

SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons + A Trip to Y Combinator - davecardwell
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-for-startups-top-7-lessons

======
patio11
It was excellent of Rand both to give this presentation and for him and YC to
post it publicly, because I think the startup community has a giant blind spot
where SEO is concerned. It isn't just black magic, goat entrails, and snake
oil.

My one qualification, on advice #7 ("you should have sources of traffic other
than Google"): while it is certainly dangerous to have 90% of your traffic
coming from Google, in certain niches you have little other choice. If you're
pitching a product in a niche with lots of linkerati in it, you're going to
have lots of non-Google traffic. If you're pitching a product on Facebook,
you're going to have lots of non-Google traffic. If you're pitching a product
to forty-something ladies, you're probably not going to have lots of non-
Google traffic, because _Google is the Internet's navigation for these users_.
They don't have a regular blog they trust, they don't spread links around
themselves at nearly the velocities y'all do, they don't tweet. But they do
Google. The sites that they might click through to you from? They got to those
by Google, too.

Since I tend to pitch to non-technical users and need marketing that scales
out of proportion to time invested, Plan A: Google. Plan B: AdWords. Plan C:
I've been looking for a good candidate for 3 years now. (P.S. If your startup
has an option I will pay you money for it.)

~~~
thesethings
Is buying ads on Facebook targeting teachers too expensive? I use the FB ad-
buying tool to do a lot of market research (it gives numbers of target
audience), but have yet to pull the trigger on actually buying the ads.

~~~
patio11
I kid you not: selling software is a TOS violation.

~~~
thesethings
Ouch! That's horrible. You made me look it up.
<http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php> It seems like in section 14,
Downloads, they're against malicious downloads. Did they accuse your software
of being malware, or did they straight up say NO software?

~~~
staunch
Or did he misread it?

~~~
patio11
It seems my information was out of date. They used to have a total prohibition
on it: "No ad is permitted to contain or link, whether directly or indirectly,
to a site that contains software downloads, freeware, or shareware."

[http://successfulsoftware.net/2008/01/23/facebook-dont-
need-...](http://successfulsoftware.net/2008/01/23/facebook-dont-need-no-
steenkin-software)

~~~
thesethings
So this is great news, right?!? I mean, it's not even my business and I'm
really excited for you. :D

------
leelin

      Posterous (I learned the official way to pronounce it - "pastarus")
    

Actually, the two founders of Posterous pronounce their startup differently,
unless one of them caved recently.

~~~
tdm911
_it rhymes with preposterous_

from: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=855744>

------
davidw
This seems like decent advice, but I think such a marketing oriented crowd
would do well to hive off a new name for "doing things the right, honest way"
that's not "SEO", which I think at this point has been more or less
permanently tarnished with the image of a zero sum game where competition is
for rankings rather than improving the product, and there is, to put it
mildly, a lot of bullshit involved.

------
_delirium
The first one gives me a bit of pause. It seems awfully close to saying that
you should design around SEO--- designing for users sorta, but always with an
eye to how you can "leverage" your users for SEO purposes. Doesn't that come
close to suggesting you might make decisions that, if they were made without
taking SEO into consideration, would be a clear loss for user experience, and
are really not what your users want?

~~~
whatusername
Are you building something like Yelp, Mahalo and Stack Overflow or something
like Gmail and Basecamp.

If you have a site full of content - then you should be designing around SEO.
Spolsky's thought that the front page of SO is Google.com is very true.
Discoverable content is useful content.

If you have a Private web-app (think gmail) then Search Results aren't all
that important.

~~~
_delirium
Well, much of this week's HN discussion, to my satisfaction at least, held up
Mahalo as an example of what you _don't_ want to do. ;-) To my mind, building
a returning base of satisfied users ought to be the main goal: what is missing
on the internet, and how can I provide it? That is, what's missing _for actual
users_? The other approach seems to teeter on the edge of the gray-hat SEO
abyss.

~~~
axod
I agree completely. Sites like Mahalo and Scribd are just wrapping up content
and duping people into clicking through SEO to their site, and then clicking
on adSense adverts to get what they really wanted in the first place.

There's a reverse incentive at work there - they have no incentive to provide
a better user experience, since then, users would get what they want, and
wouldn't need to click on the ads.

