Chirag Chamoli

I am writing this post for multiple reasons.

1. Refresh my Search engine optimization( SEO) basics
2. A lot of startups ask me
3. Basic SEO is not something you must be paying for.
4. SEO is important

So without wasting your time, let’s dive in.

What is SEO

You’ll see a lot of people talking about SEO as if it is some thing magical. Do a google search of  ”Basic SEO” and bam you have 23,900,000 results (one more just got added :) ). Just remember SEO is dead simple and you can do most of it yourself.

Note: I’ll be refering to Google search alot but same is valid for all search engines bing, yahoo, ….

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

SEO Best Practice

• Pick a domain name that matches your primary keyword.
• Make sure every page has a unique title and H1 tag that matches your primary keyword objectives for that page.
• Make sure the homepage links to most, if not all, other pages ( to start with).
• Make sure every page links back to the homepage and many other secondary pages using appropriate anchor text.
• Register on every social media site that makes sense for you. Include a link to the site in your profile. It helps if the username you choose is a primary keyword. for instance on this blog the primary author and the author name is same.
• Link the social media profiles to each other where applicable. Fill them out as fully as possible.
• Actually use the social networks. More activity will create more pages of content with more links to the profiles, in turn passing more  links to your website.
• Claim your site using Google Webmaster Tools. Submit your sitemap (preferably one that is automatically updated).
• Do a Google Search for every one of your top keywords. Figure out how to get a link from any site showing in the top 20 results.
• Do not under any circumstance pay someone for a link. Do not offer or accept offers to trade links.
• Avoid linking out to shady/spammy websites of any kind.
• Study the keywords your competitors target (if they use meta-keywords like idiots, you can just lift those from the source).
• Write a blog, or find some other way to continually add new content. This adds to the content you have indexed, but is also another opportunity for links. Long term strategy right here.
• Build a Twitter client, wordpress theme, or something else that people will link to and use with persistent links to whatever you decide is in the by line.
• Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you.
• Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords, first 4 words of the title count the most)
• Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4, img alt text, ul’s, dl’s)
• Get links from other websites (best case scenario: link’s anchor text is your keyword). Higher the PageRank of the linking site the better. NoFollow’s don’t count.
• Don’t use subdomains (i.e., put your blog at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of blog.mydomain.com) That will give you a good start. From there, start a blog with interesting content, and submit it around. The idea with the blog is that the posts are more interesting than your site’s copy, so people will actually link to it.
• Linking to your own pages will always increase the value of the link.
• SEO is not just a ranking exercise, it’s a conversion exercise. On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should consider that the first ~60 characters of you
• Speed matters. Google is on record about this.
• Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap. They’ll regularly pull it down from your server so as you add pages to your site, Google will know to index them. They’ll tell you how many pages you have submitted, and how many are indexed. Check if your site has crawl errors. Check out the HTML suggestions. Google will point out the pages which are missing title tags, which have duplicate tags, short descriptions. Lots of other information in there, including page load times.
• Pageank is logarithmic, a link from a higher pagerank site will have more of an effect than one from a lower pagerank site.
• Google often say that they use more than 200 ranking factors. External link text matters way more than anything else.
• Widget bait – Allow simple embedding of your content/app, widgets are great strategies .
• Don’t pay any for any general SEO service.
• Beware of nofollow links.  Nofollow links are links with a special attribute that tell search engines to ignore them.  To check a link, view the source of that page in your Web browser and look for rel=nofollow in it.  You don’t want to waste time getting links on sites that use this attribute.  The canonical examples are popular blogs, twitter, facebook and Wikipedia.  Don’t waste your time submitting comments and editing Wikipedia articles with your links because it won’t help you.
• Don’t ignore the long-tail content. People often concentrate on getting rankings for specific keywords. You can be just as successful building lots of pages with unique content that end up ranking high on the most random things.  Often such pages will be the only things that come up.
• Less is more.  Ranking is distributed across your site, so less pages, less links on them, and less text on them will concentrate your ranking potential on what is left.
• FYI: The typical search query is composed of 2 to 5 words
• Navigation: a) don’t use frames of any kind, b) don’t make javascript menus, use CSS instead, c) stick to very UL, LI simple nav.
• Don’t use Flash: if you’re going to use it, make sure it is under a correctly formed web page. Use very very  very sparely.
• Robots.txt: this file, which should be findable under the root of your website, provides a search map to the bots about what you would like them to index. Find out more at Robotstxt.org
• Make a Facebook/G+ page for your business. Better still, make a Facebook application.
• Make interesting, non-gimmicky videos about your product, how to use it, and research about your areas of expertise. Youtube is best at SEO
• Read this if you have some time, we have covered most of it anyways.

Write good content and we can discuss this more here.

save once. access everywhere

I love this comment from petercooper

You could write a book on this. Heck, I probably should – I’ve done it a few times :) -

A short list (but by no means anywhere near complete!):

- Find as many blogs in your niche as possible. Pitch them properly (a lot could be written on that point alone) DON’T JUST GO FOR THE BIG ONES! The smaller blogs are more likely to link to you if you’re friendly to them and develop rapport.. I run blogs with over 10,000 subscribers and I love helping people who are FRIENDLY and GENUINE.

