[mootothemax]

>SEO rigging? That's mostly having links from other reputable sources. If this software is good, other good sites will link to it rising it up in the search results

You have tell Google what your site is about, otherwise it's pretty hopeless; you're pretty much well asking Google to guess what terms the site should rank for.

The five-minute-basics this site needs are to create a meaningful title tag (getting "YouTube Downloader" in there would be a great start. With zero research, maybe even "YouTube Downloader - Save Videos for Later"), create a friendly meta description that'll tell people what it's about in the search result pages, and use an H1 where it's currently using a TD with "subtitle" class.

It wouldn't hurt to also have a short bullet-point list of uses cases, just to get related search terms - e.g. "save youtube to my computer" - that the big G can use to direct users to the site.

>Lot's of open source projects come up top of the results when you search for stuff because of this fact.

The problem is so bad, I know lots of people - myself included - who hunt for projects first on Github, and Google a distant second.

Google is capable of some quite incredible things; using mind-reading to find out the important parts of a project or what it relates to, sadly, isn't one of their core strengths.

[dalore]

Google pretty much ignore or place a very very low value on meta description and titles since it's so easy to game. External links, from high ranking reputable sites is where the most value is at since they are hard to game.

Example would be linking to this project page from the wikipedia page for youtube. Also the text used for links is important.

Yes google is a mind reader and it does figure what your page is about. It's actually not that hard using natural language toolkits to process the text on the page and figure it out. See http://www.nltk.org/

[OJFord]

    > The problem is so bad, I know lots of people - myself
    > included - who hunt for projects first on Github, and
    > Google a distant second.

Seriously?

I search with `site:github.com` all the time.

[jefurii]

DuckDuckGo has !github, !gh, !ghcode, and !gist.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=github

[OJFord]

That just takes me to GH search results, though.

My point is I find that I have more success with Google's indexing than Github's own (same with SO; many others).

[TheGrassyKnoll]

And don't forget !yt for YouTube search from DuckDuckGo. (!bang will show you almost 8000 bang options)

[mootothemax]

>Seriously?

>I search with `site:github.com` all the time.

Yup - I find that Google's index isn't always as fresh as Github's, and being able to filter by code vs. repository vs. issues and then by language if necessary is a great help.

Basically, for me, finding open-source projects is a real unsolved problem!