Is SEO the Answer for Start-up Marketing?

Lately I’ve seen that a tight relationship between SEO and startups has been something of a foregone conclusion within the SEO industry: “Of course startups should be engaged in SEO!” Perhaps, and perhaps not. In fact, some start-up communities have taken up a stance in direct opposition to this, stigmatizing SEO as manipulative. Personally I’m just a humble consultant who has never started a company of his own, so I think it would be presumptuous of me to arbitrarily declare SEO a high priority for any start-up in any field.
If doing SEO isn’t a foregone conclusion, then, it bears further discussion as a marketing strategy. I want to approach this topic from a different angle. In any successful startup there will be someone with good business sense, someone who can look at the evidence in front of them and make their own decision about what is best for their company. So let me put some premises on the table about what SEO offers the start-up and why start-ups are uniquely positioned to leverage their position for SEO.
What SEO Offers
(Measurable) Audience Embiggening
The end goal of SEO is to increase the number of people arriving at your site through organic search results. There are also other metrics that are intermediate factors helping you accomplish this goal, such as your actual rankings in search results. These are things that you can measure, and report successes in increasing.
In addition, there are two different sets of keywords to look at when assessing the organic search channel—branded and non-branded terms. It's a powerful thing to demonstrate that your branded search traffic is increasing—it suggests that more people are looking for your brand online, which is a Good Thing.
On the other hand, the implications of receiving non-branded search traffic are numerous. Such traffic suggests that a site has increasing visibility for relevant search terms. If the start-up is defining new language, it suggests that users are picking up on that language. If it is increasing its share in an existing space, it suggests that the site may be cutting into the market share of competitors in organic search.
Reinforcement Of Extant Marketing Strategies
Optimization for SEO has the potential to enhance the effect of your other marketing strategies. If you are anticipating driving a lot of social interaction with your site, having your pages and URLs optimized for SEO will ensure that as people share your site you get the most value from that sharing. If you are link building through outreach and maintaining relationships with people in your industry, all of a sudden you have assets through which you can promote social content or editorial or anything else you might be up to.

Makes sense, right?
Why Startups Can Leverage Their Position
Agility
A startup—particularly at the outset of operation—has a great deal more flexibility than a more established competitor in the market. The obvious dichotomy here is between the large, established competitor and the start-up underdog. The start-up clearly has more agility than the established competitor, without a doubt. Consider:

But what about the 18-month old company compared to the 2-month old? If you don’t even have a website live, you’re even more flexible than an 18-month old company with a website up and an investment in a particular architecture or format or strategy for content publication. Oracle might be a giant awkward mess to manage from an SEO perspective, but even Dropbox by now has a more rigid infrastructure and user expectations and a great deal of variables which it must consider. Setting a course at the outset, which includes SEO will ensure that you are well positioned to be successful in organic search when you've achieved the same size and user base.
As part of overall SEO efforts all of the elements in the following (non-exhaustive) list might need to be manipulated:

• Keyword targeting—which terms you have chosen to represent your products, content, and brand.

• Site structure—how information on your website is structured and how you present that information to users. Are your products and pages properly differentiated?

• Content strategy—what information are you going to publish on your site? None? All of it? Who will be responsible for this?

The earlier SEO can be integrated into the business model the better.
Novelty
A startup is bringing something new to the market, something with novelty (though hopefully it has some staying power as well).
In fact, novelty is what linkbait is all about. It’s something new and fresh and interesting—whether it is something explicitly new or a new take on something familiar. A new product, or a new face on an old product.
I mean, check out Y Combinator start-up Matterport. They’ve got a little Star Trek-style scanning device that makes 3D representations of any object or environment. This is some link-worthy content if ever I've seen some. We talk in SEO all the time about content marketing, which can be an expensive or confusing marketing route for a start-up. The thing is, in the early days, if you’ve got an interesting product that is your content. Ignore this at your own risk.

