photo credit: Neil Boothman

Today I came across one of the most creative and informative presentations on SEOmoz regarding Search Engine Optimization for startups. The presentation was made for the YCombinator SEO for Startups event.

Here are a few tips from the post/event:

1. Employ SEO in the concept phase (not after the site is built) – It is quite hard to do but take advantage of being a startup. You’re building your website from scratch, so be sure to apply SEO from the beginning.

2. Build accessibility first – Make something search engines can find. Unique content that users and search engines find valuable

3. SEO is a strategy, not a tactic – Don’t do the usual SEO stuff by following certain guidelines and tactics. Explore, experiment and form a proper SEO strategy for your startup

4. Remember: SEO is not a one-time event – It is constantly evolving, not only because Google keeps changing its algorithms but more because hundreds of competitors keep adding content and updating their site.

5. Analytics = Religion – Researching, tracking and reporting, all is possible through analytics. It’s the soul of any SEO initiative

6. Have other sources of traffic to your website (not only Google) – Pass links in e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, press releases etc. If 90 % of your traffic is coming from Google then that is certainly very dangerous.

For more tips, visit SEOmoz

I promise that no hairbrained scheme to manipulate the search rankings by registering thousands of sites or scraping the web for open places to link or contacting 6,000 “friends” for a link exchange are either A) new or B) going to work.

photo credit: M i x y

Let’s start by explaining what Inbound Marketing is all about – the style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers (when they need) and not ‘pushing’ your product or service (referred to as Outbound Marketing) is known as Inbound Marketing.

As a customer when you need to buy a product/service, you don’t solely trust the ad or newspaper release. Suggestions and feedback from friends, family and other customers influences your decision in a big way. And getting this ‘feedback’ has become so much easier with the advent and rise of the Internet and Web 2.0.

All you today need to do this type your query in a search engine and here you go! You have hundreds of reviews, suggestions, feedback (negative too) in one search. Traditional Marketing methods are effective but with the rise of Web 2.0, inbound marketing is definitely the future.

Now as a startup you need to go out there and market your product or service. Inbound marketing is the one stop solution to all your marketing strategy confusions. Your website, SEO techniques, blogs and social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc all come under the Inbound Marketing umbrella.

 As a startup you gain the following benefits from Inbound Marketing:

1. Better Relationship Management – which can lead to higher prospects to client conversion
2. Loyalty factor can lead to more sales
3. The methods of implementing it are far less expensive and as a startup you can’t spend heavily due to financial constraints
4. Easy to use and ready-made tools available online

Inbound marketing can be related to what Seth Godin describes as ‘relationship marketing’ which can turn out as long-term strategy for your startup business if implemented wisely.

Three quick points for Startups: Content, SEO and Social Media

(1) It Costs Less - Outbound marketing means spending money - either by buying ads, buying email lists or renting huge booths at trade shows. Inbound Marketing means creating content and talking about it.

For more information visit:  http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4416/Inbound-Marketing-the-Next-Phase-of-Marketing-on-the-Web.aspx

photo credit: manfrys

‘SEO’ (Search Engine Optimization) is a term widely used to mean “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (organic) search results” (Wikipedia).

As a startup, you have your website ready with excellent content but how will you get it across to the ultimate users? Your website is in a space where there is a lot of search traffic, but how will you make it to the top of search engine rankings and generate traffic (ultimately leads)? There is a lot of confusion by founders of startups around SEO and how it works for a startup.

What we believe – SEO is extremely important for small businesses because normal users (those who don’t live and breath technology) only type a few of their favorite websites directly into the URL bar and for everything else go to search engines, most likely Google. In the 90s, people talked a lot about “home pages” and “site flow” – which matters if you are getting most of your traffic from people typing in your URL directly. However, for most startups, this isn’t the case (at least for the first few years of existence). Instead, the flow you should be thinking about it users going to Google, typing in a key phrase and landing on one of your internal pages.

Search engines are ‘matchmakers’ between users “demanding” information and websites “supplying” it. SEO helps tracing the gaps in the supply of information and providing traffic to your startup website.

The following article and slideshow provide great tips for Startups on SEO:

http://www.slideshare.net/willobrien/try-will-o-brien-startup-corner-seo-and-social-media
http://socalcto.blogspot.com/2009/11/seo-for-startups.html
As a startup founder, don’t overvalue better results with SEO than is deserved. There is a great value in SEO for startups. The beauty of SEO is as a long-term strategy for building inexpensive traffic.

 In the same conversation about SEO for startups, the founder either tells me:
•    There's a ton of search in my space
•    I'm not sure how much search there is in my space

Growing in this era of stiff competition, where everyone is vying for attention is indeed a tough task. And this is true, irrespective of the field in which you operate. The journey from no one to some one to a known entity involves a lot of methodical preparation, planning and execution. People and companies falter at different levels and due to different reasons. There is no universal factor that makes one successful; the lines are blurring and mind-share is getting limited.

Let us share some strategies and techniques that we religiously followed, with you, which have made our company a well known website design, web development and SEO company. When we started our business almost a decade back, search engine optimization (SEO) was still in its infancy and terms like search engine marketing and social media optimization were not yet conceived. In a layman’s language, the above mentioned terms are just an extension of search engine optimization yet represent an influential medium. I hope that in sharing of our story of discovering and utilizing the power of SEO, SEM and SMO, you can shorten your own learning curve.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem”.

Have you ever thought of SEO and branding as inter-related terms? This is important because Google has changed its algorithm for ranking the websites and has now come up with a novel concept, wherein the ranking will be directly proportional to the brand name. Better the brand name, higher will be the ranking.

However, some marketers are of the opinion that they are related, as in online arena, branding of a website could be compared against its visibility over internet. If a website has a good branding label that simply means that the website has been posted on thousands of other websites and people are talking about that website over social media platforms and their blogs. So, at the end what website gets are more back links and more visitors! Read more…