Friday, April 25, 2014

SEO for Startups & New Businesses

When you are starting a new business, you should have a great idea or product, some money to invest, eager consumers and great workers. Nowadays several elements are essential to do well in your site and off-site properties, so here are some ideas on how to build a new business that will do SEO right.

1. Know Your Concepts and Keywords

It is most important as compared to keywords and keyword research. You must care about below things:
  • People
  • Content
  • Functionality
  • Open data
  • Bunch of other things
These things will get your business into conversations. For example, let us consider you are starting a new business based on selling new and used cars and operating car dealerships. Here's what a concept map might look like:
Concepts to Strategic Keyword List

2. Plan Your Content Investments and Practice Content Marketing

After completion of your key concepts and strategic keyword list, now you are ready to create a high-level plan for content creation. These things will help to inform your website user experience, the kind of people you hire, and the other kind of investments.
Here is the best pattern of high-level editorial plan for a new dealership business:
Editorial Plan

3. Ensure your site is technically flawless


This is the world of technical SEO and it has 2 main components, those are:
  • Making sure you don’t screw up your indexing by creating content that can’t be seen or is duplicative.
  • Making sure you create search-engine friendly code.
Most content management systems can also generate sitemaps. Be sure to activate those sitemaps, submit to Google, and authorize them by using Google Webmaster Tools.
Technical SEO’s rising element is used to create the open data sets or APIs. If your organization will succeed by receiving your inventory or content into as many places as possible then consider creating data feeds for third-party developers to use.

4. Get Your On-Page and Metadata Act in Order

Discrete content elements will require on-page optimization, which are:
  • Web pages
  • Images
  • PDFs
  • Videos
  • Social profiles
  • Brand pages
  • Local listings
  • Off-site (reviews) pages
This means knowing the targeted key phrase for the content and placing it into the correct places like the title, description, copy, etc.
Here are a few helpful optimization resources, those are:
  • Metadata & You: Best Practices, Benefits & Implementation Made Easy
  • Image Optimization: How to Rank on Image Search
  • 5 YouTube Video Optimization Tips
  • SEO for Google+ Profiles, Pages, Local, Communities & Updates
  • 5 Social Media Profile Optimization Tips for Brands
You need to make sure every section of content is optimized before it goes out and is published, and that it has both social signal (tweets, Google +1's,) and inbound link support.

5. Improve Your Social Authority Plan


Social authority, in many cases certain persons calculated by G+ profile, has the potential to become a major ranking factor in the emerging world of app-based or semantic knowledge engines. This means you need to verify who in your company will become active on Google+ and other key social graph and authority platforms like LinkedIn to champion your brand, create content and get connected to other authoritative people.

6. Mobilize, Localize, and Socialize Your Content and People

Search engines are geo-locating outcomes more and more – not just the local results block but the core web results as well. This means you need to make your content as locally significant as possible and to make it work great on mobile devices.
Generate geo-targeted evergreen pages; create geo-optimized profiles, location pages and support or reseller pages, whatever. No matter how abstract your business is? and you can find various ways to make it locally significant.
Here's an example of geo-located core web results:
Geo-Located Google Results for Used Cars
Making your site active or at least mobile-friendly for the major screen sizes will often help here. And these are also helpful for startups & new businesses, which are:
  • Practice Distributed, Search-Informed Communications and PR
  • Train Editors, Publishers and Writers on SEO and Linking
  • Put the Key Metrics, Reporting Tools and Reporting Cadence in Place
  • Allocate Dollars for Content Promotion and Syndication
  • Make it Somebody's Job

7. Practice Distributed, Search-Informed Communications and PR

Introducing a latest business is news-worthy, so make the most of the uneven nature of the result to get inbound links to pages by using proper anchor text.
It is not just press releases and it is also considered as interviews. It’s getting your employees to link to deep pages from their Google+ profiles and its drawing attention to the deep functionality of the site so that bloggers and other folks will link to them to discuss.