And again this matches up well with efforts you will be making on other fronts. If you've got a really interesting start-up idea, you'll almost certainly have been getting links on TechCrunch or Mashable. If you're minding your SEO on-site, you'll be getting the full benefit these novelty-based links can drive to your site.
Efficacy of Partial Implementation
Practicing SEO is a bit like practicing meditation—full enlightenment is an ongoing journey requiring a lifetime of work, but also a little bit will go a long way. It may be impractical for your business to drop $10,000-$20,000 on a link bait campaign or plan a content strategy that reaches six months out. But if you could manage to do a quick technical audit of your site, even doing that will get you one step closer to success. SEO isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. It is fully capable of scaling with your company.
Next StepsI think it goes without saying that I think the above premises suggest that SEO is really something that start-ups ought to be engaged in. If you have come to a similar conclusion, I suggest reading this longer essay on the merits of SEO for start-ups. If after that you’re feeling game, checking out the following resources:

• http://www.slideshare.net/tomcritchlow/seo-for-startups-9682262

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-for-startups-top-7-lessons

• http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/link-building-tips-for-startups-a-new-free-appsumo-video/

These reflect a higher-level look at the problem of SEO in the startup context. Then try to take some first steps, such as:

• Running through a technical audit checklist for your site, whether it is already live or pending publication.

• Reading (or having someone on your team read) the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

• Benchmarking your current position if your site is live. Which terms are you ranking for, or just tracking words for which you would like to rank. SEOmoz's Pro Campaigns are a great way to get started doing this.

• Keyword Research—what are your competitors trying to rank for? Have a go with the Google Keyword Tool and see what terms it suggests are related to those you think might be valuable.

• Get your first ten links. There are a huge number of tactics available to you—this blog itself has an entire category dedicated to link building.

You can read more on seomoz 

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Recovered From The Penguin Update

This post is from SeoMoz

Last Friday, Google pushed out the first refresh of their infamous Penguin update, bringing many webmasters to stumble towards their analytics, SERPs and the like in hopes of signs of a recovery from previous ranking drops, and/or to hope that they had not seen a precipitous drop in rankings. For most, the algo refresh seemed to do little, and for good reason - Cutts informed us that it apparently only impacted .01% of search results. Not many SERPs changed, and most of the voices heard over the weekend only seemed to be coming from people that were newly crushed by Google's pet Penguin. 

Soon after the algorithm hit, we learned that Penguin refreshes, as it did last weekend. This makes it unique and similar to Panda in formation. For most, there was a lull period where these Penguin-impacted webmasters would sit around, gather the facts about the update, and then take action towards recovery where there were negative impacts in a week or two after the event. Many removed and/or edited links - others simply moved completely away from their manipulative linking strategies. However, because of this time lull between implementation and action, it's possible that moves towards recovery were not rapid enough to see full changes, as links take time to crawl, new actions take much time to implement, and the new refresh took only a month to once again take effect. 

In that respect, it may leave some to think "is a Penguin recovery even possible?", or "should I just start over with a new domain?". These are real questions that will come with edits to links and strategy, a refresh and no changes to our rankings. To that end, I don't have absolute answers, nobody does - just strong suggestions about the data points we know about what survived, what didn't, and how Google has treated penalties in the past. What I do now know, though, is that a Penguin recovery is possible, and possible in a short amount of time - because I've seen a big, seemingly complete recovery from the update at the first refresh. This recovery came for a website that felt a previous, critical impact from Penguin at the first iteration - that website being popular Wordpress portal, WPMU.org.

The WPMU Story

On April 24th, 2012, WPMU.org was hit by the Penguin Update. Traffic from Google dropped over 81% week over week, causing a real, massive hit in revenue for the business over night. This was not the "three or four spots" Google Penguin drop, this was the "almost disappear completely" type Penguin hit that was among the worst kind of impact most websites felt - and for the owner, James Farmer, this came as a real, completely unexpected shock.

WPMU is a Wordpress information hub with resources, plugins and more  - but the most important of its resource portfolio is its themes. WPMU's themes function like many Wordpress installs usually do - they create citation footer links to declare the theme type being used, so when its popular theme packs get installed, they generate a "Powered by X" link in the footer of the site back to the theme page.

Although it made sense in the context of these blogs, and for these types of themes, it also generated a high volume of sitewide links on low quality sites. It also, in its majority iteration, used the anchor "Wordpress Mu" - which is a somewhat valid iteration of "WPMU" - but to Google, it was likely seen as an attempt to get commercial anchor text pointing at the site. 

