What’s less clear is just how much Google weights the anchor text in it’s algorithm compared to other search engines. Ordinarily it would be difficult to test this – you’d need to find a huge range of varied sites, all linked to with a common phrase. Luckily, Hacker News is a good example – if you use the phrase “Show HN” (as people often link to their new startup/project using that phrase).

Here’s what Duck Duck Go displays for the query “Show HN”:

While it (brilliantly) has a !bang syntax for searching HNSearch.com, it’s regular results show pretty much what you’d expect – sites that use “Show HN” in the title tag of the page and within the text of the page, along with something like hn-show.com which features the keywords within it’s domain name.

And here’s what Blekko shows:

Blekko is relatively similar, in that it promotes sites that use the word “Show” in the title tag and on the page a lot (maybe not as much with “HN” though).

Here’s Bing’s results:

Bing, weirdly, doesn’t have any results from Hacker News in it’s top 10 – the first result is from FriendFeed. After that, it very heavily focuses on the keyword being in the domain name or in the title tag & on-page text.

And finally, here’s Google’s results:

Other than the first result from HackerNews, not a single listing features the text “Show HN” in either the title, domain or on-page text. They’re ranking for the phrase, despite not mentioning it anywhere on the page, because some of the links pointing to them include the phrase “Show HN”.

Keep in mind, this may be an edge case – typical on-page weightings might be dialled up for search terms that are more heavily searched for.

I’m not saying that this is necessarily a flaw in Google’s results at all – I much prefer Google’s results in this edge case than to the other search engines. I just wanted to highlight how Google appears to weight anchor text very heavily – much more so than the others.

Google’s Love Affair with Anchor Text is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Every time Googlebot arrives at your site, it will first check to see if you have a robots.txt file. If the robots.txt file blocks any pages, Google won’t crawl them.

For years, website owners and web developers have used the robots.txt file to block Google from accessing duplicate content. From blocking URLs that use tracking parameters, blocking the mobile or print version of sites or just to fix flaws in CMS’s, I’ve seen a lot of duplicate content blocked with robots.txt in my time.

Why blocking URLs doesn’t help

But the robots.txt file is a terrible way to deal with duplicate content. Even if you’re 301 redirecting the duplicate URL to the real one, or using the canonical tag to reference the proper URL, the robots.txt file works against you.

If you have a 301 that redirects to the proper page, but you block the old URL with robots.txt, Google isn’t allowed to crawl that page to see the 301. For example, have a look at Ebooker’s listing for ‘flights’:

The URL that’s ranking (on page 1 of Google for ‘flights’) is blocked in robots.txt. It’s got no proper snippet because Google can’t see what’s on the page, it’s had a guess at the title based on what other sites have linked to it with. And here’s the reason why Google can’t crawl that URL:

If Ebooker unblocked that URL, Google would be able to crawl it to discover the 301, and the page would most likely have a better chance of ranking higher (as it wouldn’t just appear to be a blank page to the search engines).

If you block Google from seeing a duplicate page, it’s not able to crawl it and see that it’s duplicate. If there’s a canonical tag on that page, it may as well not be there as Google won’t be able to see it. If it redirects elsewhere, Google won’t know.

If you have duplicate content, don’t block the search engines from seeing it. You’ll just prevent the links to those blocked pages from fully counting.

Flickr image from Solo.

Robots.txt & Duplicate Content is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Patrick Altoft had an interesting tip about leaving the brand name out of the title tag – while this may not work for everyone, the idea is that for a generic keyword search (like “red widgets”), Google may display a title that’s optimised for that term. If the search term is branded, however (“Brand name”), then Google will most likely use the Dmoz title.

