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