SEO for startups in under 10 minutes

>>>Maile Ohye: Hi, I'm Maile Ohye.

I'm a developer programs tech lead at Google.

I've been at Google since 2005 working withour search and our webmaster tools teams.

But if I were a consultant for your startup, here's all the advice I would give in under 10 minutes.

This talk is aimed for companies who havetheir main content below about 50 pages.

For those sites that are looking to rank forthousands of unrelated keywords, like an ecommerce site or a news agency, you might wanna investmore time with SEO.

My objective for this talk is to provide youthe basics in the most efficient manner possible and to help you feel assured that you're notdoing something totally wrong related to search, and last, to provide pointers for more information.

The first thing to do with your domain isto decide whether you want visitors to see the dub, dub, dub version or the non dub, dub, dub version.

At which point your 301 redirect users fromyour non preferred to your preferred version.

Now, many large corporations, like Googleand Facebook, actually keep the dub, dub, dub version, but you're free to do whicheveryou want.

The reason why we use a 301 and not a 302is because a 301 is a permanent redirect and that way it signals to applications like searchengines, to actually transfer all those indexing properties from the source to the target.

The next step is to verify ownership of yoursite in Webmaster tools.

And I don't just say this because I work withthe team, but I think this is really valuable.

I encourage you to sign up for email forwarding.

Email forwarding allows Google, when we haveany message for you, like when we think you might have been hacked or we think your siteis hosting malware, or we're having trouble crawling your site and we found a high numberof unreachable URLs.

So any of those messages can be forwardedto Google Webmaster Tools and if you have email forwarding enabled, it can be forwardeddirectly to the inbox that you check every day.

One more research tip is to perform a backgroundcheck on your domain.

For example, if it was previously owned byspammers then you're not going to rank very well now.

So, one good way to check is to look at thekeywords listed in Webmaster tools for your site and see if you see any unwanted wordsthere.

Also, you can see if you're indexed by performinga site colon search with your domain.

And if you see any problems the Webmasterguidelines can be found at this URL.

And if you have questions about penaltiesor reconsideration requests and that entire process, my friend Tiffany Oberoi has a greatinterview listed here.

I'd like to highlight the fetch as Googlebotfeature in Webmaster tools.

It's a great feature cause you give us a URLand then we'll perform a crawl as Googlebot, and you can see exactly whether we've beenredirected appropriately and exactly what content we download.

An additional part of this feature, and Ithink this is really useful, is that you can actually tell us to not just crawl but tosubmit to index for that URL.

And this way, any time you update a page oryou create an entirely new page, you can trigger that entire process to happen by Google andhave it available to searchers even faster.

My next advice is to include analytics codewhether it's Google analytics or another provider.

Now you wanna start collecting this data evenif you're not ready to use it because once you hire someone it's better to have somehistorical information about your site.

The next part is the strategy in your sitedesign.

You'll want to create a great experience forall your visitors and their different personas.

So, consider your customers.

Also your investors and what content willthey see? Or even the press.

Some questions to ask when it comes to sitestrategy are utility.

Does our site design meet the needs of eachpersona and does each persona have a great experience? Navigation, if a searcher lands on a childpage, and that's common with search results they don't funnel directly through your homepageall the time, can they figure out where they are? And can they easily navigate to where theywant to be? Another question is about whether or not yoursite is focused.

Does each page contain one logical topic that'sobvious to visitors? It's common with startups that because you'retight on time and resources, that as you collect more and more information, you just add thatto existing pages and make those extremely long forcing users to scroll.

But, instead, think about your site designand if that should be broken up into separate pages.

The next step, and this is especially helpfulfor Startups, is to define your conversion whether that means for “group foo” visitorsto sign up for the newsletter or to contact bizdev lead or to try your product, you wantto have a relevant conversion possible on every page.

Like a call to action.

And not force users to make extra clicks.

When it comes to your copy or the actual informationthat you have on each page, it's great to include relevant keywords naturally in yourtext.

These keywords are like query terms that normalpeople would use to find your product or your business.

So, for example, companies might call themselvesas selling athletic footwear but in your actual copy it's better to include terms like runningshoes which is what people actually search for.

One more thing I wanted to mention about thecopy on your pages is to answer your visitors or the personas questions that they mighthave.

For example, is the product reputable? Perhaps show reviews or let other users review.

Or if a user might ask, “What if this productdoesn't work” then explain the customer satisfaction policy.

Every page should include a unique topic, a unique title as that can be displayed in search results, a unique meta descriptionwhich might be displayed as the snippet and then for non-dynamic sites, this is just abest practice, but it's good to have keywords in the filename, lowercase and hyphen separated.

And then, of course, descriptive anchor textfor every link whether you're linking internally or externally to another site.

So here's anchor text that could use someimprovement.

For more information on our product specifications, click here.

Click here is not that descriptive.

Better way to have it would be, for more informationplease read our product specifications.

So that's what you wanna aim for.

A good example of a site that has a uniquetopic on each page as well as a unique title and descriptive anchor text, can be showingwith this search result for NASA.

Now, NASA doesn't only have their homepageshown, but also has generated site links.

These site links algorithmically by Googlebut they can influenced by great site design, having a unique title as well as great anchortext.

I'll quickly cover some potential pitfalls.

Please do not hire a rogue or shady SEO.

If they guarantee any rankings it is too goodto be true.

Please don't participate in link schemes orbuying links for the purpose of passing PageRank.

And last, I know it's great to have a fancysite but try not to focus so much on site fanciness that you don't actually have indexableand searchable text.

Another thing to consider about your siteis the page low time.

I've noticed a lot of Startups don't necessarilyhave time to focus on this.

But, it's good to know that Akamai actuallydid a study of ecommerce sites and found that 2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce sitesacceptability.

At Google, we aim for under a half second.

In general, the longer your page takes toload, the more likely it is that users can click away.

Now, let's talk about ranking.

Check that you rank for your company name.

Hopefully number once was site links.

If you want to rank for other terms, you canuse Webmaster tools' search queries.

And, I put this link earlier, but here's thelink to a video on using Webmaster tools.

Then, get involved.

For Startups it might be the case that noone searches for your new kind of product or service, so you have very low query volume.

At that point, you could prioritize, findinga potential audience or community through existing forums, blogs or social media sites.

Know that, to rank well and to stay on top, provide an awesome product or service.

And then, generate buzz.

Startups often ask me about social media marketingand whether they should invest their time.

Well, I think that social media is terrificand one big reason is that rather than just having an avenue of users coming through search, this really diversifies your approach and you can get visitors from different sources.

But here are a few tips.

First of all, think holistically.

So, you might create an identity on key sites, and then participate.

But, remember, you eventually wanna connectusers to an entry point of conversion.

So think about that entire user experiencefrom a social media site directly to conversion on your site.

Also, and this is fairly obvious, but focusyour energy where your audience hangs out.

And last, play to your authentic strengths, it's likely that your company has limited resources.

So, if your CEO likes to tweet, then go aheadand let them, or if you have a salesperson who really enjoys Facebook then that's terrific, or if you have a developer who's already on Google Plus or Stack Overflow then have themrepresent your company and interact with the community there.

My last takeaway is this, even with greatadvertising and terrific marketing, valuable conversion still happens on your site.

So please, stay focused and make sure you'reready.

Thanks so much for your time.

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