Follow Friday - Making a name
Which Hive?
Much as I love the Hive ecosystem the name is not great. There are other products and services which use it and they seem to have more 'Google juice'. That makes it hard to find news about it too. 'hivecoin' does better, but would people search for that?
Is it too late for a rebranding and possibly a change of name? It would be best to do it before Hive gets much bigger. Whatever happens I do think we need more unified branding across the dapps. With some of them it is not obvious they run on Hive blockchain. Is that a deliberate ploy so that they could break off with something else? That has happened before (e.g. DLive).
Very few people, even in the cryptosphere, know about Hive. If they do hear about it then they need to be able to find relevant search results.
One place they may look is Wikipedia. I was discussing this with @hivetrending who tried creating a page. but it was rejected by the moderators. We need something better that they will accept. For that it needs to have good references. It should talk about why Hive was created and what it offers that is different to other blockchains. That should include describing the dapps. I am sure someone here must have experience of writing Wikipedia articles and knows what is needed.
Friday Followings
As usual I will include some people I have found on Hive who you may wish to check out. They will be getting a share of the post rewards.
- @mattbrown.art is an artist from the Isle of Man who just joined up. He is getting into NFTs.
- @lordbutterfly has created a couple of proposals so people can vote on whether or not they want a reduction in power down time to four weeks. I personally think that could be a bad move as powering up proves you want to be invested and have the rights to curate posts as well as vote for witnesses and proposals. Someone else wants one week, but that has security risks. Vote for what you think is best.
- @ashtv is a videograher from Yorkshire who is part of the Filmmakers community. He has some cool gear to work with.
- Brighton musicians @stickupboys have a fun tune available as an NFT.
- @nupulse, aka Billy Korg is part of the @risingstargame community and has been doing some NFT giveaways.
This week's buzzword is NFT.
The End
I will spare you a doghouse section this week, but be alert for those who just take from Hive. If you do well from it then consider sharing the love. You can make someone a beneficiary on your posts to direct some rewards their way. That could be @null if you just want to burn some rewards. I did downvote a trending post today as the rewards were crazy, but the author is okay with that.
Our priority should be to do what is good for Hive. It is still tiny with just a few thousand active users. When it goes to millions we can all benefit. We have been losing a lot of sizable accounts in the last year.
Hive five!
I don't think I am going to vote on any of the powerdown posts. I am on the fence about the whole thing. I have my opinions of how it should be done and I have shared those. Neither of the proposals are something I fully support so we will just see what happens. I think changing the name at this point would be hard what with exchange listings and all of that.
It may be possible to keep the HIVE code. Other coins have changed name, so it is possible.
Thanks for the mention. I hope some talented folks jump in to beef up our Wiki draft page. It would be a great way to gain some community clout. Oh and also: !PIZZA
@steevc! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @hivetrending.
Learn more about $PIZZA Token at hive.pizza
Agreed on the name. Hive is not a very good name. We need something more unique that not only would better show up 1st in searches, but would stick in peoples' minds more. But I'm not networked enough that I had any say at all on that decision, nor am I now. As angry as we all seem to still be at Steemit, they have a much better name.
Why was the Wikipedia page rejected, do you know? I have tried editing pages there before, but had even simple edits reverted for reasons I don't understand. It's a wonderful resource for basic info on things, but otherwise it could be improved.
The wiki post was a bit brief and only had a reference from Medium apart from the project site. There are some new stories on various sites out there, Steem got some mainstream coverage, for what good it did.
i wrote about this some time ago. google is not happy with hive blockchain, other search engines do much better. why, we can speculate and go to conspiracy theories.
i know almost nothing on ranking things on search engines and web development, but we could look at this from other side. if we had some specific name that means that people would find it only if the search for that specific name. now if we manage to move to the first page on just Hive we would get more random people on.
i know that only crypto people use presearch but if you search hive there first thing is info about hive (coingecko info).
on powerdown, i kinda could not care if it went one way or another as i think it would not do much difference. 35-40% of hive is staked and i don't think those that don't stake it now would do it if there was 4 weeks powerdown. maybe i am wrong...