- Use your social network.. you’ve been building one up, right? Make sure all your Twitter and Facebook followers know about what you’re doing. Lean on your Linked In contacts.

- Stumbleupon advertising (if appropriate, 5 cents a visitor). Adwords advertising (if appropriate).

- Find places where users of competing applications gather (forums, Google Groups, etc) and work your way into their attention zone.

- See if there’s a sub-Reddit that’s specifically for your niche. Find people to charm there, post ancillary links regarding your app, etc. Don’t over-do it.

- Post it on HR (as someone said above)

- Find your way in to interviews, podcasts, etc. A lot of content providers are dying for more content – you might make a great interviewee. The media is less opaque than it seems.

- Go to events! Make sure you have an elevator pitch. Get excited. Wear schwag featuring your logo, etc, if you want to. Don’t just focus on the big-wigs – get anyone who might find your service useful excited.

- Does your design rock? Get on to the “CSS design”, and “Web design” show case type sites. There are hundreds of them around. Not amazing exposure, but the more links the better and any one of your visitors might turn in to a serious contact.

- Start your own blog for your company / startup. Make it really interesting. Be candid. Show off new features. Show off stuff you’re working on. Show off your team or your technology. Build up your own tribe of followers. They will make all the difference when it comes to saving you on del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, and so forth.

- Make sure you stay on top of your e-mail. Customers might test you with e-mails – responding quickly and completely can make the difference between sales and no sales – or life and death with a startup.

- Find ancillary reasons to get your service mentioned in blog posts and tutorials. For example, if your startup is an RSS mashup generator of some sort, you need to have tutorials out there that recommend your service. Get those tutorials and posts on to Reddit, Hacker News, Digg, etc.

- If people write about your site, write tutorials that mention you, etc, PROMOTE THAT CONTENT EVEN IF IT’S NOT YOURS! Get people reading stuff that’s about you – not by you!

- Remember that bigger sites like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb (if applicable to your sector) love exclusives. Don’t bother mass pitching those – focus on one, whichever you can get best rapport with, and offer an exclusive. Your product needs to be AWESOME for this to work though.

- Follow a search.twitter.com search on terms related to your service (and even the name of your service) .. get in touch with people who might be interested, respond to all comments about your service.

- Write a bog standard press release and submit through the standard channels. This will not help much but at least your company name/service name will end up with a ton of results in Google – this can help you look bigger than you are. You /may/ even get some offline coverage if the press release is actually kinda good (but not too crazy). It’s cheap to do this.

- Build ancillary “fun” services that tie into your main web app. Something fun, free, perhaps something that you can relate to sites people find interesting, such as Twitter. Let’s say your main service is an online graphics editor. Perhaps you could create a separate site where people can create avatars for Twitter / Facebook from a small set of templates.. separate project but promoting the first.

- Hustle, hustle, hustle! Make sure you know as soon as someone blogs about your service. Follow Google Blog Searches, etc. Keep Googling. Get commenting on blogs (not in a spammy way – just get your name and service out there). If someone needs to do something your service offers, you need to be there!

I believe Jason Calacanis wrote an interesting piece on doing PR for a startup recently. Find that article and read it – I recall it was very good.

..

BTW, if anyone thinks I might be able to turn this into a good book, resource site, or similar, vote this up and I might give it a try! :)

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However, the current market conditions have many ecommerce players selling products at below cost price to lure users. The only way to sustain the business at this time is to get into a price war and burn a lot of investor money and try to outdo competition in a Last Man Standing game. This practice goes against our philosophy of building a sustainable and profitable company. Hence, we’ve decided to go back to the drawing board to figure out the best way forward.

I just love when you build some thing and forget, just to discover it has constant page views on a regular basis.

you can use instapad for

• write on ipad(free)
• publish essays
• create pages for upcoming events
• share code snippets
• rant anonymously
• share recipes, quotes, etc quickly
• archive some text in case the original page may go away
• probably anything which requires you to share some text, images and links

instapad does not record any information about you at any time.

After searching a lot of forums and blogs, when I couldn’t find a simple cheat-sheet on pitching to investors, I decided to write my own. (after observing a lot of successful product pitches by founders of admob, reddit, mint, twitter…many more.)

Here are the key points overlapping in all the presentations. In my opinion this is everything you require for making the perfect pitch.

• Intro slide – most important slide
• Problems
• Market viability
• Solution
• Product
• Business model
• Customer acquisition
• Competition
• Competitive advantage
• Q&A / Conclusion

You can copy above outline and build your own document or if you are lazy like me just Download powerpoint format here.

the perfect con

A vain Emperor who cares for nothing but his appearance and attire hires two tailors who are really swindlers(con men) that promise him the finest suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position or “just hopelessly stupid”. The Emperor cannot see the cloth himself, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing unfit for his position; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they mime dressing him and the Emperor then marches in procession before his subjects, who play along with the pretense. Suddenly, a child in the crowd, too young to understand the desirability of keeping up the pretense, blurts out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all.

The interesting thing in above tale is merely the Product positioning and mass delusion play a larger role in making any product or service successful.

For instance “The Dirty Picture” is piece of crap, in terms of product, execution… Almost everything, except marketing. So this, makes it very difficult for anyone to say, movie is garbage, as “the masses” don’t agree with you.

So when making a product, if you can convince a influential few that your product is great, you are set.