8 Tips for Better SEO for Startups

Startups are already bootstrapped and work on tight budgets. The co-founders work under immense pressure to get their idea to become a viable and profitable business. They focus more on product development and sales. Little or no focus is on website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more economical and time consuming. But, if perfectly done then, it will pay off in a long run.

Here are simple 8 tips which involves little or no investment but, a bit of effort for startups to promote their business online.

1. On-page Optimization: To start with the on-page optimization need to be done perfectly. Identify the right and perfect keywords. I would suggest to target more on long-tail keywords. This will help in 2-ways. One, the competition for long-tail is less and it will be easier to rank on top in search engines. Two, it will attract the right audience for you business and the conversions are easy and quick. On-page optimization the very first and important step for SEO. A mistake done here will consume lot of time to correct it. As you will be on the wrong track from the start. Note that the objective here is just not to rank on top in Google. But, the website should rank on top in Google for the right keywords and phrases.

Weston Bergmann, lead investor in BetaBlox, which is an equity-based business incubator for startup entrepreneurs in Kansas City, compares SEO to a marathon:

"The most important thing to note about SEO for early-stage ventures is it's a marathon, not a sprint. I see too many people getting frustrated by a lack of stellar results in the first couple months, when this just isn't possible. These fights are long-term ones, so buckle down and stick to the basics. Eventually you'll look back and see that you've built a monster."Search Engine Optimization Bible written by Jerri L. Ledford, is a very good book to know and learn the basics of SEO. This book offers readers about what they need to write a SEO plan and implement a successful SEO program. It also provides useful and easy tips on getting the website to the top on SERPs, The sidebars provide more information and additional resources on the topic which are very helpful to a rookie.

2. Mobilize, Localize and Socialize: If your business is focus on your local area, try to have the content more relevant to the local area. It is always better to be on all the Google properties like YouTube, Google+, Google Places... Have a mobile friendly website / webpage as well. 

 

3. Launch Blog and Keep Writing: I am sure this is the one which will be ignore by most of the startups as this is more time consuming. But, this step is the next step for effective SEO after the #1 above. Search engines want to see more of fresh and quality content. Make sure the topics, titles and the posts again include the right keywords as far as possible.

Secondly, it is not necessary that the co-founders should only write the articles and post it. You can assign and pick someone within the organization or have a freelancer to write.

Lastly, have an option to share the blog articles over the social media. As the more the articles are shared and viewed, the more help it will do for SEO. For more details refer my article 'Is Content Still King?'.

 

4. Social Media Marketing (SMM): The content / webpage which is more talked and discussed about in the social channels is of more help in SEO. Be it a blog post, video, image, website link or a post in the social channel. Having something viral in the media will boost the search engine rankings. This does not just mean that you make a few post daily and it is done. One needs to check the followers, respond to comments. Also, need to see the mentions of the name of the startup or the business and initiate the conversation. The mentions in the social media are the right signals for the business.

I understand, this eats away lot of the valuable time. But, keeping aside an hour of your daily time for this will be beneficial for a long run. I would suggest not to outsource this to any agency as I believe, you are the one who knows the business well and understand the customers. Thus, the timely interactions can be properly done by you and will be effective. An hour a day is what is required.

Do not miss to read 'The Four Important Steps to Start Social Networking for Business'.

Also, one can answer related questions to their industry and business on Quora.com. Not only answer but, can ask relevant questions as well. Never know from where we can get traffic and customers. 

 

5. Startups Directories: There are many directories were the startup can be submitted. There are tons of them. But, I would suggest just pick the top few ones and submit your startup to them with a proper description and tags. Joining sites like Angel.co and Crunchbase.com will help. There are other few directories like Betali.st, Erli Bird, CSS Mania and more. Comprehensive list and experience of a startup is nicely given by RivalFox in the article 'Startup Directories: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly'

 

6. News Media: When your product is almost ready and you are ready to spread the news about the startup do take help of the news channel. The timing needs to be right. Just do not be too early to disclose the idea and attract competition. Like directories, we have many news websites which give news related to startups and most of them do it for free. Here as well just focus on few good ones like Mashable, Venturebeat, Startupbeat, YourStory, Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com, Alltop....