Actually I checked on Presearch, which uses Dsearch by default. Top results there are the same as Google, but it looks like @liondani bought an ad. That's good if it leads people here. I expect it would be more expensive to get the same ad visibility on Google. I don't think it needs 'conspiracy theories'. Other brands with that name are more interesting to the world. We may each see different results based on location and other factors.
We need some SEO experts to tell us what will improve visibility.
!BEER
this is what i get on presearch when i search for hive
this post is from month ago, so not sure would results be the same.
https://leofinance.io/@bil.prag/google-not-happy-with-decentralized-media
On the Presearch engine I do get the Coingeko listing plus the Hiveonboard ad. Actually DSearch gets the same. As you said, few people would use those. Most use whatever their browser defaults to.
!BEER
View or trade
BEER.Hey @bil.prag, here is a little bit of
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BEER.I'd like to apologise in advance for my SEO ramblings elsewhere on the thread. The tl:dr version is: Hive.io is definitely not prey to a Google penalty, and its rankings are generally quite healthy at least in the US, but it's sorely lacking in other territories.
The main consideration for me is that it is relying almost exclusively on 8.1m backlinks (links from other sites to hive.io), rather than relying on having a competent organic SEO strategy implemented on the site itself. Hive's domain authority rating (SEMRush's statistic) gives us a score of '55', which is actually very healthy (60+ is considered excellent), so I think it any on-page/on-site tweaks could have a more potent impact that sites with, say, authority scores of 12.
ramblings are fine and appreciated 😀
I have a friend who works for a large SEO company and they have such a hard time keeping up with arbitrary changes to the Google algorithm. It's just so opaque, and even a company that's been doing really well can have their traffic slashed 10-fold for no apparent reason.
I found Hive through a blog post about eco-friendly NFTgalleries. Then I saw a detailed github post that mentioned NFT Showroom too and my interest was peaked. From there I was drawn into thewider Hive eco-system. So yes, ultimately, I think it's the quality of dapps will help get word out, and the fact that they're all "cross-pollinated" is a big draw.
dapps would need to do more to get outside people and a good app can get more people. i would personally want more connections between apps.
and maybe the number of posts, comments and activity will help in rankings.
I wanted to give some SEO considerations here for Hive with a quick five minute search. Firstly, Hive.io's top ranking keywords globally (root domain) trends towards:
Whether you see the site at position 1 will vary by geography, but by and large this is true.
The site's search traffic share is weighted 56% in favour of US search results. The main search result competitors, in terms of keywords that are shared with hive, are:
On the topic of Google penalties, and the line that 'Google is not happy with hive blockchain', the good news is that I have no reason or evidence to think this is true; the site is ranking highly for the relevant keywords, and it has only continued to gain keyword rankings and organic search visibility. As someone that was on the end of a Google penalty, you'd watch your top keywords tank almost overnight. This doesn't seem to be the case.
Other notes
According to SEMRush's Keyword Gap checker for US results, there are no significant 'Top Opportunities' that Hive is failing to rank for. So, there could very well be some localised SEO tweaks to be made by region, but it indicates that hive.io is not immediately doing terribly.
What I did notice is that in terms of on-page SEO, Hive is -- well, it's piss-poor. For example, the home-page or root domain is usually a big traffic driver so I thought I'd examine that. The H1, arguably the most important on-page element along with the page title and meta description should be related to the keyword. This is like the sign-post to tell traffic what is coming up. You need one that is clear, unambiguous.
The page title is good: "Hive - The Blockchain & Cryptocurrency for Web 3.0"
Hive.io has three H1s.
So, to continue with the sign-post analogy, this is like having three seperate signs, each pointing you in a different direction. Google, rather than taking any turning, would rather take a different turning (to a different site) that has a less ambiguous sign post.
Here is the full home-page header map:
H1: Fast.
H1: Scalable.
H1: Powerful.