In a similar way, you can actually have multiple meta descriptions – potentially one for the keyword, and one for the brand name. This isn’t recommended for everyone, and I wouldn’t recommend it for many pages on your site, but it’s possible. The regular limit for meta descriptions to be displayed in full in Google is 156 characters (although I tend to stick to around 154 characters). I recently experimented with having a double length meta description – with the first snippet being designed to be well written for a generic keyword, and the second snippet written for a brand search. The full meta description for my homepage is this:

“Dave is a freelance SEO consultant, specialising in creative link building and in-depth technical site audits. To find out more, feel free to get in touch. Shark SEO is a search marketing blog with free advice on ranking your site better in Google, Bing & Yahoo. Check out the SEO blog today at SharkSEO.com.”

That’s twice the length of a regular meta description. Now check out the snippet for “freelance SEO consultant”:

And here’s the snippet for the search “Shark SEO blog”, which again returns the homepage:

When you put multiple snippets in the same meta description tag, it looks as if Google will use the snippet that’s most suitable for the query.

Flickr image by Amir K.

Multiple Meta Descriptions is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

The set-up process is very straight-forward. You first add your URL, and then sync it up with your Google Analytics account – this step is optional, you can skip the GA import and just copy and paste the keywords you want it to focus on (useful if you’re using a different analytics package to Google Analytics). The tool then runs through all of the selected keywords – the ones you’ve manually put in, or the ones that have driven traffic to the site if you’ve used the Google Analytics option – and checks your ranking for that term, along with the estimated search volume (on exact match) from Google’s keyword tool. The ranking data can take a while to be gathered, depending on how many keywords you’ve added, but the search volume appears remarkably quickly. You are then presented with your keywords, graphed with where they rank, what their rough potential is based on the expected search volume and by how much traffic they’ve actually sent you.

You’re then free to start creating categories and filters.

Categories

One of the main features is being able to group sections of your keywords into categories. For example, the default category is ‘Brand’, and automatically includes all of your brand terms. You can create your own categories if you want to further seperate things out – for example, if you’re a clothing retailer, you can create a category for things like ‘shoes’ and ‘boots’, one for ‘jeans’, and so on. As an example, the graphs used here are from a snowboard site that I own – I have categories for “brand name”, “boots” and “boards”.

The one thing that I’d really like to see is a negative option, so you could create a category that *doesn’t* include your brand terms. That change would mainly benefit sites that have a huge amount of longtail brand traffic that are using the GA import option, although it’s far from essential.

Setting up categories is ridiculously easy, and gives you the ability to quickly drill down into particular product areas (especially useful if you’re dealing with a huge data set). This is particularly useful for retail sites, as you can seperate out product types easily and quickly.

Filters

Filters allow you to manipulate your data by setting up rules – rules like “show me keywords that have a search volume greater than 1000 according to the AdWords keyword tool, that I rank at the bottom of page 1 for and that sent me at least 50 visits”. This is what that rule would look like:

Easy.

You’re then free to slice and dice the data to how you see fit – as an example, I now have a list, in order of priority, of which terms I should go after if I want to sell more snowboards:

The graph has been filtered to only show keywords that mention “boards” or “snowboards”, that have sent traffic to the site already and where I’m not ranking in the top 5.

The real beauty in this is the speed at which you can slice and dice the data. If I wanted to focus on boots, or snowboard bindings, I can be up and running within seconds. That’s especially useful if you have a large site with a lot of potential categories. The best way to see it in action, though, is to actually play with it – Richard has been kind enough to give out a coupon. At the sign up page, if you use the coupon code SHARKSEO, you can get 1 month free.

Flickr image by C.SooHoo.

Clever Keyword Research is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

I’m not going to explain it all in too much detail because I think those two articles cover it quite well, but as a quick summary:

1. Google suspected Bing of using some of Google’s data in Bing’s results
2. Google set up a test to prove this – by allowing pages to rank for “synthetic queries” (Googlewhacks), using IE8 with the Bing bar installed to search for and then visit those pages, and then found Bing returning around 9% of those results a few weeks later
3. Bing very strongly denied “copying” Google’s results once accused

Bing’s description of what’s happening appears to be around the use of “clickstream data” – it sounds like the Bing toolbar (and IE with suggested sites) looks at which pages you’re on and which pages you visit afterwards. This isn’t restricted to Google – this is, apparently, for all pages on the Internet.