Google could, and _definitely_ should IMHO detect that user behaviour, and
penalize sites for it. For example:

    
    
      * If a user clicks on a natural search listing
      * If that same user quickly clicks on an adSense advert at the site
      * We can assume that the landing page was bad quality
      * Now penalize them either by not paying the adsense, or
        reduce their ranking for that page.
    
    

If you have a valuable site, Google should only be there to provide you new
users, not _all_ your users.

I think the quote about Google being the frontpage to stackoverflow is pretty
ridiculous personally.

~~~
qeorge
_"I think the quote about Google being the frontpage to stackoverflow is
pretty ridiculous personally."_

Why? Because its true?

There's a lot of content sites I use all the time but never visit directly.
Yahoo Answers comes to mind.

~~~
axod
I just don't think it's a useful state of affairs once a site has tens, even
hundreds of millions of pages indexed by google.

Why wouldn't you go to Yahoo answers and do a search there?

I'm just not too into the business model of "We know about everything", lets
get listed for every single search on google.

For stackoverflow, personally I don't usually find the content useful, so it's
just irritating to have to specify I don't want stackoverflow results. It'd be
good if Google could better judge quality of pages, as in "Is this just user
generated / scraped content, or is it verified reliable fact".

~~~
ericd
You don't go to Yahoo answers directly because you can either search one, or
search them all at once. Do you still go to the bakery, then the butcher, then
the vegetable stand, or do you go to a supermarket?

As for judging quality and verifying as a reliable fact, I agree, that would
be excellent. This is something I was thinking about as part of a potential
startup. Unfortunately, it's wicked hard to do without resorting to (probably
paid) human experts.

~~~
axod
>> "Do you still go to the bakery, then the butcher, then the vegetable stand,
or do you go to a supermarket?"

I often still go to the bakery, then the butcher, then the farm shop actually.
The quality is far better than anything you get in a supermarket.

~~~
ericd
Heh actually I wish I had all of those things located nearby, I've never been
disappointed when I've spent the time to go to all of those.

------
amohr
Is there a way to link to a specific slide in Scribd? I think slide 14 should
be required reading.

~~~
Timothee
I don't know if there is but you can link to this page:

[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-
fundame...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundamentals-
pyramid)

Good read indeed.

------
akshat
Is it only me, or almost all SEO advice is pretty much the same? Nobody ever
says anything new or different. Why are such posts such a rage on Hacker News?

------
clistctrl
Do Y Combinator events always have such a large offering of pizza and coke?

~~~
pg
Depends on the event, but there's always food. Startup school has bagels and
coffee. Demo Day has sandwiches. Tuesday dinners have homemade stuff like
chili or stew over rice or pasta.

------
vaksel
SEO advice is bullshit, I mean really it basically comes down to a) make a
site that has internal links b) figure out a way to get links to your site
from other sites c) modify your internal links so only the pages you want are
getting link juice.

Oh and D don't do anything stupid like Keyword stuffing, scraping, fake
content or anything else that can get you banned...well unless you are
Mahalo...then you are off the hook.

Personally I don't think YC startups actually need SEO link building. The mere
fact that they are a YC startup, means that they'll get on the front page of
Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat and dozens of other huge blogs with a
ton of PR when they launch. A single post on Techcrunch is worth more link
wise, than a million PR1-3 blogs posting about your latest link bait strategy.

~~~
bjplink
"A single post on Techcrunch is worth more link wise, than a million PR1-3
blogs posting about your latest link bait strategy."

I don't have a link to provide as proof but I'm pretty sure based off of my
memory and anecdotal evidence I've read on the web that links from the big
Nerdy Tech Blogs actually drive little to no converting traffic.

So in that case, I would much rather take the million links in the hope that
the people who come along that chain will convert better than the half-
literate TechCrunch commentators would.

~~~
vaksel
we are not talking about traffic here, we are talking about SEO, and link
juice is logarithmic, the difference from

PR4^10 links = 1 PR5

~~~
bjplink
First of all, based on my own personal experience, I don't buy that formula
for one second.

Secondly, a link on a TechCrunch post is by no means a high PR link for any
decent length of time. You MIGHT get your link on their front page for a few
hours before it rolls off into the archival abyss. Maybe if you're lucky, over
time and with enough inbounds link to that post, you'll get some juice out of
it.

I guess my point, which was lost because I didn't clarify well, is that a link
from TC (in terms of traffic or SEO purposes) is probably overrated.