H3: The Blockchain for Web 3.o
H2: Hive Ecosystem
H2: Wallets
H2: DHF
These are awful. Headings (1/2/3/4) getting should follow from one to another. For a better example of clear headings, see below:
H1: Hive | Decentralised blockchain ecosystem
H2: What is the Hive Blockchain?
H3: What is a Hive coin?
H4: How can you use a hive coin?
H2: The Hive Ecosystem
H3: How to use the Hive ecosystem
What next?
While I only spent a few minutes digging, it's clear as day that while the site is ranking well in the US, there are other geographic opportunities to be netted and I would start with an overhaul of the on-page SEO for the site.
If the rest of the site is as bad as the homepage, I'd anticipate that no real efforts have been made to optimise it.
As a quick aside, how would it be ranking for those keywords if it's badly optimised? Simple: backlinks. 8.1 million in fact, from approximately 1,270 domains. Backlinks are when an external site links back to your domain. 2 million are from hive.blog (makes sense). I would recommend the site owners to do the painful task of a backlink audit: this involves reviewing the list of links back to the website and eliminating bad quality traffic. As the site has a domain authority score of 55, the site is already perceived by Google as 55, which is very healthy.
I'd also commission members of the community to produce one long-form written piece of content on each of the five most dominant keywords, creating a broad informative canvas of that area: Hive coin / Hive crypto / Hive token / Hive Wallet / Hive blockchain. These will form what we refer to as 'pillar pages, Hubs for the content related to those keywords. Then, you commission several pieces of smaller, more focused pieces of content on an aspect of that respective keyword. For example: Someone writes a long-form, 2000-word pillar page, "What is Hive Coin?". We then have a smaller 800-word article, "where to use hive coin" or "5 sites to make money with hive coin" or "can I use hive coin for [xxx]" -- something that is related to that pillar content. Then we create internal links within the site from the sub-page to the pillar page, and vice versa. This creates a logical web in the site, and clearly associates the pages by keyword. These strands of internal links strengthen the perceived SEO value of the site as Google identifies the pillar page as not only lengthy (providing greater value) but that it links to other pages with related keywords.
And.... Hive could look to run some some paid ads. I'm not registering any traffic. I saw from one of your screenshots, @steevc , that one of the keywords had an Ad placement. Hive.io absolutely needs to leverage paid ads to own their search real estate and avoid competitors stealing their thunder.
There's some initial thoughts! I hope that was clearer than mud.
As of May 16.
Domain Authority Score (SemRush): 55. this is pretty good. +60 is excellent.
Organic keywords: 1,486
Keywords in top 3 in Google: 26
Keywords in 4-10 in Google: 52
Keywords in 11-20 in Google: 109
Keywords in 21-50 in Google: 550
Keywords in 51-100 in Google: 749
Backlinks: 8,100,000 (99% Follow)
*And my SEMRush free plan has now run out of data! *
well i think i learned something :D
i am not sure but i think the hive.io page was not really worked on. First it was just quickly made for the hard fork then i think someone took to make it a bit better.
I see hive.io as a bonus in people finding the chain. ranking all kind of different posts on all the front ends is probably more important.
I was surprised with how my posts on travelfeed.io are ranking. but they do make you pay more attention to SEO and my travel posts are usually decent :D
Interesting stuff. I've got no experience in SEO, but it sounds like we need to exploit it where we can.
!PIZZA
@dougdigital! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @steevc.
Learn more about $PIZZA Token at hive.pizza
Thanks for the Pizza, Steve!
For sure, there's definitely some basic optimisations on the site to be made if they're to continue gaining ground. For us UK folks, the site is barely ranking for 50 keywords -- lots of work to be done!
Maybe you could copy what you wrote above into a post and I could share it so others see it who might be able to take some action.
You're right about Google. I also struggle when I search for something hive related, there're too many products with the name. Since it's not an artificial name someone invented, it's a natural word. That might be an advantage, people remember it easily. Maybe just change the notation to something unique, "hivve" or something like that...
Or hayve or heyve. I think the problem is that it was picked by tech geeks, not a marketing person. You can search for peakd, but why would anyone guess that is part of Hive?