There’s arguments from people saying that Google is right to find this unacceptable, and others saying that Bing is in the right.

I was actually quite surprised by the number of people siding with Bing over this, there’s something about Bing using it’s browser to collect user data from competitors that doesn’t sit quite right with me. Regardless, I was surprised by some of the things that Bing said to defend itself.

Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers

– Yusuf Mehdi, Bing.

What Bing is complaining about here, is that Google engineers chose to adjust Google’s results for specific terms, searched in Google for those keywords and then clicked on those listings. In Google. That’s not an “attack”, nor is it a “trick” and it’s definitely not “click-fraud”.

Bing also mentions that the clickstream data that they’re using is one of 1,000 signals used to determine where a site should rank, and that the honeypot keywords that Google used were noticeable because they were outliers – and as such they only really had the clickstream data to go on.

How much of the clickstream data, is actually data from Google?

But this is what I don’t fully understand – the clickstream data itself. Bing says that the clickstream data isn’t just for Google – it’s for all sites on the web. But of course, Google – their biggest competitor – is the second most visited site on the Internet from the US, so it’s fair to say that a very hefty chunk of that clickstream data actually contains data from people searching on Google.

What happens when the clickstream data is scaled?

The other thing I don’t understand is what happens when you scale that clickstream data. We’ve only seen what happens when it’s used on 100 invented terms from Google’s honeypot test, where around 9% of those queries then appeared to affect Bing’s results. Bing implies that this isn’t a lot, and that the effect is much smaller when it’s scaled – but I’m not so sure. I’d actually be quite surprised if, when this was scaled to something the size of the Bing toolbar’s userbase, there wasn’t a very noticeable impact on Bing’s results. This is one of those things that cannot really be proved – we have to take Bing’s word for it.

Is Bing morally right to take Google’s user data?

During the Farsight video, the Bing rep mentioned that they were only using publicly available clickstream data – but of course, that data isn’t publicly available. The data is coming from a toolbar, and the conditions are, let’s face it, buried away somewhere in a EULA which nobody in their right mind ever reads. These users have legally opted in to sharing that data, but I don’t think they’re aware of it.

Regardless of that, though – Bing is taking data from Google users, who are searching on Google and allowing it to influence Bing’s search results. It may be legal, but it doesn’t mean you have to agree with it.

Flickr image from reway2007.

Bing’s Google Argument Makes No Sense is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

While a lot of SEOs had begun to suspect that tweeted links were influencing rankings, it was really good to see it actually confirmed.

What Google & Bing didn’t mention, though, was how strongly they were using these social signals as a ranking factor. Google has claimed for years now that there are over 200 ranking factors, so it’s hard to say whether their use of Twitter is a majorly influential factor (like links) or whether it’s just one of many neglible factors.

Google also failed to mention how long the Twitter effect would last – I think quite a few people may expect it to be a very time-sensitive thing, particularly around breaking news. The assumption is that, when Google uses tweets to boost a page for a search term, the ‘Twitter effect’ will eventually stop being such a strong ranking factor after enough time (or when the tweets stop) and then the regular SEO factors (links, on-page keywords, etc) start to take over. This wasn’t confirmed or suggested, it’s just what I would have expected.

A final point that wasn’t mentioned is whether or not Google differentiates between tweets from specific countries – so whether tweets from UK users to a specific page helps boost that page in Google.co.uk, or whether it also helps in US results in Google.com.

These two points – tweet locations and how long the Twitter effect lasts for – is something that I wanted to look into because of a post I wrote a while ago on Raven Tools. I wrote it very shortly after Sugarrae published hers, and I noticed something interesting about the two posts – my post very quickly started to rank very well for the term “Raven Tools” in Google.co.uk, out-ranking Rae’s even though I linked to her post from mine, and despite the fact that Sugarrae’s post, by all the regular SEO metrics like number of links and domain authority, greatly deserved to outrank my post. My post ranked so well on Google.co.uk that the only domain that outranked it was Raventools.com itself. This wasn’t true in Google.com though, the US results showed the results that you’d normally expect, with Sugarrae outranking me and with my site towards the bottom of page 1. I should also point out, my site isn’t geo-targetted to any location in particular.

