Maile Ohye from Google advises your startup as if she had only 10 minutes as your SEO consultant.
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Key-points in the video
- Chose whether to use www or not for your domain name? If you notice iknowtech.com does not use www.iknowtech.com. Whichever way you choose you should redirect the other option to your choice. If you click this link www.iknowtech.com You’ll see that you are redirected just iknowtech.com. This is done with a 301 redirect in most cases. This avoids having what appears to search engines as duplicate content at the different versions of the URL which can have an adverse effect on SEO.
- Setup your website in Google Webmaster Tools and enable email forwarding to get notifications of any problems.
- Use an analytic system like Google Anayltics so you can track who’s visiting your site and how they are reaching you.
- Site Strategies
- Design the site to meet the needs of different user type personas.
- Navigation needs to be user friendly, so people can find there was around even if they access your site from an internal landing page.
- Focus the information on your pages. Each page of the site should focus on one logical topic.
- Define your end user conversion. What do you want your end users to ultimately do? Sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, sign up for a service? Each page should allow the end user to accomplish your conversion goal without requiring them to click to additional pages to complete the conversion.
- Be smart about your written copy. Make sure you are using keywords naturally in your text. Avoid keyword stuffing, and tag clouds.
- Every page should include
- Unique Topic
- Unique Title (Displays in search results)
- Unique Meta Description for the snippet
- Keywords in the URL, lowercase and hyphen seperated. For static sites this is done with the filename, for dynamic sites this is done with permalinks.
- Descriptive Anchor Text for every link. Example of a bad link would be click here, here’s an example using proper anchor text SEO for Startup in under 10 minutes
- Potential Pitfalls
- Hiring a rouge or shady SEO specialist. Anyone that guarantees anything in SEO is probably bad news.
- Participating in link schemes or buying links to pass PageRank
- Do not focus more on the sites appearance than having quality searchable/indexable text.
- Performance tuning is important, your pages should load in under 2 seconds, shooting for half a second is even better.
- Ranking
- You should hopefully rank #1 with your company name and have sitelinks appear in your Google search results.
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to track how your site is doing on other keyword Queries
- Get involved, promote your product on blogs and social networks, with natural links, likes, +1’s, follows, shares, etc.