To WPMU founder James Farmer (as well as others), this was extremely frustrating. Wordpress and web design installs are a unique use case that might have been caught in the crossfire of this update. It simply makes sense for these sites to have a link in the footer back to the theme and/or designer - this is definitely what users expect, and is good from a usability perspective overall. However, when looked at purely from what we normally consider "clean" link profile characteristics, its raw numbers fell outside those "good" ratios - and surely, the nature of Wordpress themes and the majority of people who select them mean that a good amount will be low quality and/or spam. 

However, WPMU clearly had many other things going for it. 10,700+ Facebook likes, 15,600+ Twitter followers, more than 2,500 +1s, and over 4,250 people subscribed to Feedburner in total. Its backlink profile includes links from Technorati, Ars Technica, Wired, Huffington Post, SEOBook, Business Insider, Boing Boing and more. Surely, this isn't a site that deserves to get penalized, right? Well, apparently Google thought differently.

Post penalty, Farmer reached out to the Sydney Morning Herald, the biggest news site in Australia, in hopes to get coverage of the events. He got what he asked for, and the Herald, according to Farmer, got his site in front of Cutts to ask why a domain like WPMU would get hit by Penguin. Cutts replied, pointing out links that in particular lead to the penalty - for example, the below pages. Copy and paste to view.

• http://baydownloads.info/11580-Wordpress-Membership-Plugin-Wordpress-PayPal-R-Plugin-show-5starserve.htm - A site pirating WPMU software.
• http://computerofficechair.blogdetik.com/category/tak-berkategori/ - A splog using an old theme pack with a link to WPMU in the footer - with said potentially "commercial" anchor (my words, not Matt's).
• http://computerchairs.blogdetik.com/ - Same splog.

Cutts said, according to Farmer, "that we should consider the fact that we were possibly damaged by the removal of credit from links such as these". Sure, based on what we now know or assume about the update, this makes sense. Low quality links, and also spammy, rarely-clicked footer links with over-optimized anchor text. Right.

Although this information was helpful to Farmer, what also came from it was Google awareness of a site that potentially might not have really "fit" within what they were hoping to accomplish with this update. On top of Cutts now knowing about the changes, Farmer then went on to blog the details of the penalty on WPMU, leading to more coverage and links, tweets from Rand, and also, according to Farmer, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land putting the site in front of Google once again.

With the burst of awareness this created in the SEO community, many people, such as myself, ended up commenting on Farmer's post on WPMU. The community was gracious in offering advice, suggestions, and other reasons why the site may have been penalized - and from there, what Farmer might do to recover. Based on my comments and tweets at WPMU about the subject, Farmer reached out to me about taking next steps in undoing the impacts of Penguin. I obliged, and work began.

We had two choices for WPMU - get the nofollow attribute added to the links, or simply remove them completely. The first goal was to cut down on as many of the sitewide, "Wordpress MU" anchor text links as possible. I initially thought nofollowing would be the best solution because of the potential for these links to drive leads for Farmer and WPMU, but Farmer thought, to make it easy to change and correct for bloggers, the best solution was to simply ask for removal. 

The EDUBlogs.org Removal

The most perilous piece of WPMU's link profile came from one site - EDUblogs.org. EDU Blogs is a blogging service for people in the education space, allowing them to easily set up a subdomain blog on EDUblogs for their school-focused site - in a similar fashion to Blogspot, Typepad, or Tumblr, meaning that each subdomain is treated as a unique site in Google's eyes. Coincidentally, this site is owned by WPMU and Farmer, and every blog on the service leverages WPMU theme packs. Each of these blogs had the "Wordpress MU" anchor text in the footer, which meant a high volume of subdomains considered unique by Google all had sitewide "Wordpress MU" anchor text. In what might have been a lucky moment for WPMU, this portion of their external link profile was still completely in their control because of WPMU ownership. 

In what I believe is the most critical reason why WPMU made a large recovery and also did it faster than almost everyone else, Farmer instantly shut off almost 15,000 'iffy' sitewide, footer LRDs to their profile, dramatically improving their anchor text ratios, sitewide link volume, and more. They were also able to do this early on in the month, quickly after the original update rolled out. A big difference between many people trying to "clean up their profile" and WPMU is time - getting everything down and adjusted properly meant that many people simply did not see recoveries at refresh 1.1 - but that doesn't mean it won't happen at all if the effort persists. 