Is there a time limit to the Twitter effect?

At the time I assumed it was some kind of query-deserves-freshness effect, and that eventually my site would drop down the search results. That would fit with my original idea that Google’s use of Twitter is to spot breaking news and promote tweeted articles when the topic was hot, but then dropped those articles in favour of the most linked to over time, when the topic wasn’t being tweeted about as much.

It’s been over 5 months since my Raven post, and it’s still only outranked by Raventools.com in the UK.

This would imply that, in this case at least, the Twitter effect may not be time-based, and tweets from months ago may still help your page to rank well.

Does Google use tweet locations?

I wanted to look into why my post was ranking well in the UK results, but not anywhere else. It’s a .com, hosted in the US and it isn’t geo-targetted to any country, Google shouldn’t consider it a UK specific site.

Using Backtweets I grabbed a load of the data around who tweeted my post and compared it with who tweeted Sugarrae’s. An important point to remember is that Google is likely treating some tweets diffently to others, depending on how authoritative they think a Twitter user is.

While Sugarrae had more tweets to her article than I had mine (she had 23 to my 13), the majority of my tweets were from people who had their location set to somewhere in the UK (9 of the 13), while Sugarrae had the vast majority of her tweets from the US (17 of her 23), and she only had 2 UK tweets.

This would suggest that Google is using the location of tweets to determine which search engine the page gets a boost in. The theory is, if a page becomes incredibly popular amongst UK tweeters – it may only be relevant to people in the UK, and so it only gets a boost in Google.co.uk. This is an observation for just this one specific example – it’s not a cold, hard scientific fact – but if anyone was planning on testing how tweeted links can affect rankings, I’d suggest looking into how long the effect lasts for, and whether the location of the Twitter user plays a part.

And you can download the sheet here, if you’re so inclined.

Flickr image from view-askew.

Thanks to SEO Scientist Neyne for the title advice.

Geolocation of Tweets Affects the Rankings in Local Google is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

If anyone knows what this device is – please, please put me out of my misery and let me know in the comments.

Flickr photo from Leo Reynolds

Does Google Have A Secret Tablet? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

1. Do not rely on SEO to market your product

It sounds contradictory, but its true. There are two main scenarios for new startups, the first is that it’s a completely new product or proposition, for example – balaclavas for pets. The second is that it’s a slant on an existing product, such as a service that allows other people to lend small amounts of money to others at a more reasonable rate.

The problem with scenario 1 is that, because it’s a new idea, people won’t know about it and so they simply wont be searching for it. You can check search volumes for particular keywords using Google’s AdWords keyword tool – but take the data with a pinch of salt, as it’s not always entirely accurate.

For scenario 2, because it’s an existing product, the competition is likely to be far too strong (at first) to get those rankings. Even though the person-to-person micro-lending example above is a relatively newish idea (the example is actually stolen from Zopa, who have been around for a few years now) – the new site would still be aiming to rank for terms like “small loans” and “payday loans”, which are remarkably competitive and could take a huge amount of time and effort to rank for.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be thinking about SEO when you prepare for launch, however. Launching your startup is one of the biggest opportunities you have to gain links into your site – links that, later down the line, could prove to be invaluable in allowing you to rank above your competitors, or rank for particularly high traffic driving phrases. While there are a huge number of intricacies with search engine optimisation, the basics are to find the right key phrases to target, to include those terms on the page naturally and within the page title and, of absolutely massive importance, to get other sites to link to you.

When launching your startup, even with just your minimum viable product, there are a large number of chances to pick up links – potentially some of the strongest links you could hope for.

2. Think about links during your initial launch coverage

Try to ensure that, when other sites cover your launch (potentially sites similar to Killer Startups), they include a link back to your site. While those initial links will be very useful in sending traffic your way in the early stage, they can be massive useful later by allowing search engines to find your site and gain authority and link value. Traindom has an excellent list of places to submit your startup to, and the comments of this Hacker News page are also very useful.

