ULS - Getting Started with SEO by Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting

Ultra Light Startups Getting Started with SEO

More Traffic from Search Than Any Other Source

Position Matters

Paid vs. Organic • Paid Search: – Offers direct response model – Cost per click management fees • Organic search: – Results take months to see, but are more enduring

Search Engines are Software Programs

They Have a Big Job • Crawl one trillion web pages • Perform semantic analysis on All of Them • Map ALL the links on the web • Use this data to map results for ANY search query • Respond to any query in < 0.2 seconds • Result: One tired spider

They have Limitations Images: Videos (including Flash): Can’t “read” the file But, with clean HTML text, it’s easy

Conclusions (Part 1) • Need search engine friendly web site – Content Management System – E-Commerce Platform – Web Development Tools • Need to have text on your web site – Lots of text (on many pages, 2 paragraphs is enough) – Must still offer a good user experience

Use Links Like Votes in an Election

Who Rank’s First? Joe’s Book Store

Links Are Not Created Equal Killer #1! Link 1 #2 Web Site A Link 1 Link 2 Search Results …….. …1,000 Web Site B

Search Engines Do Not Count All Links • Links they can’t read: – Encrypted JavaScript – In an iFrame • Links on pages that they can’t crawl – Can’t find – Marked as NoCrawl in Robots.txt • Links marked with NoFollow Attribute

Why do People Link?

Conclusions (Part 2) • Must actively pursue links – It’s part of your marketing plan • People don’t link to you to help you make money • Need to provide compelling content

Content Management Systems

Typical E-commerce/CMS Problems • Lack of control in specifying: – Titles – heading tags – meta descriptions – Image alt tags – anchor text – breadcrumbs – URL structure of site

More E-commerce/CMS Problems • Generate really long, ugly, URLs • Uses hidden text in a risky way • No support for NoIndex and NoFollow • No canonical redirects • Uses 302 as default redirect • Uses session parameters on URLs • Does not generate XML sitemap • Non-scalable optimization methods

Market Focus • Your product is your product • But … • Are search engines going to be the primary source of your new customers? • Competitive landscape can define where the best opportunities are • If competition has 4 or 5 areas of the search market wrapped up …

Conclusions (Part 3) • You CAN screw up your SEO at the very beginning • You CAN try to compete in a market where you have no chance of success • You CAN build a web site that gets no traffic • To avoid this: – Bake SEO into your plan from the first moment

Thank You! Eric Enge President Stone Temple Consulting eenge@stonetemple.com (508) 485-7751

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ULS - Getting Started with SEO by Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting

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