Additional Cleanup

Once .EDUBlogs got cleaned up, the majority of the link profile had been fixed. However, much of the junk still remained from independent bloggers who put up WPMU themes. Because of time constraints, I was really unable to move at all on the link cleanup outside EDUblogs as we attempted to get an effective strategy in place for people to remove footer links, and also avoid Memorial Day weekend for e-mailing. Despite this, we still may move forward with cleaning up the remainder "junk" links to prevent Penguin hitting again on a second iteration.

Although Penguin seems to be a link penalty, I would be remiss to only mention the large link-based changes that were made to the site in the month between updates. Farmer and the WPMU team also made the following changes during that time, any, all, or none of which may have made an impact on recovery. I want to clarify, here, that these cleanups were all done by Farmer as overall quality value-adds, and were not Penguin-specific improvement suggestions made by me, although some, many, all, or none of them may have contributed to the recovery.

• Pinged blogs that were originally highlighted by Matt Cutts in a conversation with the Syndey Harold - only one removed links, but they did come from a significant volume of splogs on the Blogdetik.com domain
• Submitted WPMU to the Penguin review form, twice, specifically referencing this article that was being beaten out by the links that referenced it
• Used SEOmoz campaign data to implement some canonical URLs to clean up crawl errors and also kill some unnecessary links across the site
• Did a bit of "SEO cleanup" that revealed WPMU.org sitemaps did not exist and/or were broken. Implemented sitemaps and submitted the feeds to Webmaster Tools, which was not happening previously
• Cleaned up numerous duplicate title tag issues as reported by Webmaster tools
• Continued to build natural links to the site and promote other positive signals such as referring traffic and social shares
• Very notably and importantly, got this specific use case in front of Google and also the greater SEO community that highlighted it

These aren't the only changes that occurred, certainly, but were the most notable in reference to the Penguin update, and may help in your own decision making in order to better recover your own website rankings in the future.

Just as I was about to start manually e-mailing the remaining blogs to remove WPMU links, a great thing happened - recovery. On Friday, May 25th, a clear return from the 1.1 refresh of Penguin occurred, bringing ranking and traffic levels to what look like the same spot they were previously. Given that it's a holiday weekend, traffic is considerably down, so it's hard to tell for certain - but considering what we know about traditional impacts from the holidays, it looks like WPMU has made a full recovery from its original hit from the Penguin update.

This Penguin recovery is a great sign not just for WPMU, but also other Penguin impacted webmasters as well. WPMU had a lot of things going for it that allowed for immediate and quick recovery - such as getting in front of Google (which may have caused an algorithmic adjustment for this use case), being a site that DESERVES to rank with tons of other great signals already, and also the ability to pull down tons of manipulative linking root domains instantly. However, these "quick fix" solutions that allowed WPMU to quickly come back also means that the long term fixes that you're working on for your domain should also work - that is, if you implement them properly and move towards a longer term, higher quality site as you should be.

It should also be noted and taken very seriously that this post should not be considered a "blueprint" for recovery for your site. Read it and make your own educated decisions based on what you know about your link profile, your business, your vertical, and the Penguin Update in general.

Best of luck - and happy Penguin hunting!

Although Farmer and his team at WPMU did most of the heavy lifting in this recovery, I'll do my best to answer any questions you might have in the comments. Feel free to also ping me on Twitter for a quicker response. Many thanks to Melissa Kowalchuk as well for her image design work on this post.

This post is from SeoMoz 

Posted by kamal aujla a big fan of SEOMOZ

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Stop Doing SEO Tricks

Hi everybody! My name is Kamal Aujla. I’m super excited to be here! I’ll be posting on SEO here regularly going forward, but for my first post I wanted to tell you guys that when it comes to SEO, this is how I roll:

 

I know a woman who’s recently lost about 30 pounds. She looks great, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone compliment her on her new look and then ask, “What’s your secret?” “Just eating right and exercising,” she replies – and their faces invariably fall. Eating right and exercising? BO-RING! Sounds hard!