3. Tie link building into your initial promotion

If you’re going to promote your new product, see if you can incorporate a way to build links at the same time. A year or so ago, I noticed a marketing campaign by a company that involved offering bloggers a “plant a tree” widget for their site – if you placed the banner on your site, they’d plant a tree. If anyone were to copy your embed code and put it on their site, your score would go up – the higher your score, the more trees they would have planted for you. It meant free advertising for the company, it made them look good, it was an interesting enough idea that they might have potentially picked up natural links anyway and each widget included a link back to the “download this widget” page on their site. (I can’t find any traces of the competition now, so I’m not sure it’s still running – but if you find it, please give me a shout). Make sure you don’t overcook this idea though, or you could cause Google to review what you’re doing – make sure you read this post first so you know where the line is.

4. Build in a reason for people to link to you

Similar to the example above, try to find a reason for people to link to you – and think about ways you could tie it in to promoting your product. Think about approaching relevant bloggers and offering them exclusive early access to your product, or free 1 month/2 month/lifetime membership, in exchange for a review on their blog.

5. Ask your customers to link to you

If you have any new customers, it’s worth mentioning in the confirmation email that you’d be grateful if they shared word of your new site, and would be especially thankful if they linked to you.

6. Provide something to actually link to

If you’re launching a minimum viable product, you can still try to include something on the signup site for people to link to. When news sites are covering your startup, they may not be too inclined to link to you if all you have on your site is a signup form. If, however, you have a promo video explaining your product, a more in-depth description or an easy to understand illustration of your service (for an example, check out Appointment Reminder) then you’ll have a much better chance of gaining links during any blog or press coverage.

Getting other sites to link to you may not be hugely important in the short term, except for sending traffic your way, but in the long term the links that you can pick up when you launch can prove to be some of the most valuable links your new site may get.

7. Find the search terms your customers are using

What you would type into Google to find your product may be significantly different from what your customers (or potential customers) would search for. You can check which search terms have the highest number of searches by using Google’s AdWords keyword tool. But again – take that data with a pinch of salt, it’s impossible to say how accurate it is. Also, when you check keyword search volumes, it’s best to make sure you check “Exact match” instead of “Broad match” (the default).

8. Protect your new brand name

You’ll absolutely, without doubt, want to rank for your brand name – but if your startup is a success then you’ll want to make sure that other people aren’t easily able to outrank you. Knowem provides a really useful service that lets you easily check a large chunk of the popular social network sites to see if your brand name is available to register. If you have the time, it lets you register them one by one, or they’ll register it for you for a small fee.

And now for the experts

This post was originally going to be much shorter, but then I thought it could be significantly more useful for bootstrapped startups if it included advice from some extremely experienced SEOs. For everyone that helped – thanks very much!

Aaron Wall, SEO Book

Add a free feature which is accessible, useful, and spreads virally. It can create a stream of links and mentions that quickly replaces an ad budget.

Decide in advance who you want to be compared against and offer the points upon which you should be compared. Blekko recently used health search as an example of where they beat Google, offering specific queries where they were better. Make it so that the companies you are comparing yourself against can’t change to fix “the issue” you are creating without drastically altering their business strategy.

When preparing your launch, ensure you have at least a few stats you can talk about, as these can help make reporting feel more firm / less soft when journalists write about you.

Solicit feedback from socially connected folks & give them early access. Blekko’s “closed” beta had 8,000 people in the test.

Tom Critchlow, Distilled

Rank for your name

If you’re launching a startup with a funky name like strtpsitesRawsm.com then make sure you rank for the full query “startup sites are awesome” as this is what people will search for when they want to find you and those branded searches are incredibly valuable. To rank for these queries – try and make sure you put the full words on the site somewhere in the text. This is especially relevant for me as I’m about to launch www.7bks.com which is pronounced “7 books” but clearly might not rank for that term unless I mention it on the site in text.

