Better seo - its so hard to find the project

[tmotyl]

Hi
I'm so happy I've found the tool. I spend a day looking for a tool which can help me and my team track time, but is not focused on spying on employees.

Please consider working on SEO, so it's much easier to find this project. It was also not included in any comparisons or lists I've seen.

I will dig the exact keywords I've used but one for sure was "automatic time tracker linux"

[ErikBjare]

We agree, but we suck at SEO. I welcome any suggestions for concrete action that reliably improves it.

Related issue: #368

[tmotyl]

The website https://activitywatch.net/ basically is just a one page with very little content.
So let's start from the basics:

• the website should get much more content (you can use the one you already have in readme or docs)
• there are 3 broken links
  • on donate/ - donate/gitcoin
  • on contributors - https://github.com/activitywatch/total
  • https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/activitywatch
• robots.txt is missing
• 2 pages have duplicated titles (home page and /download)
• Meta description is duplicated on all pages
• page is missing basic html markup (titles, headers, descriptions...)
• page is missing the keywords people will use. I've quickly run the audit agains some keywords I've found on the competitors websites and most of them are not used even once on the page.
  • Keywords: activity, app, automated, automatically, desktop, free, linux, manage, mobile, monitor, performance, productivity, report, software, system, team, time spent, time, tracking, time-tracker, timetracker, window, work, work hours.
  • I've attached the report: Page Audit (Details)_activitywatch.net_2020-05-04.pdf
• Please also check google search console if everything is green there
• consider putting your documentation under the same domain you have the website, this way you will gain more valuable content.

[ErikBjare]

That's very helpful, thanks.

I've started working on putting docs under the same domain. I won't have time for the copywriting stuff anytime soon, but I welcome any PRs in the website repo that improve the landing page with text that includes more of the keywords.

Edit: Updated your comment to make it a checklist.

[ErikBjare]

Docs are served from https://docs.activitywatch.net/en/latest/ now.

We should probably also add a sitemap.

• Add a sitemap (and link to it from robots.txt)

[tiagoad]

Personal experience: I only found this through alternativeto.net after searching for open-source time-tracking tools on google for a while.

[yzevm]

Personal experience: I found it after searching firefox addons like "time tracker" to measure surfing time (its better to add recommended mark on this addon)

[alexriabtsev]

I've been searching for RescueTime alternative ;)

[nicolae-stroncea]

Idea for adding more content to the website:

Add an FAQ page

FAQ

General

• What is AW?
• Is AW free?
• Where is my data stored? Do you have access to my data? Do you sell it to advertisers?
• There's so many time-trackers out there. Why should I use you?
• Why is being open-source important for a time-management tool?
• Seems to good to be true. What's the catch?
• How do I contribute?
  • Non-coders: "Like us on alternativeto.net", "report bugs on the issue-tracker", "Ask for features on the forum", "add documentation"
  • Coders: "Get to know the architecture by reading the docs"; "Solve issues tagged with "good-first-issue"
• and many other general questions which explain AW's mission, and how it's different from current alternatives. Can get more inspiration from FAQ's of closed-source alternatives

Specific

• Help! My browser isn't tracked
• Where do I find more trackers/watchers?
• Can I use AW on more than one computer?
• Other questions that you noticed pop up very frequently on the forum and on github issues

[nicolae-stroncea]

Another idea to make AW more visible online:

• A lot(most?) find the time tracker they use by searching for it on google.
• Therefore, the solution is to look up simple queries people might ask like: "open-source time-tracker", "best time-tracker", "RescueTime alternative", "free software to track time" and commenting in the top blog comment sections/quora threads/reddit threads about AW.
• I haven't seen the project mentioned in virtually any of the top 3-4 posts on google for any of those queries, and commenting there is an easy 1-time thing to do that doesn't require maintenance. A bonus point is that in a lot of the places people specifically ask for OSS projects, most comments come from closed-source alternative, so highlighting AW there would be especially targeted to the right audience

[cybrpimp]

I'm in a battle right now with the ManicTime guys who provide horrible, horrible customer service to their clients. I've been watching this project mature for a few years now and have been wanting to switch over.

FYI, we do SEO :)

[cybrpimp]

Another idea to make AW more visible online:

• A lot(most?) find the time tracker they use by searching for it on google.
• Therefore, the solution is to look up simple queries people might ask like: "open-source time-tracker", "best time-tracker", "RescueTime alternative", "free software to track time" and commenting in the top blog comment sections/quora threads/reddit threads about AW.
• I haven't seen the project mentioned in virtually any of the top 3-4 posts on google for any of those queries, and commenting there is an easy 1-time thing to do that doesn't require maintenance. A bonus point is that in a lot of the places people specifically ask for OSS projects, most comments come from closed-source alternative, so highlighting AW there would be especially targeted to the right audience

I would recommend adding a comment to the Quora Posts related to "Time Tracking Software" related keywords.

[ErikBjare]

@cybrpimp I've posted on Quora here, here, here, and here (and probably more places). Upvotes and further Quora answers welcome :)

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[jouhoff]

I often read that security is a reason for alternative choices. Also, I believe a course or collection on how to build custom watchers. Anyways, Youtube is pretty empty and the ones there show barely how much detail you can pull and how to use it.

In general some courses, more templates for popular applications and rather than throwing in the regex101 link, address examples and the self learning recourses at the end of the documentation.

[The-Beebz]

A bonus point is that in a lot of the places people specifically ask for OSS projects, most comments come from closed-source alternative, so highlighting AW there would be especially targeted to the right audience

Yes. I only found this because I've been recently fascinated by FOSS culture and have been trying out a lot of things and turning to github first more and more often over google searches. I think I stumbled upon this through the humane tech list or something similar. I fell in love right away because of how hands off it was and the fact that it was already able to replace Rescuetime, Toggl and work.exe (a AHK script by Neil Cicirega) combined and shared it right away to a discord.

I've always had a lot of distaste for SEO practices and found it difficult to play the game while sticking to how I truly felt and making it sound natural. But in any case-

My suggestion:
I've noticed the website doesnt mention Discord at all and I'm not sure how much you've got going on for the server but it might be something to consider. I remember once searching for "productivity" discords and the best ones were centered around an app or product for productivity.

Obsidian Members Group and Forest Study Chat are huge community discord servers that I'm sure would have people very interested in the project. Obsidian is a notetaking app which I feel has similar values to this one and Forest is a time tracking gamification app.

Discord has been a wonderful avenue for me when it comes to collaboration and networking (despite the companies questionable practices). I hope this suggestion is helpful. I don't usually interact on github, this is actually the first time I've offered a suggestion, but I guess that's just how much a single day of using this project has meant to me. Haha.

[tmotyl]

Hi
One more keyword to consider adding on website and github "activity tracker" - that's what I used to find the project recently again :)

[Purrkeet]

Hi. The SEO was great. I found the project on the first result!
I used "activity tracker windows"