Presentation by Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting. Given to Ultra Light Startups Boston on March 11, 2010.

1. Ultra Light Startups
Getting Started with SEO

2. More Traffic from Search Than Any
Other Source

3. Position Matters

4. 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

5. Search Engines are Software
Programs

6. 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

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

8. 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

9. Use Links Like Votes in an
Election

10. Who Rank’s First?
Joe’s
Book
Store

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

12. 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

13. Why do People Link?

14. 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

15. Content Management Systems

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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 …

19. 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

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