Don’t do SEO

Wow. Ok, so let me explain this one. There are two things that make SEO tick: 1) links, 2) links. Unfortunately you’re going to struggle to get links initially so don’t obsess over SEO as a major factor. What you SHOULD do is make sure that your other activities are SEO-friendly. So don’t actively do SEO, but do do things that will bring you SEO benefit like outreach to relevant communities, viral blog posts, embeddable content etc. All of these activities are solid marketing tactics in their own right but in the long run will help your SEO.

Wiep Knol, Wiep.net

In my opinion, there are three elements that are important for the success of a marketing campaign: Brains, Balls and Big bucks. It’s not a problem if you miss one of these three elements -like startups usually miss the Big bucks-, but it does mean that you have to focus a bit extra on the other two elements.

The most important part is that you’ll have to be creative (Brain) with your marketing, and link marketing is just a part of that. Send out press releases for example, but with a different angle than most of the regurgitated stuff you can find on most press release and news websites. Make yours stand out from the crowd to increase the chances of getting picked up by large websites and blogs. Also, make sure to start networking with important players in your industry (journalists, bloggers, etc.) well before you launch. Help them wherever you can, so they have the feeling that they owe you something by the time that you’re ready to go.

Also, don’t be afraid to fall flat on your nose every now and then (Balls), if you don’t try you’ll never succeed. For example, you could email the top guys in your industry and ask them to participate in some research, contribute to a massive article, or to answer a few questions for an interview series. Some probably won’t even reply to your request, but others may be willing to help you out and even to help you promote the content piece. Ego is a *very* effective link hook (see this post on the most influential UK SEOs for example), so make sure to use that when contacting your most important targets.

Rishi Lakhani

Get Your Keyword Association From Day 1 – when I see startups, many have really good ideas, and really cool funky names. Nothing wrong with creating a brand name out of thin air, in fact it’s advisable. However, from an SEO point of view, these “made up” names don’t mean much when trying to rank for generic keywords. My advice would be to include your keywords and service message, all in one, by the use of a well targeted tagline.

Consider Geekosauros – a name I made up to represent a new startup that aims to be a Thesaurus specifically for the scientific community. The name is pretty cool, and brand able, but has none of the keyword targets in the logo or name:

So what would I do? Well the top keyphrase the site wants to try and aim for is “Scientific Thesaurus”. I would use a tagline in the logo and on the site “Thesaurus for the Scientific Minded”:

See what I did there? I included the words from the phrase in the logo, such that over time the strapline becomes synonymous with the brand identity. There are multiple effects of doing this:

1. Gives you a nice title and strong identity in SERPs if you use it in the home page title, which ensures that the keyphrase is covered:

2. When blogs, newspapers, etc write about the site, they will be tempted to lift YOUR definition of the business, instead of creating their own. This means that the Press and PR you get isn’t working in silo but working to push your generic keywords as well.

The result of that? Well, they may either:

a. Link to your site using the full definition, hence including the tagline as anchor text
b. Or link to your domain with your keywords in close proximity, which is also considered a “signal” for search engines to rank sites for generic keywords.

Rae Hoffman-Dolan, Sugarrae.com & Outspoken Media

I think the main piece of advice I would offer is to figure out who your brand is before telling the world who it is. And sometimes, this means spending some time prior to launch writing content nobody will ever read, especially if you plan to have a company blog. With brands of mine such as Outspoken Media and Sugarrae, obviously, we knew who we were (us!) pre launch, so we didn’t need to write “pre-content” to figure it out. But with brands I’ve built like BlackBerry Geeks and Android Geeks, etc we spent a few months writing content while developing the site (both sites launched with several months of content in place) to get a feel for who we were and who we wanted to be in the space and to consumers. It allowed us to find our point of difference, which in my opinion, is absolutely essential to Internet success, whether you’re “simply” an affiliate website or a traditional company/brand.

Richard Baxter, SEOgadget

(As a quick note from Rich, he’s writing this from the perspective of having started his own company SEOgadget).