!BEER
Thanks Steevc for the shoutout! I really appreciate it. I sold my first NFT late last night and it just feels fantastic. I love this eco-system, and there's so much potential in it - but I have to admit, it was quite hard getting info on it elsewhere on the web when I searched for "Hive". Searching for Hive Blockchain brought up a crypto-mining company that had no association with Hive at all (and this took a while for me to figure out!)
Whether that means a change of name I'm not so sure - but it's definitely a conversation to be had. I think as a name it's pretty strong and does a good job capturing what the platform is about. If it does gain traction then all other "Hives" out there will gradually fall away in search status and it won't be a problem.
In my opinion, it's better to have a actual word rather than a "nonsense-word" brand. But that does mean that most of the dictionary words have already got some brands pinned to it. Hivecoin is definitely an option, and doesn't need to be a whole rebranding - just a renaming of the token.
For me, though, the issue is less about the brand and more about how people buy Hive. If they first have to buy a more established crypto coin to then transfer into Hive, then we'll always be playing seconds fiddle.
Getting Binance et al to allow you to exchange fiat into Hive is going to be the thing that opens the floodgates. Or a dapp that other hive dapps can plug into, that allows the user to easily buy Hive with a credit card. I appreciate that is a difficult technical and logistical challenge though.
Anyway, that's my 0.0002 Hive's worth!
Happy to include you. You may be the first person on the Isle of Man that I've found.
I think the name was picked by geeks rather than a marketing person. There are several prominent brands it clashes with.
I have a Wirex card that lets me buy crypto. I can't buy HIVE directly, but it's easy to convert from others. We could do with a direct method. I think some of the games accept cards or Paypal, so that may be an option.
Anyway, have fun. There's lots of artists here and NFTs are the new coolness.
!ENGAGE 25
That's interesting to here about the games. I may check them out.
And, I've been waxing lyrical about Hive on the island here, so maybe it'll become a Hive hot-spot!
Let me know if anyone signs up so I can add them to my list. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool and people can help each other out when they get started. Hive is not simple to understand at first.
Have fun.
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.ENGAGEtokens.Agreed but to rebrand now might be a bit late, i did severall rebranding and it costs a lot effort and concerted efforts. Within a company already difficult where you can create corporate guidelines. Might be a option to create or promote better named sub brands / DApps
Well we need some way to get the brand we have better known. I hope someone can work on that. I know there were some proposals that could get funding.
!ENGAGE 10
Well, then that should be part of the marketing proposal - not seen any results there but branding costs money and to be honest I doubt this is sth we can pay as a community especially also with no guarantee. Given I work in that industry we should really focus first on a "core story" - as a step before branding (if we need that branding at all). We need to crate the core of this community (where tech, features etc is max a little part), we need to create the value, the vision, the potential outcome for a broader non-tech audience to attract users and investors.
We need more posts around marketing and SEO for those with the expertise to help. See comment from @dougdigital on this post with some SEO stats. I know nothing much about that.
ENGAGEtokens.You are certainly right
We need to be found on the search engines, instead of competing space with other brands who are similar to us in names.
Maybe we have to take the Wikipedia options since we will need a lot of links and references
of course, links and references will not be a problem because we have already created an ecosystem that has lots of juicy contents concerning the platform and other sub-communities which we can use
Let's just start from somewhere and see how it goes
I don't know how easy it would be to change the token name. Not to difficult I imagine,but I am not one of the tech guys. For an alternative name I think we would have a hard time for people to agree on a new one. My name change suggestion would be:
CONTRAI don't know if it is already be used or not, but we are sort of a contra community to most coins and to most social media.
I recently started following ashtv. I would follow the others right away..
I wish we didn't choose such a generic name like "Hive". We could have come up with a unique name like Bitcoin or Ethereum did, names not out of an English dictionary. It would have helped people searching for us on Google if our name was more unique. Too late now though...
Agreed! If you are not even able to make yourself a name on wiki one should reconsider its "market activities"...
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