 

7. Guest Blogging: Apart from the news channels, there are other bloggers who are interested to write about startups. It is just not about startups, but bloggers who write about the industry related to your business will also help.

Weston Bergmann of BetaBlox opines about guest blogging and he had this to add:

"Recently I've heard a lot of people say that guest blogging is dead. Well it's not. What's dead is spammy and manipulative link building techniques. What's more important than ever is high-quality guest blogging and thought leadership. If you're sharing high quality and exclusive content you'll be rewarded, not punished. Also, guest blogging shouldn't be a one-and-done thing; aim to write for the same publication multiple times."

 

8. Analytics and Metrics: Do not forget to analyze the traffic stats and the sources of these traffic. See which traffic is being converted and focus on generating more traffic from these sources. Google Analytics is the best free tool available and to start with the numbers which it provides is apt. If the numbers are read and interpreted well then, it will save lot of efforts and cost to the startup. This step is always ignored by most of the businesses.

 

Whether it's for a startup or a new business, these simple 8 steps will help your SEO or digital marketing efforts to be more successful. Of course, once you launch a business the keywords and content your care about may change, but the game remains the same.

Work at a startup? Ask questions or share your own experiences in the comments!



 

SEO Basics For A Rookiee

The Search Engine Optimization process is briefly described by the following stages:

1. Keyword Research:

Proper research assures that your website is optimized around the keywords most often used by your visitors. Without proper research, Optimization is likely to yield poor results. The research phase produces a finalized set of keywords that may be anywhere from 1-150 keywords. You can use the free tool available at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com. Prepare a set of keywords for every page of the website depending on the content that is on the webpage.

2. Identifying your Competition:

After selecting the best keywords, it is important to know which websites rank highest in the major Search Engines. Websites that appear the most often are referred to as your ‘Competition.' Comparing your website to your Competition helps to give an idea of where the initial efforts of Optimization should be focused. Identify and study the keywords being used. Check the link popularity and PR of the competitors and make a note of it. Identify the traffic the competitors’ are getting. You can use these free tools available at – http://www.marketleap.com, http://www.trafficestimate.com, http://www.alexa.com.

A detailed analysis of your website and the competition provides the details necessary to plan a successful Optimization.

3. Meta Tags: Meta-tags & Title tag, Hyperlinks, Image Alt tags:

Optimizing the HTML code includes creating Title tags, Meta description tags, Meta keyword tags, hyperlinks, and possibly headings & image alt attributes. All of these are factors in helping the search engine spiders to properly classify your site, with some being more important than others. Rather than go into detail on how to perform all of these tasks, I'll direct you to some of my previous SEO articles.

When your code is optimized, it's finally time to upload your new pages to your server. In the past, at this point we would then resubmit them to the search engines. However, these days, this is an unnecessary step. As long as you're dealing with an existing site with some links already pointing to it, the search spiders should visit and index at least your home page fairly quickly. It may take a bit longer for them to re-index the inner pages, but you can rest assured that they will.

Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were.

4. Content Optimization:

Once the keyword phrases are chosen for each page of the site, it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty and start utilizing them within the copy. If you're rewriting from scratch, be sure your copywriter understands which phrases need to be used, what the goals of the site are, and who the target market is. Obviously this information will affect how they write the copy, so the more they know; the more accurate your copy will turn out. If you're lucky enough to be able to work in the necessary keywords, that's your next step. Once your copy is finished and approved, you should now have a number of pages focusing on 2 or 3 keyword phrases each.

5. HTML Site Map:

Create the html sitemaps providing the links of all the pages. Have the keywords in the body text and the anchor links if possible.

6. XML Site Map:

Create xml sitemaps and submit to Google and Yahoo. Free tools are available on - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/, www.google.com/webmasters/ and http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.

