ↳ “how to” for the exact job my product does 📁 Backlinks ↳ Ask ChatGPT: “What’s the best tool for...”  ↳ See the URLs it used to form the response  ↳ Reach out to all those authors  ↳ Ask them to include my URL in exchange for money or a backlink from you ↳ Do the same in Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and Grok ↳ Search Google for your keywords  ↳ Find the pages that already rank  ↳ Do the same as above ↳ List on as many directories as possible using @listingbott ↳ Link all my pages across all my websites when possible ↳ Do internal linking on each site too  ↳ Between blog articles  ↳ Between pages ↳ Extra places that still work:  ↳ Guest posts on sites that already rank for my keywords  ↳ “best tools” roundups  ↳ Unlinked brand mentions   ↳ Search Google for my brand name   ↳ Ask them to turn the mention into a link ↳ When I link out or guest post, I want the page to have:  ↳ Real traffic  ↳ A topic close to mine  ↳ A link that looks natural on the page (avoid spam at all cost) 📁 Social media SEO ↳ Social media gets indexed instantly  ↳ Reddit  ↳ X  ↳ Substack  ↳ LinkedIn ↳ Monitor hot, growing keywords and trends  ↳ Google Trends  ↳ Radar on X ↳ Produce posts around those trends  ↳ Place some of the product links inside ↳ Find relevant social media posts via Google Search  ↳ Plug my product into the comments when it brings some value  ↳ No spam ↳ Put the keyword in the first line of the post ↳ Turn each good blog post into (and link back to the original url with a backlinks, cuz social media backlinks in my experience have really high weight for google):  ↳ 1 X thread  ↳ 1 LinkedIn post  ↳ 1 Reddit answer where it actually helps ↳ Reply under bigger posts in my niche  ↳ Useful reply first  ↳ Link only if it adds something 📁 AI search ↳ Same game as SEO ↳ Ask ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity / Gemini:  ↳ “What’s the best tool for [my keyword]?”  ↳ “Best alternatives to [competitor]”  ↳ See if they mention me  ↳ If not, look at who they mentioned and get onto those same pages by paying them or doing a link exchange --- That's it for now. I'll share the next topic in my next tweet. What should it be? Also, i put it all in great details into my Founder Guide:

@johnrush

j/k. just cancelled my @ahrefs account and am self-hosting https://openseo.so and swapped all my /skills to just use DataForSEO.

@Shpigford

Semrush charges $139.95/month. Ahrefs charges $129/month. A guy named Ben built the open-source alternative that you can run on your computer. It is called OpenSEO. Enter a competitor's website and it reveals the keywords bringing them traffic, the pages winning those searches, and the backlinks helping them rank. And enter your own site and it tracks rankings, crawls technical problems, reads Search Console, and shows whether ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews mention your brand. Then connect Claude or Codex. Your agent can pull the real numbers, compare opportunities, cluster keywords, and save a strategy back into the dashboard instead of guessing from a prompt. The hosted version starts at $10 a month. The entire codebase is MIT licensed, so you can also self-host it and pay DataForSEO directly for only the data you use. No, it does not magically reproduce every database and advanced feature Ahrefs built over a decade. But it breaks the most important rule of the old SEO market: You no longer need their permission to own the tool.

@ihteshamali

Introducing OpenSEO, the open source alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs. I started building it out of spite because the existing tools were too expensive, bloated or scammy. Since then, we've gotten 4k stars on Github and are launching on Product Hunt today. Hope you support!

@bensenescu