8. Train Editors, Publishers and Writers on SEO and Linking

Be sure to put your writers and editors through SEO and social media bootcamp. Get them to understand content metrics and target keywords. Make sure they push their content on Google+, LinkedIn, wherever it's relevant. The idea is for content marketing, not for content creation.

9. Put the Key Metrics, Reporting Tools and Reporting Cadence in Place

There are a ton of tools to help you to evaluate content both from social sharing as well as an SEO perspective. Add in conventional web analytics and you have a good idea of how well acquisition content is doing.
Linkdex 360 Report

10. Allocate Dollars for Content Promotion and Syndication

Now you want to know how you're going to promote and syndicate. At each stage, there are paid, social graph or syndication options that go away from conventional SEO and can work synergistically.
Enterprise Content Framework

11. Make it Somebody's Job

It is saved as the best for last because it is most important. If you don’t have much knowledge on content for SEO, then choose any content writer based on their performance plan. Hence you have the resources in place to get the work done.

7 Essentials When Optimizing Your Site

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is the method of affecting the visibility of a website from the “free”, “organic” listings on search engines. Basic search engine optimization is important and fundamental. The main purpose of foundational SEO isn't to defraud the search engines.
The purpose of SEO is to:
  • Create a good, faultless user experience.
  • Communicate to the search engines about your plans so they can recommend your website for significant searches.

1. What Search Engines Are Looking For

Search engines desire to do their works as good as possible by suggesting users to websites and content that is most significant to users. Hence how is significance determined?
Content: It is resolved by the topic that is being given in the page which includes the titles and descriptions.
Performance: How much time takes to load the page in your site and does it work properly?
Authority: Does your site have relevant content to link or does other authoritative sites use your website as a reference?
User experience:
  • How does the site look?
  • Is it easy to navigate around?
  • Does it look safe?
  • Does it have a high bounce rate?

2. What Search Engines Are Not Looking For

Search engine crawlers have a definite possibility of data storage. Hence if you are using shady tactics to trick them, then chances are going to hurt yourself in the long time. Items the search engines don't want are:
Keyword Stuffing: Repetition of keywords on your pages.
Purchased Links: When comes to SEO, buying links will not get you anywhere, hence be notified.
Poor User Experience: Make it easy to get around for the user. Many ads and relevant content will only helpful to increase your bounce rate. If you know your bounce rate it will help to determine other information about your site.

3. Know Your Business Model

While this is attractive , hence many people tend to not sit down and just focus on their aims. Some questions you need to ask yourself. Those are:
  • What defines a conversion for you?
  • Are you selling eyeballs (impressions) or what people click on?
  • What are your goals?
  • Do you know your assets and liabilities?

5. Don’t Forget to Optimize for Multi channels

Keyword strategy is not only significant to apply for on-site, but should enlarge to other off-site platforms, which has to consider multi-channel optimization. These multi-channel platforms include Face book, Twitter, LinkedIn, Email and Offline, such as radio and TV ads. Being logical with keyword phrases within these platforms, will not only help your branding problems, but also train users to use exact phrases you are optimizing for.

6. Be Consistent With Domain Names

Domain naming is very important to your overall foundation, hence you are better to use Sub-directory root domains (example.com/awesome) versus sub-domains (awesome.example.com). Some other best practices with domain names are Consistent Domains, Keep it Old School, Keywords in URL.

7. Optimizing for Different Types of Results

In addition to development for the desktop experience, make sure to concentrate on cell phone, tablet optimization and also other networks.
  • Create rich and unique content like video, as it's easier to get a video to rank on the first page as compared to plain text page rank.
  • Search engines can see it, when you optimize your non-text content. If your website uses PDFs and flashes make sure that search engines can easily crawls that content and give a better rank to your site.

8. Focus on Your Meta Data Too

Your content on your site should have Title and Meta description Tags. Nowadays, Meta keywords are much unnoticed by search engines. Anyway if you still use keywords, make sure it talks particularly to certain page. Your Meta description and title should be unique and also tell about specific page. Duplicate Meta descriptions from page to page will not get a better rank.