On a tight budget, you’ve got to look at what you can do cheaply, and sort those activities by the highest potential return. I genuinely believe the single biggest reason why we have a company at all is because of our blog. Starting a blog on WordPress costs nothing, and good WordPress hosting can be very inexpensive, too. Your effort is rewarded by traffic and (hopefully) credibility in your niche. If I could start SEOgadget over again, I would still run the site from WordPress, and write about topics I care about.

Of course, networking with peers and people you generally hold respect for can make a great deal of difference. I have so many great friends that have, often many times over, tweeted, sphunn, linked to, recommended or in some way contributed to my work. Those people know who they are, and I’m very grateful they exist. If, as a startup, you have material to promote – build great relationships and network online. It works. Networking, and a good blog or some kind of emerging industry presence can open up opportunities to speak or attend events. Most industries have some kind of conference these days – what are the criteria you need to satisfy to be invited to speak?

For a low budget start up, I often think – if you build a great product, they will come. I know that’s pretty standard advice these days, but it’s true. More than just building a great product, it’s about who knows about the product at launch. Have you researched a PR / launch strategy? Do you have a few technology bloggers or influencers in your field who have advanced knowledge of your startup?

I would check out Rand’s post on having a launch plan.

It’s quite important to build a site platform that is scalable. Don’t worry about big keyword research and large site architecture on day one – but do make sure that what you’re building will scale easily. Baking in search engine friendly URLs, internal navigation and page templates is pretty simple stuff these days, but I still see startups with horribly polluted session ID based URLs and shocking duplicate content problems before they’re even a month old!

If you have the capability – bake in an embeddable content theme into your product from day one. Does your product produce data, charting, pricing, jobs, salary data, images, videos etc? There’s little excuse for a product that doesn’t have an embeddable content strategy at some point in the development cycle. With the right embedded strategy, you could save a lot of time and effort in building links. All you need to understand is what would make someone share your product? What would their reward be?

If you’re keen to make your product embeddable, consider making it sharable, too. Check out Spreadable.com – developed by the good folks behind Chargify, you can reward the people who share your products through social media channels by thanking them with a discount code after they’ve shared your product. Pure brilliance.

David Naylor, Bronco

Get a blog on the site and use the URLs that will later become landing pages.

So www.startup.com/ is the new site that will take 6 months to get to market, while it’s in the incubate status we collect the keywords we are wanting to rank for and plan the URL structure, we install WordPress in the root and start adding blog content to the SEO url structure:

www.startup.com/blog

www.startup.com/Keyword-Cat

www.startup.com/Keyword-article links www.startup.com/Keyword-Cat
www.startup.com/Keyword-article1 links www.startup.com/Keyword-Cat
www.startup.com/Keyword-article2 links www.startup.com/Keyword-Cat

We use the www.startup.com/Keyword-articles for social attraction. People link better to non commercial

But we know full well that on launch day the www.startup.com/blog will 301 to blog.startup.com, but we don’t 301 the articles they become the landing pages of the sites keeping the backlink equity they have built up

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

1. Leverage your network of contacts at launch to help draw attention, links and traffic to the site. If you’re a heavy user of social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, beef up your participation and connections prior to launch and announce your new site at an optimal time. If you have reporters/press/bloggers in your network, asking them for help/coverage/links is smart, too.

2. Plan a bit of post-launch viral content. If you can put together remarkable video content, write an amazing blog post, do cool data analysis or infographics, all of these are worth a shot to spur on marketing and awareness. Just make sure not to get disheartened – you may need to build 5-10 pieces like this before one actually “goes viral” and earns you the kind of traffic, attention and links you want.

For more information on SEO for bootstrapped startups, a number of people have recommended checking out these useful posts from Rand:

SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons
I’m getting pretty tired of startup advice that doesn’t include any mention of SEO
Advice for Startup CEOs

Did I miss any useful SEO for startups blog posts? If so – please give me a shout in the comments.

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SEO Advice for Bootstrapped Startups is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?