Startup SEO - Beginners Guide

Following on from last week’s post about Startup Marketing for Twitter, here’s part 2 of my startup marketing fundamentals: Search Engine Optimisation

In this post you’ll learn all the fundamentals of what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) you should be doing for your startup

Search Engine Optimision (SEO) is really important because it helps people find your website on Search Engines (Google, Yahoo etc). So when they search for something, this happens:

Obviously, if you’re on the top of the first page of Google, more people are going to your site.

With that out of the way, let’s jump right into what you need to do. Don’t fear SEO – it’s really quite straightforward – just follow the step by step guide below to unleash your SEO awesomeness! Want to do some background reading first? Check this out: The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO

SEO is mostly broken into 2 sections: Onpage and Offpage SEO.

1. Onpage – you set up once and don’t need to check too often

2. Offpage – you set up once and add to contantly

Find out more about these here: The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO I’ll explain how to do each now….

OnPage SEO

Step 1: Keyword Research

This is the foundations – to find out what words your customers are using to find products/services like you. Good news is that once you have this set up once, you can leave ti work for the most part. Many people think this is one of the most important parts – I’d tend to agree. Here’s what to do:

Set a goal e.g. What do you want visitors to do?? Read stuff? Buy stuff? Signup for an email address??
Brainstorm and write down search queries you think your customers will be looking for e.g. Got a pie shop – maybe pie mad people are searching for ‘chicken pies London’ or ‘best pie London’ – get the idea??
Input these chosen keywords – Sign up forGoogle Adwords and learn how to use the provided “keyword tool” – it’s really easy to use. Tip: make sure you set searches to ‘exact’, not broad to see how many people are searching for these keywords. Learn how to useWordtracker (paid) and/or theKeyword Difficulty tool (free).
Extract the best results (most searches) into a spreadsheet
SERPs – sound like scary tech lingo?? It’s really not – it stands for: Search Engine Results Pages i.e. the results that come up after you did a search on Google. So, do the SEPS for your keywords – Who are your competitors, make a list of these
Look at your competitors:

Look at their keywords
UseYahoo Site Explorer to find the sources of your competitor’s links – Record the sources of links your competitors have and save them for later.

Search for our site to see how it ranks. Use command e.g.: “site:www.ourwebsite.com.” Record these results.

Step 2: Other Lovely Stuff

Look at the design of the site – anything that sucks? Got lots of content that will engage customers? If not – you’ll need it so add it now
Sign up and verify withGoogle Analytics,Google Webmaster Tools, andBing Webmaster Center – This important – will tell later why
Let Google Analytics run for two weeks before doing any SEO
These two weeks will give us a baseline with the data collected
Recommended we screen capture results and file these to record progress
Relook at visual design of site – any glaring issues that will negatively impact on bounce rates etc?
Next go to Websitegrader.com input www.yourwebdomain.com

Action any suggestions
Send report by email and file for future reference

Check cross browser compatibility – look to see if site looks same/good on different web browsers e.g. check Internet Explorer 6,7,8,9, Firefox, Safari. Or try this tool – it should hel
Create policy only to use website specific email addresses with signatures from now on – make sure you have an signature with your web address on it that goes as standard on every email (never know who might see that email)
Look at exisitng HTML code (right click, view source) – and see what needs to be added/changed. Keywrods from step 1 will come into play here. NB: If you are getting lost here – talk to your webmaster

Should be able to acheive the ‘Key objective’ (mentioned above) from the homepage
Keyword in title tag (unique for each page, include keywords)
Keyword in H1 on each page
Keyword in text
Optimize URL permalinks to ‘pretty premalinks’ e.g. change indigital.com/htiswheer to indigital.com/suppliers.
Use 301 redirects if you rename pages
Relook at information architecture – as few clicks as possible
On all images, make sure to include keywords in alt tags and in filenames

Change a meta description (If you are getting lost here – talk to your webmaster) – This is the little snippet that Google shows on their search engine – so influences if people click though to view your site.