 

The truth is, we’re all looking for shortcuts to help us get the results we want without putting in the work we need to do to achieve them (think about the “1 Weird Old Trick” ads you see everywhere). We step on the scale, think about the hard low-cal high-cardio road ahead, and think, “Surely there’s a better/faster/easier way to do this.”

 

SEOs do this all the time. We want that magic bullet to get our sites to the top of the SERPs, the one “secret trick” to get the edge on our competitors. And just like fad diets, a lot of secret/sneaky SEO tricks do work for a while. When I started doing SEO in 2006, one of my tasks was to go into our older blog posts and bold or un-bold various keywords, so the content would update and be seen as “fresh.” And you know what? It worked for a while. Remember Page Rank sculpting? TOTALLY worked for a while. Remember directory submissions and blog comment spamming for links? Of course you do, because they are still going on.

 

Weaning Ourselves Off of Short-Term Gains

Look, I get it, guys. It’s so easy to adopt SEO tricks, and when they actually WORK it can be incredibly hard to turn them down. If all of your competitors are outranking you thanks to their huge volume of paid/spammy links, the moral high ground’s not gonna put food on the table, amirite? So I feel ya. The “if it works I’m doing it, regardless of whether or not it follows the guidelines or is a good user experience” approach has gotten some serious short-term gains for some people (to my continuing chagrin – for more on this topic, see Wil Reynolds’ post How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO). Regardless of my personal feelings on whether or not they’re good for the Internet, I’m not going to say tricks don’t ever work.

 

The problem with SEO tricks is that they’re about getting a site to the top of the SERPs regardless of whether it deserves to be there. That’s the kind of trick that search engines have a vested interest in continuing to combat, which leads to algorithmic updates like Penguin. Over-reliance on SEO tricks is what causes your rankings and traffic to be completely wiped out overnight by these updates. Without a foundation of quality SEO in place, you’re going to spend a lot of your time fixing stuff and doing stuff over every time the search engines catch on to your latest trick.

 

SEO is Hard

The difficulty with weaning ourselves off of SEO tricks is that doing SEO without doing tricks is hard freaking work. It is way harder to build great content and fix crummy code and build linking relationships and get people to share and link to your content and then do all that again, over and over, than it is to submit to a bunch of directories and hire a freelancer to spin some content to syndicate on article sites and to comment spam neglected blogs and then buy a bunch of links. 

 

However, it’s a lot easier to build great content and fix crummy code and build linking relationships and get people to share and link to your content and then do all that again, over and over, and have it NEVER STOP WORKING, than it is to completely change everything you do every year or so because your websites keep getting algorithmic slaps. And it’s a lot less stressful, in the long run, not to have to explain to your clients why their sites are totally hosed now.

 

SEO Tactics that Never Stop Working

We talk a lot about how SEO changes all the time, but in the 6 years I’ve been doing this, here are some things that have never stopped working for me:

• Find the terms that people are using to search for your products, and then talk about your products on-site using those terms, without using them so much you sound crazy.
• Make sure a search engine can find every page on your site, read the content and figure out what the page is about (i.e. what keywords it should rank for).
• Fix the broken stuff on your site, remove duplicate content and make the whole site faster.
• Create interesting, relevant, fresh content that is designed to engage users and encourage them to share it.
• Build links to your site from other high-authority sites with which you share a topic or audience – better yet, build relationships with those sites that can earn you links again and again.
• Make sure you’ve got a good experience for users once they get to the site: the content they see is the content they wanted. That’s what search engines want to happen, and that’s how users give you money.

The ways in which we do these things have changed a lot over the years, and we’ve been given a lot of new tools (social media, schema.org, the canonical tag) to do them with, but despite the fact that a lot has changed, a lot hasn’t. 

 

Just like with weight loss, doing things the right way (the hard way) may not work as fast, but it will work for longer. Every time your competitors get slapped down for their SEO tricks, they have to spend a few months fixing everything and making up for the rankings they lost when their tricks stopped working, then finding a new trick and implementing that. You get to spend that same time building your foundation even stronger. Over time that’s going to make for a solid, well ranked, algorithm-proof site. 

 

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