SEO for StartUps: Top Rules to Apply Now!

Being a Startup person means capable of doing multiple things at a time. Staffing, outreach, paperwork, development, testing, financing along with several other things simultaneously goes on in a startup business. Startups, unlike other businesses, are by nature much volatile that crave for heavy lifting at the early beginning of their lifecycle.

Though our brilliant entrepreneurs are already experts in their niches they always had double thought on the implementation of a well-structured SEO strategy. Maybe they think there will be an extra expense on dedicated SEO resources or they will need a complete marketing team for the optimization. But my dear entrepreneurs! there is nothing like that. Even you can implement your own SEO strategy at an early stage that can pay dividends down the line as your business grows.

For a brand new website, SEO ensures that when people search for your business, they will be able to find your web address in the search engine results. After a certain period of time with the fuller implementation of SEO, people will also be able to find your products and services when they put a search query related to them instead of your competitor’s.

SEO is really a slow game. It takes months of optimization to achieve but starting sooner rather than later is always recommended. Below are some essential SEO tips for any newly born startup to implement. Some only take few minutes while some take little more development assistance- but believe me, each provides a distinct benefit to your website. So start your ride on as soon as possible!

Rule #1: Be pretty sure that your site can be indexed!

This should be the very first thing you need to keep in mind. Search engines totally rely upon some automated programs known as “bots” or “spiders” who move between the internal and external links to your website and store information they find in the index of the search engine. These indexes are massively huge databases from where a search engine based on a certain google algorithm pulls out the relevant page that best matches the query of a user.

So it is totally your responsibility that you make the path very clear for the bots to crawl your website since if they find any obstacle in between like broken links, hidden content or any other crawl issue, they won’t be able to fully explore your site. Consequently, your content won’t be picturized in the index and that’s why won’t be displayed in natural search results.

So at first set up an account with Google Webmaster Tools to be aware of different crawling issues that you might face in near future.

Rule #2: Do proper Keyword research!

Keywords are the specific search queries for which you definitely would like your site to appear in natural search results and any SEO strategy largely depends upon the identification of individual keywords. For example, you own a startup in Vancouver, Canada then your targeted keywords must be like Vancouver companies, Vancouver startup or IT companies in Vancouver etc.  Again, Search engine crawling programs are automated and they rely upon some arbitrary signals to determine what your content is about and is it any good or not? The inclusion of relevant keywords among your content (as in your title tag, in your headings or anywhere in your body content) increases your chances to be noticed by these search engine bots.

Rule #3: Keyword Characteristics you need to keep in mind:

Don’t pick anything that matches your brand as a keyword. Keep the following keyword characteristics in mind while determining which search query to optimize your website for:

Search Volume: There will be an estimation of the number of times a particular keyword phrase is searched for each month. The higher the number is, the more potential traffic you tend to get.

Competition: Competition tells you how many other websites have been optimized for a particular keyword phrase. Until and unless you own a well-funded startup don't go for high competition keywords.

Keyword Intent: Obviously, the keyword that you choose should match your business objectives. Don’t pick a phrase like Vancouver jobs if you really are not offering any jobs in Vancouver.

Hope, you got my point :P

After taking all the points into consideration, shortlist 5 to 10 keywords and start your own optimization campaign.

Rule #4:  Make a proper link building strategy:

This should be treated as the highest priority task in your overall SEO strategy. Building quality inbound links that direct others to your web page plays a big role in its overall natural search performance.

Follow these points to carry forward your link building strategy:

• Provide Guest posts at high authority sites.
• Contact sites that review the products of your industry.
• Send press releases to major news sites.
• Viral your content on social media networks.
• Add your business to relevant business directories(or top citation sites) within your industry.

Ultimately the whole SEO thing revolves around the quality of content that you frequently post on your website. So publish healthy and nonspammy content and get your site indexed on search engine result pages.