Need to make it interesting
Include some keywords but must make grammatical sense
Remember that no 1 purpose of this is to get people to click through

Add company address and phone number – this should be done on every page (as search engines read this) – include in the footer. Particularly important for local businesses as you never know which page customers will arrive from
Add a robots.txt – Helps crawlers find their away around your site
Add sitemap – – again help crawlers find their way around site

Offpage SEO

Here’s where’ll be concentrating on building links on other websites pointing to our site

Choose anchor text you’ll be using: select main keywords and use these. An example of anchor text is: Find a developer (see the way I’ve created a hot link of keyword text
Add website to the major search engine’s local listings – These are really important for ranking – especially local businesses -but non local too

Yahoo Local

Google Local

Bing Local

Ask City

CitySearch (feeds Ask.com and Bing)

Yelp (feeds Bing and Yahoo)

Crunchbase

Some other, less important but still beneficial: (this can be time consuming so I’d recommend asking a VA to do these)

citysearch.com

merchantcircle.com

yellowpages.lycos.com

directorym.com

bbb.org

switchboard.com

iaf.net

local.yahoo.com

maps.google.com

yellowpages.aol.com

yelp.com

whitepages.com

yellowpages.com

wikimapia.org

superpages.com

business.com

insiderpages.com

hoovers.com

yellowbook.com

tradekey.com

zagat.com

local.ingenio.com

mobile.yahoo.com

local.com

manta.com

zoominfo.com

dexknows.com

local.botw.org

hotfrog.com

ezilon.com

yellowbot.com

getfave.com

find.hamptonroads.com

cityvoter.com

outside.in

genieknows.com

ratepoint.com

discoverourtown.com

infousa.com

uscity.net

marchex.com

mojopages.com

matchpoint.com

wcities.com

openlist.com

accoona.com

boulevards.com

welcomewagon.com

corporate.local.com

bizjournals.com

directory.classifieds1000.com

magicyellow.com

pr.com

kudzu.com

justclicklocal.com

brownbook.net

citysquares.com

judysbook.com

pennysaverusa.com

twibs.com

sitejabber.com

b2byellowpages.com

yellowpagecity.com

localmatters.com

cityguide.com

soprano.com

localdatabase.com

ecovian.com

eztousebigbook.com

rateitall.com

localadlink.com

infignos.com

myhuckleberry.com

americasbestcompanies.com

city.com

thinklocal.com

smalltown.com

locallife.com

planetbuzz.com

citycliq.com

bluestarhighway.com

neighborsville.com

cityslick.net

yellowassistance.com

usyellowpages.com

listd.com

bing.com

corporate.localpages.com

propeller.adsonar.com

showmelocal.com

bing.com/local

brownbook.com

businessdirectory.bizjournals.com

Using the comptitor analysis already completed above, analyse your comptitor links to see where they are geting their links from – see if you can replicate these (can be as easy as submitting to a directory)
Get more links – look for more sites that can trade links with –

Use this tool
Consider your local chamber of commerce, local networking groups, and local complimentary businesses. Search engines like to see local links pointing at locally targeted websites

Optimize Social Media pages to include keywords and correct links to web pages, blogs etc
Create and submit sitemaps – Create a sitemap Then login into Google Webmaster Central and Bing Search Webmaster Tools (remember them) and submit it.
Optimize site from google’s side: Do this by logging into Webmaster tools (remember we set that up). Login to Google Webmaster Tools and click on the tools menu.

Set corrext Geographic location

Enable image search

Begin Article marketing – create content based around the site, include back-links to the site, submit to sites below

1.knol.google.com
2.ehow.com
3.ezinearticles.com
4.squidoo.com
5.hubpages.com
6.articlesbase.com
7.buzzle.com
8.examiner.com
9.suite101.com
10.associatedcontent.com