7. Website Structure Analysis:

Website Structure Analysis actually means website architecture. It is an approach to the design and planning of websites which involves certain criteria like technical, aesthetic and functional. The main focus is on the user and user requirements in designing a structure of the website. Attention is primarily given to the web content, usability, interaction design, information and web design.

In case of search engine optimization the navigation schemes of the website should be created most importantly for use by visitors. Through usability testing we can easily determine what type of navigation schemes visitors prefer. Like for example a text based or graphics based one.

For a website to be successful first and foremost, it should satisfy your target audience. At the same time by making sites simple and easily accessible we will be providing the easiest path for the search engine robots to index our site. This strategy helps in the long run success of search engine optimization. No matter how often the search engines algorithm change the good content and simple navigation is always rewarded.

Search engine friendly design: The easier the navigation and the more text on the page the better it is not only for the visitor but also for the search engine robots. Certain points to be considered while designing a search engine friendly site are not to include long javascript in the source code, dynamically generated pages, frames and so on as the search engine robots have difficulty in crawling them.

However there are techniques to overcome the problems with indexing but the best way to assure that the pages will be indexed is to keep them simple and ensure return visits both from the search engines and the visitors as well.

8. Robot.txt file:

Many search engines use programs called robots to gather web pages for indexing. These programs are not limited to a pre-defined list of web pages; they can follow links on pages they find, which makes them a form of intelligent agent. The process of following links is called spidering, wandering, or gathering.

The robots.txt file,

• is a text file created in notepad or any text editor
• should be placed in the top level directory or root of the website or server space
• should include all lower case letters

Through the robots.txt file we can,

• exclude all robots from visiting the server
• allow complete access to all robots
• exclude robots from accessing a portion of the server
• exclude a specific robot
• exclude certain type of files from accessing by specifying the file extensions.

Here are few examples of robot.txt file. Check both good and bad practices.

Entry Meaning
User-agent: *
Disallow:
The asterisk (*) in the User-agent field is shorthand for "all robots". Because nothing is disallowed, everything is allowed.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

In this example, all robots can visit every directory except the three mentioned.

More examples are available in my previous post - http://seocolumn.blogspot.com/2005/12/search-engine-robots-and-robottxt.html

9. One-way links and Directory links:

Some SEOs recommend that you do these before all the other work so that you can start getting rankings right away. However, I prefer to wait until the copy changes have been made and uploaded. The newly focused copy helps the directory reviewers to more easily understand what your site is all about, and they'll be less apt to edit your submitted description. If you submit before your site's copy is using your specific keyword phrases within the copy, the reviewer may feel these keywords don't belong within your directory description.

When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

Where as directory submission to Yahoo, DMOZ… can happen immediately. You just need to make sure you have the details asked by these website forms are ready with you. And make sure to have the home page to have some relevant content prior to submission to these directories.

10. Reciprocal links:

As with directory submissions, I prefer to wait until the site is in perfect condition before starting to request links. You can certainly get started researching link partners before the SEO is complete; however, the better your site is, the more likely others will be willing to link to it. Link building can be done in a quick burst, but should also be an ongoing process. You should always be on the lookout for sites that are a good fit with yours and contact them about exchanging links.

In some cases, additional content pages may also need to be created as per the need of the keywords you want to rank for.

11. Article Submissions:

The fundamental base of the internet is not the page, but the link. A great way to accumulate links is to write articles and submit them to places interested in quality articles.

When you write articles for free on certain websites, you are typically given a by-line or author bio which you can link to your website. Few websites also accept links within the body text using html tags.

Few good Article resources are listed below.

http://goarticles.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
http://amazines.com
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://bpubs.com/
http://businessknowhow.com/
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml
http://www.promotionworld.com/
http://promotenewz.com/

12. Adopt Web 2.0 Technologies:

Do not think that the traditional tactics of SEO – optimizing using meta tags, keyword density, prominence of keywords…more has lost the importance. They are still important and one needs to follow these for better rankings.

Here are few easy steps…http://seocolumn.blogspot.com/search/label/web 2.0