What are the "secret SEO hacks" that can make my tool visible?
I'm in the marketing phase, where I'm trying to scale my first tool without the help of paid advertising.
I'm trying to talk about it on my own social networks (while I have the link pinned to my profile)
I'm helping people in the comments answer questions about the problem
I'm going to create content for social networks around the problem
I want to appear in as many articles as possible (third-party websites, newsletters, my own blog, etc.)
Launch in directories
Well, one thing I've always wanted to earn credit for would be to be mentioned in Wikipedia.I managed to do it a few times for minimalist phone, but only in 2 languages; as soon as I published in English, they reported us and deleted the remaining articles in those two languages.
What are your guaranteed tips to increase my chances of getting a link on Wikipedia? + other "secret SEO hacks"?
Replies
On the Wikipedia point - I'd actually treat that as a signal, not a setback. Wikipedia's notability bar is deliberately strict, and getting a page deleted for a new tool usually means it was written to promote the tool rather than to document something independently notable. There's no "hack" around that, and honestly you don't want one - a page that survives review only happens after independent press/reviews already exist, so it's a lagging indicator of visibility, not a source of it.
What actually moved the needle for tools I've watched grow: dofollow backlinks from real usage, not directory submissions. Directories mostly help crawlers find you faster, they rarely rank or send traffic on their own. The stuff that compounds is: writing pages that answer a specific technical question your tool solves (comparison pages, "how to do X without Y" posts), so people link to it naturally when discussing that problem, and answering the same question well enough in a PH launch thread or forum that people come back to it later - PH threads get indexed and keep getting found long after launch day.
@omri_ben_shoham1 It is true, to be honest, most of the traffic for SafeLimit (my LinkedIn extension) are from this thread :D
@busmark_w_nika On Wikipedia, the thing that worked better for me than chasing a page: getting cited inside an article that already exists. Editors kill promotional pages fast, but a citation that backs up a factual claim tends to survive, because it's doing a job for the article instead of asking for space. So publish something actually citable, original data or a proper comparison, then go find the paragraph that's missing a source.
The other one is boring but it pays: YouTube. A 90 second screen recording titled with the exact phrase somebody types can sit on page 1 of Google for months, and it gets there way before a blog post on a new domain will. Same logic as what Omri said about threads getting indexed, except you get to pick the phrase up front.
And people don't search for categories, they search for their exact mess. Not "screentime app", more like "how do I stop opening instagram without deleting it". Do you know which ugly long phrases people already use to find minimalist phone? That list is usually where the easy wins are hiding.
@yelyzaveta_kibets Good advice with that YouTube video – I didn't know that it can work so well. I more talk about SafeLimit, because I want to position this one tool well :)
@busmark_w_nika Smart to push one tool, the YouTube thing works way better when you can own like 3 exact phrases instead of spreading thin. What's the ugliest search phrase SafeLimit fixes? That's the video I'd make first.
On the Wikipedia one specifically — worth checking before you spend more effort
on it. External links there carry rel="mw:extlink nofollow". I just looked at a
random article to be sure. So even the two language versions that survived
weren't passing anything; it's reach and credibility, not a link.
That's actually the tip I'd give above any other: check the rel before you
write for a site, not after. Ctrl+U on any article there, find an outbound link,
read its rel attribute. Ten seconds.
I did this across everywhere I'd been publishing and it was not what I assumed:
dev.to rel="noopener noreferrer" followed
freeCodeCamp no rel at all followed
DigitalOcean no rel at all followed
Hashnode nofollow ugc
HackerNoon ugc
Medium ugc nofollow
CSS-Tricks nofollow
Product Hunt noreferrer noopener ugc
I'd written four pieces for one of the nofollow ones before checking. Four
evenings, zero link value. That's the whole lesson.
One trap if you do check: don't judge a site by its footer. Every publisher
marks its own social icons rel="me nofollow", and if you count those you'll call
a perfectly good site nofollow. I did exactly that with DigitalOcean and got the
answer backwards. Look at a citation inside the article body.
And on directories — I checked four and three were nofollow. They're not
useless, they just aren't what people think they are.